Chapter 8
Sitting at the desk in the study of Jim and Maggie’s house, I scroll through yet another of the hopefuls who want to be Tom’s permanent Executive Assistant.
This morning, while Tom was talking me through the new job I’ve accidentally acquired, I came to realize just how worn out he is. Or maybe even burned out. Close to it for sure.
Last night he told me that he’s here for a rest, but I hadn’t realized just how badly he obviously needs it.
While he’d been fired up during the naked verbal sparring that first morning, and was all charm over food and wine last night, today when he was talking about work things, he was different. There was a heaviness about him, a darkness to his eyes, a fatigue in the way he moved his body.
I’ve searched for info on his divorce, and all the articles I found said it had been super fast and she’d gotten more than half. Which didn’t seem fair since apparently she was already awash with family wealth before she met him. And I can’t imagine what she’d even do with the string of properties she got in the settlement.
But imagining the guy who threw balls of scrunched-up paper at me during geography class ending up owning a string of properties is also pretty tricky.
Anyway, whatever he’s been through, he looks pretty goddamn stressed and totally lacking in the energy or interest to go through the résumés sent from his HR department in London. So that’s my first task.
How quickly life can change.
Not that long ago, I thought Dylan and I would be squished in with Jude in her tiny apartment for months while I worked the few hours she could afford to have me help at the shop.
Now I’m living in the guest suite of a beautiful home and sitting in that beautiful home’s study at a huge mahogany desk at one end of a room lined with bookshelves. At the other end is a brown leather sofa and a large comfy chair, the perfect place to curl up and read.
The crisp morning light streams through this room from the wide window at the front that overlooks the sweeping circular driveway to the one behind me with its views of the patio and garden.
And here I am, spending Saturday morning looking through documents on a laptop belonging to a man I never imagined I’d ever see again, much less work for.
There’s no one I should be working for less. This is dangerous territory. During dinner last night, it was obvious the old spark is still there. Maybe that’s just natural. Maybe when something like that burrows its way deep inside you in your formative years, it never leaves.
But now I have an older, wiser head on my shoulders. A head that knows my one important job in life is to do the best for Dylan—for his happiness and health.
And since that means moving to LA and getting my foot on the ladder of a career that can support us, this woman, this mother, has to do what she has to do.
And Tom was right, goddamn him. Having him on my résumé and his name at the bottom of a reference will go a long way toward making up for my lack of experience outside of raising a kid and working as a housekeeper with the odd side-gig in waitressing.
Not to mention the amount he’s paying me, the unnecessarily large amount, which will help kick-start our new life in California.
My instinct to not let him throw cash from his guilt over how he treated me has faded into screw that—sure, I’ll take his money. If it’s the best thing for Dylan, I can swallow my pride.
Hell, if running barefoot over broken glass while chased by a hungry lion armed with flamethrowers were the best thing for Dylan, sign me up.
But looking at these résumés fills me with dread as to how realistic—or, rather, unrealistic—Rachel was when she said, “Everyone’s an assistant out here. You’ll walk into a job.”
I take a sip of hot coffee as my eyes drift down this applicant’s long list of qualifications. A master’s in business administration with a thesis on female executives in the music industry, as well as internships at EMI and a global artist management company.
The one before her is currently an executive assistant for a director of an international bank, and the one before that has worked on a BBC music show for three years.
It fills my stomach with dread. Even with the connections Rachel and her husband have, and Tom’s reference, I’m still going to struggle to get a job over people like these. And LA must be crawling with them.
I am woefully inadequate.
And Tom probably realizes that. He could easily have someone at the office in London go through this stuff.
As sure as his aunt doesn’t really need a housekeeper, Tom doesn’t really need a temporary helper.
But I’ll be damned if I’m going to be anyone’s charity case. Just like I work hard to make sure Maggie and Jim get their money’s worth out of me, I’ll make sure I do things for Tom he doesn’t even know need to be done.
