I open my mouth and close it again before swallowing hard. “An assistant makes coffee.”
“How would you know?” she fires back. “Have you had a lot of assistants?”
I have not. And I’m pretty sure she knows it.
“For the record,” she adds as I once more turn to leave. “I don’t make breakfast or lunch either.”
I stiffen, tension knotting my shoulders.
It’s going to be a long month.
By midmorning, I’ve had two cups of coffee, but the caffeine isn’t helping me feel any better about my new working arrangement.
I’m starting to understand that Lilly Burton is going to be a problem in ways I haven’t fully prepared myself for.
She doesn’t make coffee, she doesn’t apologize for doing the job she was hired to do, and she sure as hell doesn’t wait for permission before trying to make sense of the disaster I call an office.
“You went through my messages?” I ask from behind my desk.
Lilly’s standing beside the file cabinet with one of my legal pads in her hand and a pen tucked between her fingers. She doesn’t look guilty. If anything, she looks far too comfortable surrounded by my chaos, like she’s already decided it belongs to her now.
“I went through your schedule,” she says. “Your messages were part of figuring out what was urgent.”
“My messages are private.”
“So are your client files, and yet you hired me to organize those.” Her blue eyes lift to mine. “I only listened to the ones marked urgent.”
I cross my arms. “That was not permission.”
“No,” she says evenly. “But it did tell me that Eric Wolf from Rock Creek has been trying to reach you for over a week.”
That gets my attention, and she knows it.
“He’s a client.”
“I gathered that.”
“A very important client.”
“I gathered that too, especially after the third message, when he stopped sounding patient.”
I drag a hand down my face and remind myself again that this is temporary. A month. A trial. Nothing more than a solution to a problem I didn’t ask anyone to solve.
The issue, of course, is that she’s already solving it.
Eric Wolf isn’t the kind of man I like to keep waiting. He owns enough businesses in Rock Creek that most people take his calls the first time, but he’s never been one to throw his weight around.
When Eric calls, it’s because there’s a reason. Usually, a profitable one.
“What does he want?” I ask.
“He wants your opinion on whether he should hold off until the winter numbers come in before moving forward with another purchase.” She glances down at the notes infront of her. “Something outside of Rock Creek. Commercial, I think. The notes are hard to read.”
I look at the folder she’s already set on the corner of my desk.
Of course, she found the right one.
“I’ll deal with it later.”
