He watched her exit. Something about her fascinated him, but irritated the hell out of him too.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
Poppy
He wanted me to walk into a meeting and stop it!
How was I meant to do that?I’d waited with bated breath for the arrival of this Mr. Grey fellow, and when he finally did arrive, he wasn’t anything like the film version of Mr. Grey. In fact, the short, portly man with the bright red cheeks and orange comb-over hair looked more like a horizontal version of the American president than a man who had the power to stir the loins of women everywhere. His name was very misleading, since it conjured up all kinds of images.
I’d sat there nervously waiting for the ten-minute mark, waiting for the moment I was meant to go in there and put an end to the meeting. But I was still trying to figure out how on earth I was going to do that. The last thing I wanted to do was walk back into his office, it filled me with terror and fear. At that moment someone walked past my desk and then stopped.
“Shit, it’s Mr. Grey,” she said.
I looked up at the woman standing by my desk; I’d seen her walk in this morning.
“I better let the others know,” she said quickly and then put some papers down on my desk. “Quarterly financial reports, he’ll want to see those today.” She started walking away, and I stopped her.
“Why do you have to tell the others that Mr. Grey is here?” I asked.
She turned around and looked nervous. She leaned in and lowered her voice. “Mr. Stark hates him. He’s always in an extra-terrible mood after meetings with him. We dread it when he comes into the office.”
“Oh, I see,” I mumbled, looking over at the office. You didn’t need to be a body language expert to see that he was irritated with the man. In fact, he wasn’t doing a very good job at hiding the way he felt about him or the meeting, and at one point he actually rolled his eyes and sighed. God, this man had no behavioral etiquette whatsoever. Most people worked hard to hide things like that. He did not. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to show his displeasure with everything.
“I’m Juniper, by the way. I work in accounts.” She extended her hand for me to shake.
“Po—” I cut myself off quickly, almost forgetting my character’s name for a moment there. “Doris,” I replied, taking her hand. God, this was the ultimate method acting, being in character all the time like this.
“If you ever need to know anything, by the way, you can always ask me. I’ve been here for five years—that’s four years and eleven months longer than I should have been.” She rolled her eyes and I smiled at her. I knew what she meant. I had already been here for—I looked up at the clock—three hours and forty minutes more than I needed to be too.
“Thanks for the offer,” I said as she walked back to her desk. I looked at the clock again; I needed to be in there in one minute and put an end to the meeting. This was confirmed when Mr. Stark glared at me. I stood up nervously and walked over to the office. I could do this. I was an actress. I knocked on the door.
“What?” he said, sounding irritated by the disturbance. Clearly playing along. I walked in.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Stark, but you have a call.”
Mr. Grey turned and looked at me. “A call?” He sounded dubious.
I nodded. “Mmm, a very important one,” I quickly added, upping the stakes and feeling rather pleased with myself for thinking of that.
Mr. Grey stared at me blankly and I smiled at him. Doris was a smiler. I’d decided that smiling should be one of her character traits. You can’t be mad at a person who smiles a lot, can you? Mr. Grey looked unmoved, though, and then Ryan started blinking at me. Rapidly.
“Do you have something in your eye?” I asked innocently.
His eyes widened, his face reddened and now he just looked angry. I smiled even more and decided I would need to improvise. I cleared my throat and then dropped the smile.
“Yes!” My voice was high and borderline frantic. “In fact, I think you better take the call right now, Mr. Stark, sir. Immediately. It seems very urgent. Very urgent indeed. The voice on the other end was very—”
“Urgent?” The portly old man cut me off. He leaned over his chair and eyed me suspiciously. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” he said sarcastically, and suddenly I got the feeling that Mr. Stark had tried this on him before. He was onto us.
“It was on silent,” I said quickly. I could see he didn’t believe me.
The man slowly looked over at my office desk and then back up at me again. “Interesting,” he said. “I didn’t see you answer any call either.”
“Well, that’s because you had your back to me,” I retorted.
“I can see you in the reflection of the glass.” He pointed at the window in front of him and, lo and behold, my desk was reflected in it.
“It was an SMS,” I said.
