Chapter Twelve
Autumn was trapped in a living nightmare.
She sat in the first-class lounge in the Indianapolis airport, watching Chase pile snacks from the buffet onto a plate, and questioned every choice she’d ever made in her life that had brought her to this point. A three-day business trip to Signal Bend with her boss.
On paper, to an outsider, it probably wouldn’t seem unusual: a groundbreaking ceremony on the first project in a new initiative should draw some brass to the podium. And the person who’d driven the business should be there as well. Nothing unusual about it.
However, Chase was the brass in question, and Autumn had spent years managing him, keeping him on the correct side of her personal boundaries. It had been clear from the moment he’d announced his intention to join her that he was interested in finding a break in her fence.
He’d booked both their tickets—first class; she usually flew business. He’d insisted they share a car to the airport. When she told him that she preferred to wait in a concourse café rather than the Sky Lounge, because she liked the bustle of travelers, he’d laughed at her and grabbed her arm firmly, nearly dragging her to the lounge.
Thus far, he was only kicking at the boundary, not through it yet, but they were about to spend three nights in a small country inn. It was very clear that he expected them to be joined at the hip the whole time, and Autumn knew, she could physically feel it, like a shrinking of her skin: he was going to do something that upended her entire career.
Chase made his way to the end of the buffet and headed back. Autumn honed her attention on her laptop. She had two files up on her screen, the project timeline and the purchasing and costing spreadsheet, and she was combing through both to make sure they were completely synced.
“Do you ever stop working?” Chase asked as he plopped into the leather seat beside her, juggling his mountain of complimentary buffet food.
“As I’m working for you,” she replied without looking away from her screen, “I’d think you appreciate my attention to detail.”
“I do, obviously. But c’mon, kiddo.” He elbowed her arm gently. “Lighten up a little. Free food, free booze, a little vacation to the heartland, where they’re throwing us a party. You can bask in the victory.”
Swallowing an irritated breath, Autumn turned to her boss. “I don’t like it when you call me kid. Please don’t.”
She was five feet, two inches tall. A shockingly large percentage of the world—mostly male, but not exclusively—condescended to short women. Whether intentionally or unconsciously, they diminished her work, her experience, her expertise, as if she were a child. Often their voice even shifted to a higher register. To a degree, being underestimated gave her space to do what she wanted, and she tried to harvest that benefit from the situation. Even so, the disrespect burned. Autumn had always loved fashion, but she’d taken to wearing five-inch heels almost exclusively because they brought her closer to eye level with men. With that extra height, she was condescended to as a woman, but not as a girlchild. Not great, but better.
Chase, however, wasn’t fooled by a Louboutin. He’d been casually diminishing her since he’d started promoting her. She’d been baffled by that apparent paradox at first, until she realized he was trying to make sure she believed she owed her success to him.
He grinned. “I didn’t call you kid. I called you kiddo.” When she narrowed her gaze, he laughed and put up a surrendering hand. “Okay, okay. Apologies. But you really do need to lighten up.” He plucked a fat, crimson strawberry from Mt. Buffet. “Here, have a treat.”
He proceeded to hold the strawberry in front of her mouth. Like he wanted her to let him feed her. What the hell?
Autumn tipped her head away. “No, thanks. Not hungry.”
Chase’s expression went through a whole calisthenics routine before it settled into a frown. “Don’t make more of it than it is, kid.”
He hit that stupid word at the end of his sentence just hard enough to make it rhetorical.
Autumn returned a look as flat as she could make it. She was not in the mood to manage this man today. “No, thank you.”
With a great heave of dramatic breath, Chase popped the strawberry into his own mouth. He sat back in his chair and sulked.
Her brain spinning, seeking every possible option she had to get through this trip with her job and her personal boundaries intact, Autumn turned back to her work.
Eventually, Chase stopped making a show of his sulk. He opened his tablet, put AirPods in, and watched Succession until boarding was announced for their flight.
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~oOo~
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“How are we doing?” the flight attendant of their second flight asked with a practiced smile. “Can I bring you anything more?”
Sitting on the aisle, Chase answered, “Another scotch’d be grand, sweetheart.”
