Shopping for a Billionaire 1 (5 page)

It’s so nice to have a friend who really gets your OCD phobias. Or who understands your mom. Or both.

“Shannon? I recovered your data,” Josh says, scaring the hell out of me. He moves like a vampire, suddenly behind you in your office. I think he likes it. Office sadist.

But I forgive him, because
what
? “You recovered my shops?” Hope springs eternal.

“It’s all in the cloud now, so thank me for setting that app up and forcing Greg to spend money on something worthwhile. Everything is in there but the last one, because
you
didn’t hit save.” I get a scowl that makes me think Chuckles is more evolved than most humans. Josh looks like a lamb pretending to be mad.

“I was perched over a men’s toilet trying not to watch a man whip it out. Don’t you dare shame me.”

“The only shame is that you didn’t try to look when he whipped it out,” Josh says, eyes twinkling.

“You recovered
all
eight shops?” I’m incredulous. This is making my day already, and it’s only 11:37 a.m.

He nods. I throw my arms around his neck and hug him. “I would French kiss you if you weren’t gay,” I murmur.

“You keep this dry spell up and you’ll start French kissing me even though I
am
gay,” he mutters, shaking his head. “If the only action your inner thighs are getting is while hiding from a hot guy in the men’s room of a shop, it’s time for a lifestyle evaluation.”

“Let’s mystery shop Shannon’s life!” Amanda squeals, appearing at the perfect moment. The perfect moment to go through another episode of
Let’s Dissect Poor Shannon’s Failed Love Life
, that is. My mother would emcee it.

We’re on season three, episode five by my count. Netflix should pick this one up. People could binge watch and point to the TV as they laugh, feeling a sense of relief while thinking,
At least I’m not as bad as Shannon.

I could provide an important public service.

“What about Hot Guy? Did he ask for your number?” Shannon and Mom had clearly connected.

“I’m sure he hits on all the women he meets who have their arm flushed down a toilet in the men’s room.”
Does he?
Because if he’s met more than me that way, then it’s really not me. It’s him.

“Sample size of one!” she chirps. “You stand out from the crowd.”

“I’m the only one who could give him E. coli by feeding him grapes!” I look nervously at my hand. It looks the same.

“You didn’t catch his name?” Josh asks.

I freeze inside.
Declan McCormick
is on the tip of my tongue, but I keep it behind my teeth, like a candy you savor and suck on. Heat creeps up my chest and neck as I think about things on Declan I could suck.

I shake my head hard, like a dog after a swim. “Nope. Just really rich, really confident, and enough of an asshole to make me want him.”

All three of us wistfully sigh in unison.

They believe the lie. They should. We’re all really good liars. You kind of have to be in this business, because you spend so much time pretending to be something you’re not, all while evaluating the surface level of people.

It’s a cold job when you think about it that way. Now I frown and Amanda looks at me with concern. Then I realize she has black hair again. Fourth color change in four months.

“What did you do?” I ask as she follows me into my office. Yesterday she was a blonde, and the shift is jarring, like she’s gone from looking like a beach bunny to a dominatrix.

“Carole flaked on the hair salon shop, so I had to go to yet another color, cut, and style,” she says sadly. She touches the ends of her hair. “I look like Morticia Addams.”

I snort. “You look like Katy Perry.” Amanda is the cheerleader type. Was in high school, still is. And yes, I’m lying a little, because Amanda actually has near-zero similarity to Katy Perry other than black hair and red lips. In fact, right now, she’s staring at me in a creepy way with that new hairdo, like that woman on the
Oddities San Francisco
show.

Like she either wants to tell me a secret or stick me in a jar with preserved three-headed piglets from 1883.

“You got all your shops in?”

“Eight out of nine.”

She looks at the wall clock in the hallway. “Twenty-three minutes to get the last one in and we get credit for exceeding client expectations.”

“But—um—hello? Toilet water? Dead phone? Hot guy?” I can’t catch a break.

“Hot guy or no hot guy, we have that big meeting at four today with Anterdec Holdings, and if we get this all in on time it makes it much easier to land a client so big Greg will have to start turning the heat up over fifty-five in the winter.”