I switch to a browser and search for Divine Justice, the band Tom was eager to see the other night but was a week late for.
They have a gig next weekend at a small venue not too far away in Portsmouth.
I sit straighter in the desk chair. This is a good plan. And maybe I could make more of it by finding some local Portsmouth bands Tom might otherwise not have heard of. See if they’re playing the same night. Maybe he’ll unearth a hidden gem. And all because I was the best assistant he never wanted.
The upper level of the pub where Divine Justice is appearing is so small it’s ticketed. Shit. I don’t want to give this away by asking him for a company credit card number.
I hate putting anything on my own credit card—it’s for emergencies only. But this is a proof of competence emergency, so it probably counts.
I click to the ticket page for the gig.
Large, red, rubber stamp-style letters announce Sold Out!
Of course. Of course, it is.
I sink back in the chair and cup my coffee in both hands while I stare at the screen. The longer I look at them, the more the words seem to pulsate, to taunt me, to ask me who the hell I think I am trying to do a job above my station.
I don’t have an MBA from a fancy school. I don’t have years of experience running an executive’s office. I don’t have anything other than years of somehow raising a kid by myself while working whatever no-experience-required jobs I could get along the way.
And while that gave me the resourcefulness to invent games from toilet paper tubes to entertain a toddler, the resilience to keep going when abandoned by Dylan’s dad and my parents, and the organizational skills to juggle waitressing, housecleaning, and clerking at grocery stores while trading childcare with other struggling moms, none of that is anything you can put on a résumé.
Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe it does mean I don’t have what it takes for a real job like this. Maybe I’ve missed the career boat. Who’s going to want to take a chance on a thirty-three-year-old looking for their first professional position?
“Do you sing Four Thousand Medicines songs all the time?”
Tom’s voice snaps me out of my self-pitying trance and makes me jump so much that coffee slops over the edge of the cup and onto my white top right between my boobs.
“Shit.”
“Oh, God, sorry,” Tom says, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans and strolling toward me, his forehead pinched with concern. “Did it burn?”
“Nope.” Yes, yes, it did. “All good.” I pull the fabric away from my chest and stand up. “I’ll go change and toss this in the wash before it dries.”
Now there’s a job I could do—professional stain remover. When you don’t have enough cash for clothes for yourself or your child, you become a whiz at getting out all sorts of seemingly indelible stains. Ketchup, grape juice, grass—I’ve saved our clothes from them all.
“Was I singing?” I ask him.
“Well, humming,” he says. “Is it so instinctive for you that you don’t even realize you’re doing it?”
Nicholas, the shithead I just left, said I sang and hummed all the time. It bugged the crap out of him.
“Maybe it’s what my brain makes me do when it knows someone annoying is about to show up.”
His smirk causes an inconvenient flutter under my coffee stain.
“Only here for a sec,” he says. “Just to see how it’s going. Then I will leave you in a room free of annoyance.”
I flick the screen back to the résumés in case he’s about to walk behind me and see the Divine Justice thing. “It’s going okay, but they’re hard to narrow down. Everyone’s so incredibly well qualified.”
“Yeah.” He ambles right up to the desk. The light from the window behind me illuminates the laugh lines around his eyes. But apart from the few minutes when he finally relaxed with me last night, his general demeanor suggests they weren’t borne of any joy. “Assistants are usually more qualified than me. Actually, most people are more qualified than me.”
Tom famously never went to college. Everything I’ve ever read about him mentions how he started the label in the garage of his aunt and uncle’s London home when he was eighteen. It’s his legendary origin story and the name of his company—Garage Records.
“I’m not.” I poke my chest and accidentally press the—now chilly—wet patch against my skin.
“You flunked out of high school too?” he asks.
“Oh, no. I did pretty well. But are you saying you flunked?” I haven’t heard that before. Could it be that I have better educational credentials than this billionaire businessman? Huh.
“You don’t really flunk out of British schools. But I failed my A Levels. Well, I got an E in music, which is technically a pass. But getting the lowest grade is pretty meaningless. Especially when it’s music.”