That smile remained fixed in place. “Of course. And you, miss?”
Autumn intended to abstain until she was free of Chase. The last thing she needed was her defenses to weaken. “I’m fine—”
“She’ll have a glass of white wine,” Chase interrupted huffily.
Still focused on the attendant, Autumn shook her head. The attendant gave her a brisk nod. “I’ll be right back with your whiskey, sir,” she said and made her escape.
Chase turned to Autumn. “Are you gonna be like this the whole trip?”
“Like myself? I assume so, yes.” She took a calculated risk and asked, “What is it you’re expecting of me?”
He stared at her like he’d never seen her species before. “That you’d take that stick out your cute little ass at some point and have fun! I’m starting to think you’re not capable of fun. I sure as hell’ve never seen it.”
Autumn closed her laptop and checked her watch. She had been trapped with Chase since his car had picked her up this morning. With the drive, the wait at the airport, the first flight, the rush to make their connection, and half of this flight, they’d been together virtually nonstop for more than six hours. Ahead of them was the rest of the flight, another airport, collecting their rental car—which he insisted they share—and a two-hour drive to Signal Bend. It had been literal years since she’d been in continuous company with one person for so long, and she was already so tired of Chase’s company she could weep.
He was her boss. She loved her job—not today she didn’t, but in general she loved her job. Especially now, finally with enough power to develop whole programs and be in the room with the C-level brass when big decisions were made. She even finally had some sheen of her own.
MWGP was a major player in the region, and if she left her job, or got fired, and Chase decided to blackball her, he’d likely have some success. All these years, he’d stopped short (or she’d held him back) from crossing the line into harassment, so she had no evidence, no ammunition to use to defend herself if he did.
She supposed she could try to collect evidence on this trip, bring her defenses down some and see if he crossed over, figure out a way to record it when he did, but that was risky business. Off the top of her head she could think of a dozen things that could go very wrong and land her in big trouble.
There might be a viable argument that she’d brought this on herself a bit, trying to manage Chase by giving him small doses of what he wanted—dressing and wearing her hair the way he liked when she was in the office, for instance—so he’d stay out of the way of her work and support her advancement.
Even as she had the thought, she recognized it as the kind of self-blame women all too often defaulted to when a man was being a sexist jerk. She couldn’t quite shake the feeling, but she knew it for what it was.
She also could not shake the cringe of Chase’s attention, and she could not tolerate this constant barrage of schoolboy pouting and wheedling. The man was in his mid-forties, and he’d been huffing and pouting and acting out like this since she’d refused to let him feed her a strawberry.
So she turned to him now, brain running at full speed, trying to pick each word so it accomplished what she needed for this trip without risking what she needed for the rest of her life.
“This is a business trip, Chase. We’re colleagues. I enjoy my work, but I’m working. My focus is on doing that well. I have fun on my own time, when I can relax.”
A condescending smile curved his lips. “Oh, kiddo. At this rate, you’re going to burn out and melt down before you’re forty.” He reached out and pushed her hair behind her ear. Autumn was too surprised to shrink away from his touch. “I’d hate to see that,” he added in a murmur.
“Don’t touch me like that, Chase.” The word please was queued up, ready to end the sentence, but she bit down and didn’t let it loose. She was not asking.
His hand dropped away. “You say we’re colleagues, but you’re not very collegial.”
The flight attendant returned with his drink. Chase shifted to face forward again. He arranged his drink on his tray, got his AirPods out, and went back to Succession.
Unsure whether to be relieved or worried, Autumn opened her laptop and got back to work.
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~oOo~
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By the time they deplaned in St. Louis, Autumn had lost count of Chase’s drinks. His cheeks were flushed and he’d grown very friendly with every attractive young woman who paused in his path, but he was neither reeling nor slurring.
He kept putting his hand on Autumn’s back, ‘leading’ her in directions she was already headed, down the concourse, to the baggage claim, then to the rental car shuttle, and so on. Since she’d put him in a snit by insisting that they were working, not playing on this trip, and he was considerably more intoxicated now, she was back to managing him. She tried to be more subtle about resisting his touch, simply walking faster, away from his hand, or finding a reason to make more distance between them.
