Chapter 2
Chapter Two
JOSH
Until today, I had no idea that big round eyes, a heart-shaped face, and perfect Cupid’s bow lips were my catnip. In a cartoon, she’d likely have woodland creatures or elves flocking to her, but in real life, Avery Mills has cast a spell on me. When we touched, each and every part of me relaxed —except one, which she awakened from a deep, deep slumber—making me want to get as close to her as humanly possible.
Could be magic, could be a hallucination brought on by whatever industrial-strength cleaner they use on the floors, but whatever the cause, I cannot afford to be spellbound right now.
I cannot be thinking inappropriate thoughts while I’m working at my brand-new job. And not just any job, but one that I’m pretty damn sure was a pity hire. And not just at my brand-new pity hire job, but the job that involved moving my family to the middle of nowhere.
But I’ve only been in the Climax Parks and Rec center for fifteen minutes and it’s clear that this part of my job is a disaster in the making. I’m hitting on women and making them drop things, and Eli is making enemies right and left.
When the new voice echoing through the foyer has my boss’s face turning even paler than usual, I force my attention away from the magical Avery to the object of his dismay. Noting the venomous expression on the face of the petite brunette in the doorway, I step in before things go from bad to worse.
“Good morning, I’m Josh Harmon from Trede,” I say, holding out my hand. “We’re here to embed with your team. You know, assess the framework, perhaps do a minor re-org.”
She ignores me. “Elijah Ransom, I said, why are you here?”
“As Josh explained, to interface.” Eli bows at her, a gesture I’ve got to get him to stop using. Not only is it misplaced cultural appropriation, but people hate it. “Reduce the friction in the back end so we can optimize X-functionality.”
Her mouth twists into an even deeper frown. “Did you forget how to speak English?”
One of the other team members places a hand on her shoulder. “It took me a while to understand them too. Basically, we’re going to fix this place.”
She stares at the hand until they remove it. “Who the hell said you could waltz in here and tell me what to do?”
Groaning inwardly at the obvious communication breakdown, I clear my throat. “Actually, the mayor. And the town council.”
“For fuck’s sake,” she mutters.
An imposing, middle-aged woman sticks her head into the doorway. “Center’s opening in ten minutes, Leia. You’d best move this out of the foyer.”
“Fine. Into my office, now.” The woman called Leia steps out of the doorway and gestures down a hall behind her. As I pass, I hear her ask, “Can you handle the phones, Wanda?”
Wanda says something about needing to finish the Q2 books and tells Leia she has fifteen minutes.
As we all crowd into a tiny room stuffed to the gills with office equipment from the last century as well as bookshelves full of actual ring binders, I fully intend to stand closest to Leia, but my body has other ideas. It puts me right next to Avery. When the other Trede representatives squeeze in on her other side, I have to forcibly stop myself from touching her honey blond hair to find out if it’s as soft as it looks.
It’s official: my dry spell has gone on way too long. As I remind myself that there are two very good reasons why, things escalate further between Leia and Eli.
“Princess, you can’t mean what you’re saying,” Eli is saying.
Leia’s brown eyes practically shoot lasers at Eli. “I told you to never call me that again.”
“Uh-oh,” Avery breathes.
Leaning closer to her, I whisper, “Princess? Leia? As in Star Wars ?”
She meets me halfway and whispers back. “Yep. It’s his old nickname for her.”
“First off, it’s Leia,” Leia snaps. “Or better yet, Ms. Blake.”
“She’s hated it ever since he left town,” Avery whispers.
“Blake? But your last name is Butts,” Eli says.
“Not anymore.” Leia lifts her chin defensively. “Obviously, I didn’t want my kids to have to endure the teasing I did in school, so I dropped it when I had the opportunity.”
“You have kids?” Eli’s squawks.
“Frankly, that’s none of your business,” Leia shoots back. “It is my business to run Climax Parks and Rec, so any changes to the building or programming need to be run by me.”
Eli bows. Again. “Of course, of course. When we get to the front-end user flow—maybe even the A/B testing phase—your data sets will be invaluable. Perhaps we can even get you into a Mood Board meeting.”
One of our team members begins to chant paint colors, and Leia looks like she’s about to blow her top. I open my mouth to put a stop to it all, but before I can utter a word, Avery grabs my forearm, the sight of her plump bottom lip caught between her teeth rendering me speechless.