“But you made pretty good use of your time after that. I, however, got pregnant. And boom”—I make an exploding gesture with my hands—“a baby to look after and no partner or parents to help with childcare so I could go to college.”
“I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.” The furrow of his brow suggests he means it. “Dylan seems fun now, though.”
“He is. Generally. But the last few months have been a bit rocky. Getting into trouble for dumb stuff at school. He’s never done that before. I’m not sure if it comes with the territory of being thirteen or if it’s because things at home got nasty and then I moved us out and squished us in with Jude. He wasn’t pleased about any of that.”
“Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” Tom turns slightly away, his shoulders hunched, elbows rigidly tucked to his sides, like he’s a tightly bound ball of string.
He pushes his hair behind the ear facing me, immediately drawing my attention to an old scar near the top of it. That’s where the same kid who did our tattoos had, in a previous body art venture, pierced it with a needle and an ice cube. It was a mess. And Maggie was furious. Guess he’s let it grow over, closing up the past.
I shrug. “It’s okay. I’ll save the gory details for another time.” Or, more likely, never. He does not need to know any of that. “At least Jude was close enough to where we’d been living for him to be able to stay at the same school. So, there’s that.”
“Is working for me today keeping you away from him? Because you can do all this some other time.”
How damn thoughtful. “No, it’s fine. Thanks. Another parent has taken a bunch of them to Beaver Creek Park. They’ll be sledding, then playing in the freezing stream.”
Tom’s face breaks into an affectionate smile. Wonder how he feels about kids?
“Okay, well, it’s no problem if you want to wrap up early.” He takes a step backward toward the door. “I’m off to help Jim with some wine-making thing that apparently requires another pair of hands.”
I chuckle, recalling yesterday when I walked past Jim’s wine-making room behind the kitchen and saw a small brown missile fly up, bounce off the ceiling, and boing across the tiled floor a few times. Jim was apparently trying to get to grips with his new corking device. He just laughed to himself, picked up the cork, and cheerfully told it, “You are a tricky little devil.”
“They’re even more adorable than they used to be,” I tell Tom.
“They are.” He turns to leave, and my eyes instinctively drop to his backside. His hands back in his pockets, the jeans stretch tight across his rear, emphasizing its solid, worked-out form. It definitely wasn’t as round and firm as that the last time I had my hands on it.
Tom’s head snaps around to look at me over his shoulder, and my eyes dart up to meet his. My cheeks heat with guilt. Shit. He totally caught me checking out his ass.
“Adorable when they’re not pretending to be fans of video game movies anyway,” he says with a slight snicker.
“Ha. Yeah.” The redness I can feel in my face must be visible.
“Text me if you need anything,” he says, as he disappears through the door.
I flop back against the chair.
Damn it. If Tom, a high school failure, can start a billion-dollar business in the goddamn garage, I’m not going to be beaten by an annoying little Sold Out! stamp on a website.
I punch the pub’s number into my phone.
It rings and rings. And my determination not to be beaten diminishes with each unanswered trill.
I take the phone away from my ear, but just as my finger heads for the red button, a voice rattles out.
“Bedrock Tavern.”
I yank it back to my ear. “Hello?”
“Yeah, Bedrock Tavern,” an irritated male voice says with a sigh over a background of chatter and music.
“Hi. Yes. I was looking for tickets for Divine Justice on Saturday.”
“Sold out,” Mr. Helpful grunts.
If I didn’t give up when the childcare people told me there were no city-funded places left for Dylan, there’s no reason for me to fold at the first pushback on gig tickets.
“Yes. I saw that on the website. But I wondered if you might have any tickets you’d held back. When I was in bands the venues always kept some for the door so I?—”
“Like I said, sold out.”
Life has definitely taught me there’s always a way, if you just try hard enough.
“Do you take a waitlist, for returns?”