They bickered quietly at the car rental, when he tried to make himself the only driver. It was bad enough that she was stuck with him for the whole trip; she was not about to give him the power to strand her anywhere.
Also, there was no way he was driving right now. That, she said out loud. “No, Chase. You’ve been drinking all day, so I’m driving.” She set her license on the counter so the agent could note her details.
“I don’t ride shotgun with any woman,” Chase declared.
Autumn almost laughed at him. “A woman drove the car that brought us to the airport this morning.”
“That’s different. It’s her job. And we were in the back seat.”
“If it makes you feel better,” Autumn said, unable to completely hold off a smirk, ”you can sit in the back seat while I drive.”
“Sir,” the agent said before Chase could react, “I can’t release the car to someone who’s been drinking.”
Chase turned aggressively back to the counter and leaned close. Starting hard at the poor twenty-something who was only trying to do his job, he snarled. “Do I look drunk to you?”
The agent—whose name, according to the tag clipped to his shirt, was Jason—blinked. He dashed a glance at his monitor, and Autumn imagined him weighing the possibility of losing a top-shelf rental on an Elite account and maybe getting written up or even fired, against definitely getting fired, and maybe even facing charges, if he handed the keys to a drunk and that drunk hurt somebody driving.
Quietly, he said, “I smell it on your breath.” While Chase huffed like an asthmatic bear, Jason focused on Autumn. “Have you been drinking, ma’am?”
“No, not a drop.” Too irritated to be subtle anymore, she added, “This is a work trip, and I don’t drink on the job.”
Not strictly true, as evidenced by her most recent trip to Signal Bend, but nobody here knew that.
The dig hit its intended target squarely. Chase turned and glared hard at her. She saw the threat but was currently too fed up with him to care about consequences.
She needed to figure out a way to surreptitiously record him, in case he said something clearly actionable. She didn’t know the law in Missouri, but Indiana was a one-party consent state for recording.
“I’ll make you the driver, then. I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t put you down as a driver. You can amend the contract at a later time, when you’re sober.”
“This is bullshit!” Chase groused. “I’m the one paying for this!”
Autumn set her own corporate Amex on the counter. “You can put it on my card.” Which was, of course, from the same company account, but she enjoyed the moment, and the deepening frown on her boss, nonetheless.
“What’s your last name, Jason?” Chase demanded, drawing a silver pen from inside his suit jacket.
Jason sighed audibly. “Torres. With an S.” He plucked a business card from the desk and set it on the counter. “Here’s the info for our corporate office.”
“I’d like one of those, too, please, Jason,” Autumn said, offering him a smile so he understood her reason.
He smiled back as he handed her a card and the keys, putting them both directly into her hand. “It’s a white Mercedes EQE, slot 3.”
“Thank you for your help, Jason.” Gathering her bags again, she turned to her boss. “Come on, Chase. Let’s go.”
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~oOo~
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The drive to Signal Bend was about two hours. Chase sulked in the passenger seat for about forty-five minutes, arms crossed like an angry toddler. Then he fell asleep with his head tipped back against the seat and snored like a horny moose for nearly an hour. As Autumn pulled off I-44 and stopped at the end of the ramp, ready to turn onto the road that would become Main Street, her boss made a final snort and sat up.
“This it?”
She made the turn and headed toward town. “About twenty more minutes to town. Feel better?”
At the corner of her eye, she saw him give her a petulant look. “I felt fine, and I still feel fine.”
“Okay.”
She glanced his way and saw him turn to the window. They passed a small property with a humble bungalow, a car and a truck, both ten or twenty years old, parked on the yard, and several lines of laundry waving in a moderate breeze. Old tractor tires filled with geraniums lined a gravel drive. Two little boys chased a few brown chickens through the scene. Autumn thought it looked pretty, almost like a folk art painting.
While the thought rolled to an end in her head, Chase said, “Jesus, what a dump.”
She smiled to herself but said nothing. The first time she’d driven this road and seen that little home, she’d had a similar thought. But now, after a handful of trips to Signal Bend, a total of probably two weeks’ time, she supposed she had a better context for the lives that got lived here. Chase didn’t have that context.
