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I’d also spent all day yesterday waiting for someone to come explain my new duties, but nobody had spoken to me until I saw Damon head off toward the “interesting” thing Daria had mentioned. Needless to say, I hadn’t accomplished anything that day.
I greeted the secretary, who always made one of two types of comments. She’d ask if I had a late night with a somewhat disturbing leer that told me she was hoping to live vicariously through me, or she’d make a sarcastic comment about how excited I must be to get to work. Either way, I smiled and appreciated the routine of it.
Little by little, I’d started to feel more at home here, even though my desk was practically designed to make me feel like an outsider in the spotlight.
But when I reached my floor, I couldn’t find the awkwardly placed desk in the center of the room.
I thought about knocking on Damon’s door, but for some reason, I was afraid to speak to him. He’d left off after he told Luna the truth, which had been followed by a long session of questions from her that had barely given me a chance to get a word in edgewise.
Now I had no real idea where we stood. I didn’t know if he’d gone back to being pissed at me for keeping the secret. I didn’t know if he was drafting wedding vows. I just didn’t know.
All I did know is that my heart was still in a puddle from watching the two of them hug. It was breaking every time Luna asked about him with bright excitement in her eyes. It was everything I’d been afraid to hope for, and now I was too scared to make sure it was real. I worried I’d walk into his office and realize with one scowl that Damon was going to tear down the dream brick by brick.
So I found my way to the floor below ours where the HR department worked. After asking around for the appropriate person, I was sat down with a chipper young guy who couldn’t have been much past twenty. He had bird-like features and a habit of humming nervously while he typed.
“Cross, you said, right?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Yep. Looks like Mr. Rose officially put in your promotion… Friday evening.”
“As in last week before our business trip?”
“Yep, I guess? Congratulations, though, Miss Acquisitions Agent. Very fancy. You know, my brother’s friend dated one of them. Said they make crazy money. I mean, so long as you aren’t afraid of rubbing elbows with Mr. Rose. But who isn’t?”
I smirked. “Yeah. He’s a scary guy.”
“I heard he fired an intern’s entire family because she screwed up his coffee once.”
“Her entire family worked here?”
The guy shrugged. “I didn’t ask for details. They say if he finds out you are digging for or spreading gossip about him, he’ll take you to the utilities closet and shove a mop handle so far up your ass that it comes out your nostrils.”
I found myself smiling. Part of me almost wondered if Damon had gleefully spread those rumors himself. “Do ‘they’ realize the mop handle would have to reverse direction in your head to pull that off?”
The guy smiled a little uncomfortably. “Just what I heard. That’s all. Oh, I also heard he once walked up to someone’s desk and spit on their computer screen because they misplaced a comma in an email they sent him. Dude is a savage.”
“Well, I’ll be careful around him. I wouldn’t want him shoving anything up my butt or spitting on me.” I stopped myself from giggling like an immature schoolgirl. To tell the truth, I wasn’t entirely sure either of those statements were true.
“Oh, by the way.” The guy dug in his desk and pulled something out of a messy drawer. “I was going to mail this out later. Want to just take it now?”
He wiggled a manilla envelope toward me.
“Paycheck,” he added with a wink.
I snatched it from his hands and hugged it to my chest. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to get this until Friday?”
“Don’t thank me, thank he who must not be named. And, uh, please don’t tell him I said that. My name is Roy, by the way. But he sent a memo this morning telling me to pay you everything you were owed from your previous position immediately, now that you’re working in acquisitions.”
My eyes fell to his nametag, which said Peter. “Well, thanks, Roy. I had better get going.”
“Hey, seriously don’t tell him. Please. I was just kidding around. And I don’t want him to take me to the closet.”
I smiled. “Want an insider secret? Mr. Rose is all bark and no bite. You don’t need to be so scared of him.”I went back to my floor and decided to stop being such a wuss. After all, I wasn’t a wuss.