“You’d never know the two of them were an item in high school,” she murmurs.
“Shit,” I whisper. “Now everything makes sense.”
With Avery so close, my hormone-muddled brain may be having a hard time focusing on the problem at hand, but I can still put two and two together. Or maybe one and one is more like it. I’ve wondered why Eli chose to move Trede to a small town in Upstate New York after founding the startup accelerator in California. Seems like this “Princess Leia” had something to do with it.
“Why don’t you just build something new?” Leia asks. “Part of whatever fabulous building I hear you erected for… what’s your business called? Treed? Like a dog with a raccoon?”
“It’s spelled T - R - E - D - E ,” I say, like that’s going to help.
“Trede is sourced from try,” Eli explains. “To experiment, to strive. To have or gain knowledge of or by experience.”
Leia rolls her eyes. “Of course you’d name your business a made-up word.”
Without picking up on her scathing sarcasm, he nods. “We still haven’t been able to get it into the dictionary, but we’re working on it.”
She waves a hand in his face like she’s trying to erase him. “Whatever. My question is, why do you have to change this place? Why can’t you just build a fancy gym or whatever for your employees?”
“Our campus has a world-class fitness center,” he says. “Studies have shown that midday exercise increases productivity by three hundred percent.”
“Great. I’ll just see you and your flunkies to the door, and you can leave us alone.”
“However,” Eli continues, ignoring her shooing gesture. “In exchange for tax concessions, I have a mandate to give back to the town of Climax. So it seems obvious to begin with what I understand is its primary interface.”
“Maybe we like our interface just fine the way things are.”
“I’m afraid surveys say otherwise,” I say, hoping to draw her ire away from Eli.
She narrows her eyes at me, and I get the distinct impression she hadn’t really noticed me earlier. “Who are you and who gave you access to our survey results?”
“Josh Harmon, and the mayor’s office,” I answer as quickly as possible, hoping that a terse reply will counterpoint Eli’s tendencies to overexplain.
“As Vice President of Community Engagement for Trede, it’s Josh's job to dev-op,” Eli says. “Run minification and caching, basically set up your sandbox for optimal flow.”
“He just means that I’ll be the point of contact as we digest consumer research and plug it into various models in order to create the best— oof .” The office door whacks me in the back, and I’m shoved right into Avery. When her eyes go wide, I throw my hands in the air. “I am so?—”
“Whoops.” A deep, mellow voice drowns out my apology, and the head and shoulders of a tall white man with a square jaw, deep-set brown eyes, and close-cut dark brown hair appear. “Sorry to interrupt, boss, but we’ve got a clog in the sink in the women’s locker room again.”
“I’d recognize that voice anywhere,” Eli whispers, his head ticking back and forth between the Princess and the Hunk. “Blake. Leia Blake. As in Travis Blake. The handsome-but-brainless star football player at Climax High.”
Still only halfway through the door, the man just shrugs. “That’s me.”
Thankfully, Leia leaves her office to deal with the plumbing issue, and I somehow get Eli and the rest of the Trede team out of the building and back to headquarters before anyone can do anything else to make my job harder. Back at the office, Eli gets sucked into meetings and I spend the rest of the afternoon giving myself a stern talking to regarding my priorities.
Namely, what’s left of my family.
My two kids are at the top of the list. After everything they’ve been through, they need stability. My parents follow. When I got the Trede job offer—for a position I’m pretty sure Eli made up out of thin air because he felt sorry for me—my parents put their travel-the-world retirement plans on hold and moved to Climax to help me out.
So I really need to stop drooling over a woman I need to interface with. Not suck face with.
Two days later, ramping up my energy as I approach CPR—the somewhat confusing way the locals refer to Climax Parks and Recreation—I turn on the charm that served me well in my career as a Wall Street fixer, even though I’m pretty sure that man doesn’t exist anymore. The highs I used to get from being the guy who could always solve a problem just don’t do it for me anymore.
Still, if I could put together a real estate LBO model at three in the morning when I really have no expertise in the field, I should be able to convince Princess Leia that her rec center is ripe for change. So I knock briskly on her door, and when she waves me in, I step inside with the smile I’ve been told is charming but confident. “Thanks for making time for me in your schedule, Ms. Blake.”