... And it only just this moment occurred to her that she’d grown fond of this little town.
She’d been struggling against so much here for the past year—it really had been nearly a year since she’d first reached out to the former mayor—that she hadn’t realized how well all the research she’d done, all the strategizing, to get her deal had made her know this place. At least to know it as well as an outsider could.
She was more than proud that she’d gotten the deal done. She was more than eager to break ground and get this potentially transformative development initiative going. She was honestly excited to have a chance to make her mark on this particular town, to show these particular people that she honestly wanted Signal Bend Pavilion to be a boon to them.
She was honestly, personally invested in their success as well as her own and that of MidWest Growth & Progress.
They approached the town limit and the emphatically quaint and cheerful town welcome sign. Beside her, Chase laughed. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t they?”
“I think it’s charming,” she said, though, again, she’d had a similar thought more than once passing that sign.
Chase squirmed restlessly in his seat. “I don’t understand how people can live like this. There’s nothing to do but chase chickens.”
“Not true,” Autumn rejoined, feeling a little defensive. “One reason we identified Signal Bend is that it’s a significant regional tourist destination.”
He rolled his eyes. “For antiquing, right? Great for the ladies and the gays—no offense—but I’m gonna want to blow my brains out by the time we leave.”
“The B&B we’re headed to offers hiking and horseback riding, too.”
“Our competition, you mean.”
“The B&B has only ten rooms. We won’t be competing with them but with the motels outside town, where everybody else has to go. The Signal Bend Inn will keep visitors in town, spending money here. That’s main pitch, Chase—that we’re collaboration, not competition.”
He was quiet, and Autumn could feel his eyes on her, so she glanced over and saw his theatrically shocked expression.
“You do understand what our business is, yes?” he asked.
He was being snarky, but Autumn thought it was an interesting question because it had at least two correct answers: first, their business was ostensibly ‘growth and progress.’ They were a real-estate development company whose business was building in new areas and overhauling old commercial properties. But second, and certainly the answer Chase cared most about, their business was to make money for the Isley family. Lots of money, as much money as possible, doing whatever they could to squeeze every last dollar out of every single deal.
Chase was not interested in collaboration because it meant sharing. He did not share nicely. He’d been home sick that day in kindergarten, apparently. But Autumn had created her masterpiece in convincing him that collaboration was the key to making as much money as possible in Signal Bend and any other community so tightly knit.
“You know I understand,” she answered. “And this project is going to make a lot of money.”
“It better,” he groused. Then, “That’s them, right?” He pointed forward toward the Night Horde MC/Signal Bend Construction compound. A large metal sign, a rendering of the club patch, hung on the side of the building nearest the road, and another sign, reading SIGNAL BEND CONSTRUCTION in a simple, sans serif font, rose above a set of double doors on the other side of the large building.
“Yep.”
“Turn. I wanna see.”
“What? No. We’re not dropping in unexpectedly on the Horde, Chase.”
“Why not? Are they dangerous?”
She thought of the beating Cox had dealt the man who’d attacked her. But that was safety, not danger. “No. Not dangerous.”
“Turn! I want to see!”
He grabbed his door handle and pulled. Obviously, like all cars made for the past twenty years or more, it was locked while the car ran, but he kept yanking. This middle-aged man, this president of a major company, her boss, was behaving like a toddler who needed a time out.
They passed the turn for the compound, but he kept yanking on the door. She began to worry he’d actually damage the car.
“Chase! Stop!”
“Then turn around! I’m giving you an order!”
“You’re not a general, Chase.”
Abruptly, he stopped. “No, I’m your employer, and, as you’ve made repeatedly clear, every minute of this trip is work. So I’m giving you a directive. I want to meet these bikers you’ve got us working with, and I want to see them in their natural habitat. Now.”
The spin from half-drunk man-child to calculating titan of industry was so sudden, Autumn practically had whiplash.
“Okay,” she relented. She found a place to turn around and took her employer directly to the natural habitat of the Night Horde MC, where Autumn had never been, and where they were not expected.
That was sure to go over well.