He emits a patronizing snort, like I’m a clueless kid. “Look, lady. If people buy tickets and don’t want to come, they just don’t show up. This isn’t Madison Square Garden—we don’t have a computerized return system. Or an uncomputerized one.” He laughs at his own joke.
I turn around and look out of the window over the garden that’s covered in a thick layer of frost. “Okay…sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Didn’t give it to you.” There’s a smirk in his voice. Obviously his hilarity is on a roll. “But people call me Trigger.”
It invites a question, but I plow on. “Okay, Trigger. Could you do me just a one-off favor here and take my name and number. My boss really wants to see Divine Justice, and if I can’t get tickets for him, he’ll…fire me.”
Maybe Trigger is open to a little emotional blackmail.
“What a jackass.”
“Exactly. Total tyrant. So I have to get him these tickets or my life won’t be worth living.”
Trigger sucks in air between his teeth.
“Okay, look.” He blows out the breath. “I’m always up for sticking it to the boss man. And you’ve got me on a good day.” God help his bad ones. “I’d set aside two tickets for some friends, but they’re going out of town. I was holding onto them, just in case. But I hate to hear a damsel in distress.” Hopefully he can’t hear my gagging sounds. “Give me your credit card, and I’ll email them to you.”
“Yes.” I punch the air. “I mean, thank you so much. I appreciate it more than you can know. It’s very kind of you, Trigger.”
“My good friends call me Trig.”
After giving him my card number, I stay on the phone until the tickets drop into my inbox, just to be sure his middle name isn’t Fraudster, and smile at my victory and the sun glistening on the frost.
It might only be two tickets to a small gig by a band no one’s ever heard of, but I made it happen. Without a degree, without years of admin experience, without any qualification other than the cold hard lessons of having to make things happen with almost no resources other than what’s between my ears.
I sit back down at the desk with renewed purpose. Okay, now to find some other bands playing in or around Portsmouth on the same night to make Tom’s trip worthwhile.
And I’m going to keep at it until I find at least one that’s better than Divine Justice.
I can’t remember the last time I felt this fire in my belly. Or if I ever even have. But I’m going to make Tom realize that although he might have given me this not-real job because he wants to make himself feel better, or because he sees me as a charity case, I can actually produce results and he won’t have to lie in his reference letter.
And possibly because something deep inside me wants him to think I’m good at it. To see that while he was busy building his empire, my life wasn’t entirely wasted, that I have skills too. Maybe even some he doesn’t have.
If anyone had told me two weeks ago that I’d care what Tom Dashwood thinks of my organizational skills, I would have laughed them down the street, but apparently I do.
And I can’t wait to see his face when I tell him about the evening I’ve organized for him. To watch those brown eyes light up with surprise, that slightly flirtatious smile grow on his lips, and his ring-covered fingers push through that sexy-as-hell hair as he looks at me.
I’m suddenly aware of a dampness in my underwear. Christ, he can’t still have that effect on me from just thinking about him. Not after all these years. And definitely not after how he disappeared like that.
But I guess it’s almost impossible not to have a biological reaction to a handsome, talented man. I mean, he’s objectively attractive—that’s just science. And he’s indisputably a brilliant businessman. That’s all it is.
And he’s going to be fucking impressed with me when he sees I’ve shown initiative and planned a whole thing he didn’t even ask for.
Professional respect is all I’m after. Pure and simple.
As I hit return on my search for “up and coming bands Portsmouth New Hampshire,” my phone pings with a text.
RACHEL (11:37 AM)
Check your email!!!
I switch tabs on the laptop browser and there, above the tickets Trig sent me, is a forwarded message from Rachel with the subject, “Marina Del Ray Children’s Hospital: Clinical Trial Approval.”
My heart, already pumped from the ticket-purchasing victory, reacts even harder to the thing I’ve been counting on for months, had sleepless nights over for months.
I open the email that has multiple attachments to see Rachel’s short message at the top in all caps. “HE’S IN!”
We really are moving to LA then.