“I didn’t think I had a choice.”
Arms crossed over her chest, chin lifted, she’s already on the defensive. Obviously, I have lost ground to make up. “Listen, I truly am sorry about the ambush the other day. I had no idea that you were in the dark on the proposed changes.”
“Elijah, or Eli , I guess”—her nose wrinkles like she can barely stand to say his name—“is to blame for it, I’m sure.”
No skin off my nose to take the rap. “This was totally on me. It is my job to interfa—uh, liaise—between you, Trede, and the city government.”
“Isn’t Eli your boss?”
I shrug, keeping things easy. “He is. And I’m sure you know how that goes.”
Her eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”
If I could shrink my six-foot-three body down to equal her five foot and change, I would. Instead, I sit across from her and hunch over, elbows on knees. “I can tell you two have a history. Which I’m sure makes this all… complicated.”
She rolls her eyes. “You could say that again.”
“Eli,” I say on a chuckle, adding a What can you do? shrug. “When he’s excited, especially when it’s a new idea, he tunnel visions.”
“So you’ve worked for him for a long time?” She picks up a pen and sits back in her chair to twirl it around her fingers.
“Actually, I just joined Trede a few months ago. But I’ve known him a long time. My, uh, wife—” It’s still difficult to figure out how to refer to her, but I push on. “Worked on a startup with him their senior year in college. She vowed to never do it again.”
She nods knowingly. “Because he’s such a jerk?”
I shake my head. “Because she valued his friendship too much.”
“So why are you working for him?” she asks, sitting forward.
This is an easy answer, even though working for the man is nowhere near easy. “He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. And it was a good fit for me and my family.”
She taps the pen on her desk blotter and her gaze flicks to her computer monitor, a piece of equipment that looks like it’s been there for twenty-five years. It seems like I’ve shifted things slightly, but I’m running out of time, so I go for broke. “Can I be frank, Ms. Blake?”
She puffs out a slightly less irritated sigh. “You can call me Leia.”
“Leia, I honestly believe that if we work together—you and me and your staff—we can make this place the center of the community. Not just a community center.”
Her eyes narrow again. “That sounds like an ad campaign.”
“It just came out of my mouth, but we could use it.” My hand goes to my heart. “It’s not just words. I am a part of this community now. I want it to be a place where my kids can thrive.”
That last line isn’t bullshit, I remind myself. They’re the reason I took the job in this tiny town. That, and the fact that you couldn’t get out of bed in the morning back in Manhattan.
She sighs again, but this time it feels like surrender. “What would this ‘working together’ mean?”
“Well, I’d love to start with your survey results from the past few years.”
She stiffens. “I hope you’re not looking at numbers during COVID. Obviously?—”
“Obviously, those have to be treated differently. But there are some useful dynamics at play.”
“Like what?”
“Hey, Leia?”
At the sound of that sweet voice, my head whips around to lock in on its source.
“Did you hear back from the fire department about visiting—” Seeing me, Avery freezes. “I’m so sorry I didn’t know you had a, uh… I’ll just check in la?—”
There’s a ripping sound as she disappears and then reappears in the doorway before falling through it headfirst, exclaiming, “Oh, sugar!”
Diving between her and the floor, I just manage to catch her shoulders and roll beneath her to cushion her fall. When she lands on top of me, every molecule of air whooshes out of my body, but I don’t care. I could lie here forever with her draped over me like a plush, cozy, sexy blanket. For a few magical moments we just blink at each other. When she breaks the spell, scrambling to her feet muttering apologies and something about a ripped pocket, my nose follows her, my lungs shamelessly vacuuming up as much of her scent as I possibly can.
The door slamming behind her brings me back to earth. A pointed throat-clearing from Leia brings me back to my senses. “Are you okay, Mr. Harmon?”
Hopping to my feet, I hunch over, brushing off my trousers as I will my junk to calm down. “Oh, yeah. Fine. Now, where were we?”
Face hot, I reach for my briefcase and grab the reports I brought along. Eighty-five percent sure she’s a gal who likes a graph, I pull a stack of colorfully printed pages from my briefcase. Still needing a moment, I tip my head toward a table and chairs by the window. “Mind if I lay these out over there?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
I turn my back as I spread out the bait and release a tiny breath of relief when she appears at my side. When she picks up a spreadsheet, I shift into full-on wonk-mode. Five minutes later I’ve got her wrapped in demographics and percentages, all adding up to what she must see is truly incontrovertible data.