“You know how to improve company morale. Don’t tease me,” I say, pretending to fan my face. “Next thing you know you’ll tell me we’re allowed to turn the overhead lights on after sundown.”

“Don’t push it,” she says in a fake flat voice. But with the new hairstyle she makes my abs tighten with fear. I flinch. She sees it and frowns.

“You look like something out of a BDSM novel,” I explain.

One corner of her mouth hitches up. It’s half adorable and half chilling. “Really? Too bad I’m not dating anyone right now. This is just going to waste.” Her hand sweeps over her face.

“Ha.”

“Twenty-one minutes! Hurry! Once we have all the shops in the system we can do a quality-control check and go to this big meeting with an unblemished record. And then maybe they’ll give us the Fokused Shoprite account.” Amanda says this with a triumphant grin.

My jaw drops. “We have a shot at sniping one of their accounts?” Fokused, or Foked, as we call them, is our archenemy…er, competition. Consolidated and Fokused are the biggest consumer experience and marketing firms in the city, and the rivalry is strong.

If my little toilet-hand fiasco had cost us this account, I would have not only cried, Greg would have sold my office furniture out from under me and spent the $17 it was worth on coffee for the rest of the staff out of sheer anger.

My computer boots up and I log in to the website interface, a
zing
of thrill flooding my extremities as I see all complete shops from this morning, except that red ninth one.

Incomplete.

Incomplete this, sucker.
Ten minutes later, I am stuck with one final question.

“Is the bathroom aesthetically pleasing?” I let my mind drift to Declan, remembering those smoldering eyes, the tightly muscled jaw, how his cheeks dimpled when he laughed. The snug cut of his tailored jacket across those broad shoulders and how strong and sure his hands had been on me, making certain I didn’t fall.

Into the toilet, that is.

Can a relationship develop from two people who meet like this? Am I hopelessly dreaming? Or am I doomed to live the rest of my life surrounded by men at fast food restaurants on $5 sandwich day, or guys opening new accounts at banks to get a free pair of tickets to a big amusement park, or—

I take a slow, deep breath and remember the heat of his fingers on my arm. The warm questions in those eyes. The willingness to laugh with—okay,
at
—me.

I click
Yes
and then submit, ready to perform the killer client pitch of my entire career.

Chapter Six

Amanda and Greg like to pretend that they’re the experts at client pitches, but while they’re good openers, I’ve become the closer.

And in business, the closer is everything.

I have this innate sense that tells me how to fine-tune my words and convince a wavering vice president of marketing, or director of consumer relations, or vice president of
let’s invent a title for the owner’s son
, that Consolidated Evalu-shop, Inc. will help their company usher in a new wave of business that positions them at the vanguard of a paradigm shift in the industry.

See? I’m good.

Marketing really isn’t anything more than word salad, and I don’t mean the schizophrenic kind. Learning to speak business jargon fluently is definitely an acquired skill.

Growing a penis is another one. Haven’t mastered that just yet, though if I could, I would.

You know how many female VPs I meet? Maybe one in fifty. Presidents? One. Ever. A smattering of directors, more assistant directors, and then the glut of “coordinators,” which can mean anything from an underpaid, overworked equivalent of a vice president but without the paycheck to a glorified secretary.

And when you walk into a meeting, you have no idea what you’re dealing with.

Guess what my title is?

Yep. Marketing coordinator.

“They emailed me this morning,” Greg says. I take a good look at him. One thing I have to give to Greg—he cleans up well. He’s a little younger than my dad, which makes him mid-forties or so. You know—old, but not ancient. Brown hair, thinning out, and cut super short the way guys who won’t quite admit they’re balding cut their hair. His wife made him ditch the old 1980s frames he used to wear for a sleek updated look, and his suit is tailored, which it has to be. The beach ball masquerading as a stomach needs to fit.

“Portly” is the genteel term for what Greg looks like. He’s a great Santa at Christmas over at the community center, and today he looks like a distinguished gentleman ready to play hardball at the boardroom table.

