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And if he can manage that with just his shirt sleeves, what the hell would it be like if he was really trying to turn me on?
12
CHARLOTTE
“T
here’s been a what?” Please let me have misheard her. For the love of Erin Condren, please let me have misheard her.
“A flood,” says Priya, the freshly appointed manager of the First Byte tech hub in Indiana.
Shit.
I’d spent the weekend going over and over the construction schedule and all the plans to make sure everything would slot into place on time. The contractors started work exactly as planned first thing yesterday morning. They hit it so hard, as these teams always do, that they were two-thirds done late last night and I thought we were almost home and dry.
Apparently, we are now anything but dry.
“How bad?” I ask Priya.
“Very.” She sounds like she thinks I might blame her. “Two pipes in the ceiling burst overnight and ruined everything.”
My stomach hits the floor like a crashing elevator. “Ruined? Everything? Are you sure?”
It’s Tuesday morning, just a week before the launch and the grand opening.
“Yes.” Now there’s a hint of panic in her voice. “Well, there might be a couple of chairs that will dry out okay. But the walls are all wet, some of the paint’s run, the room dividers are ruined, the ceiling needs to be replaced, the carpets are drenched, and?—”
I’m suddenly on my feet, but don’t remember standing up. “What are we going to do? How do we fix this? It needs to be perfect by Monday.”
I must have said that louder than I realize because Max turns to look at me through his office wall, frowning.
“Um, any chance we could move to a new location?” Priya asks as if from the side of her mouth.
“No. No, we can’t move.”
I know it took Elliot and Owen forever to find this place. Once they’d settled on Plainsville as the perfect spot for the inaugural First Byte, they struggled to find a downtown site easy to get to with public transit. And they wanted something street level and visible. When they finally found this unit on the corner of a new retail building not far from a junior high school, they knew they’d hit gold.
And even if we could find a new location, we couldn’t sign a lease and get it all built out by Monday.
I look back at Max, who’s returned to concentrating on whatever’s on his monitor. If I can’t pull this together in time, there’s no way he’ll ever give me a chance to manage a project and set me on the path to becoming an executive.
My phone pings three times in quick succession.
“I’m sending you pictures,” Priya says.
I pull the phone away from my ear and look at them.
Hell’s bells in a fucking bucket.
I drop back into my chair as if my legs had been kicked out from under me.
Where the ceiling hasn’t fully burst open, it’s sagging. On two of the walls, the blue and yellow paints have run together to form a weird green waterfall pattern. The vertical dividers separating the space into zones have split apart and fallen open. And the surface material is peeling off most of the desks.
Shit.
But I have no choice. I have to make this happen. Or else I’ll be drawing up Max’s schedule and pouring away his cold coffee for the rest of my life.
“Okay.” I get back to my feet, my legs almost as weak as when I was sick last week. Suddenly, that whole puking thing no longer seems like the worst thing that’s happened lately. “Give me a few minutes.” I move around my desk, my back to Max’s office so he can’t see my, presumably, panic-stricken face. “I need to talk to the building management about the pipes and fixing the ceiling. That’s their responsibility. I’ll call you back.”