“Essentially, you’re serving less than twenty percent of the citizens in Climax. Don’t you want to expand that?”
She flicks a hand at the higher end of the income scale on one graph. “The eastside people have their golf clubs?—”
I counter with a tap at the other end, the so-called wrong side of the tracks. “It’s not just the high end of the earning spectrum. It’s the low end too. You’d like to build diversity, right?”
She straightens, chin jutting out, arms crossing again. “We always have.”
“But you can do better?”
Her attention goes back to the reports, and she picks up the programming proposal to flip through it. “So you’re talking about adding programs? Where am I going to get the budget for that?”
“Trede has allocated resources to support any changes for a year—including building upgrades—but in order for the city to commit to adding line items to its permanent budget, we have a mandate from the mayor’s office. All programming must be at eighty percent capacity by the end of the next fiscal year. Which means we should do our best to make changes to the schedule by September.”
She fumbles her pen. “But that’s just a couple months away. What happens if we don’t?”
“In order to make the changes permanent, you’ll have to consider cuts.” I tap the graphs with enrollment data. “And the mayor agrees that the Climax population could be better served.”
Tapping a line on the proposal, she makes a noise in the back of her throat. “Avery’s toddler class is on this list. We can’t lose Playgroup.”
“Well, uh…” Just the mention of the name Avery has me skipping off to hearts-and-rainbows land, and I fumble as I search for the chart illustrating childcare statistics in the area. “Right. So, as you can see, the county is in dire need of more daycare, while the parent-toddler program enrollment has been falling for years.”
“But it’s magical,” she says, her voice infused with a different emotion than she’s used before. Something I can’t quite identify, but it probably has to do with the bewitching Avery. “And it’s a community builder. Kids from Playgroup participate in sports when they get older. Their parents take classes.”
Not just because participation would mean spending time with the program’s teacher, I say, “It sounds like something I’d love, honestly.”
Leia’s smirk is dismissive. “You’re a little old.”
“I’m not kidding,” I say quickly, hand to heart. “I mean with my son. He’s just about to turn two. And we don’t know many other families in town yet.”
“Well, there is room in the class…”
I have to bite my tongue to avoid pointing out the reason: enrollment is low.
“Hmm. You should try it.” She raises her chin as she considers me. “You might find out that you don’t want to cut it.”
“How about this?” I say on a clap, like we’ve just agreed on everything. “I commit to taking the class and you’ll take a serious look at other ways to utilize the space and staff so we can best serve that age group. The children and the parents.”
Her sigh is heavy, but it’s less dismissive, more You’ve made your point . “Fine. As long as I don’t have to deal with Mr. Ransom.”
Time to close, Harmon. “I will be your primary contact. He does have an entire company to run, after all.”
“Maybe you could remind him of that, so he’ll stay away?”
With her brows raised and lips pursed, I’m pretty sure I’ve got my deal and her number. “I’m on it.”
Her eyes scan the reports. “Can I keep these?”
“Of course.” I pick up my bag and then add, “With your permission, I’d like to meet with other team leaders. Just to get their insights.”
She snorts as she picks up my proposal and crosses back to her desk. “Good luck with that. Especially with Carl Conrad. His bark is worse than his bite, but he does bite. Our office manager, Wanda, has tons of institutional knowledge but don’t bother her until you know exactly what you need, or she’ll give you nothing.”
She pauses, tapping her pen on the desk. “Daisy, who directs our art program, is kooky but she knows her stuff. Avery runs all children's activities, but she’ll be angry to hear that you’re thinking about cutting Playgroup. Her swear words may be cutesy, but she’s tougher than you’d think.” She pauses, and I wonder how many more warnings she has to hand out about her staff. “My recommendation? Start with Travis.”
“Travis? The ex-football player?” Also known as the third point of an old love triangle between Leia and my boss?
She nods definitively. “He knows everyone in town. He’ll be a good resource.”
On my way out the door, I’m almost giddy at the prospect of seeing Avery again. But as I review the last few minutes of our conversation, I have to wonder if I just got played.