“What’d they say?” Amanda is wearing a long, gray pencil skirt with a slit up the back. Nothing too racy, but with her curvy hips it looks business sexy. Red silk shell and black blazer. With the black hair and red lips, she has the look down. I have to stop myself from calling her Mistress.

“They want to expand the account by sixty percent. Into their high-end properties.”

Amanda and I suppress twin squeals of excitement. Anterdec owns an enormous chunk of real estate, hospitality companies, and restaurants in the area. If they have fewer than two hundred properties, I’d be surprised.

An account this big, including their luxury hotels, fine dining, and elite transportation services, could turn Consolidated into a major player in marketing services for enterprise companies.

(See how I did that? I should be a highly paid copywriter. Instead, I spent the ten minutes after we got here using a lint roller to peel cat hair off Greg’s back.)

“You want first dibs on mystery shopping The Fort?” Greg’s words make my heart soar. Amanda’s eyes open so wide I think one will fall out. The Fort is
the
exclusive waterfront hotel in Boston. Rumor has it the mints on the pillows have mints on them. Sheiks and royalty from around the world stay there when they are in town.

A night in a standard suite costs what I make in a month.

“Dibs!” I hiss. Amanda snarls.

“Down, you two. If this goes through, there will be more than enough shops for both of you and Josh. The luxury shops will be handled in-house. I might need to add employees.”

“You might need to add heat and a toilet,” Amanda cracks just as the receptionist catches our eye and motions toward the board room.

We are in the financial district of Boston, where people like me notice the nearest Starbucks or Boloco, but folks like the vice president for marketing at Anterdec notice which building has a helipad for helicopter landings.

Three suited men are turned away from us as we enter, their heads huddled in discussion. One head is gray, two are brown.

No women. Of course.

“Advantage already. No women,” Greg whispers in my ear. He is the opposite of sexist. He pays all of us, male or female, the same crappy salary.

The office is gorgeous. I’d expected a sleek, black and gray glassed room overlooking the building across the narrow road; the financial district isn’t close enough to the water for everyone to get their sliver of a view of the ocean.

But
this
. We are on the twenty-second floor and the window looks out over a rooftop terrace next door, covered with topiary filled with…PacMan?

“Is that a PacMan maze on that rooftop, or am I nuts?” I whisper to Amanda, who stifles a giggle.

“Big video-game development company next door. Their IPO just happened. I hear one of the perks of working there is that they deworm your dog or cat on site while you work.”

I open my mouth to say something back, when the three men turn and stand, facing us.

My mouth remains open.

One of the men is Declan McCormick.

His eyes meet mine and five different emotions roil through that chiseled jaw, those sharp eyes, that sun-kissed skin. Most of them are scandalous. All of them make my toes curl.

And then his face spreads with the hottest, warmest, most mischievous smile I have ever seen on a man who has taken over my damn senses, and he says:

“Toilet Girl!”

Chapter Seven

There are so many ways the next few seconds can unfold. I can pretend I don’t know what he is talking about and remain professional, giving him nonverbal cues and hoping he is decent enough to play along.

I can turn around and run screaming from the building.

I can laugh nonchalantly and step forward with grace, offering my hand and telling the story with self-deprecating sophistication and wit so overwhelming that I clinch the deal right here.

Instead, Amanda blurts out, “That’s Hot Guy?”

Declan’s face goes from joyfully amused to ridiculously gorgeous as he tucks his chin in one hand and tries not to laugh. The gray-haired man looks from Declan to me with an annoyed expression, the kind you only see on men who don’t like to be left out of knowing the score, and who are accustomed to having everyone make them the center of attention.

The other brown-haired man takes a step forward and offers his hand to Amanda, who is standing a step closer to them than I am. “Hello. I’m Andrew McCormick, and you are…?”

“Amanda Warrick,” she says with a clipped, professional cadence. The lingering handshake is mutual, though.

He seems to drop her hand with great reluctance, then turns to me. “My brother calls you Toilet Girl, but I’m going to assume that’s a stage name?”