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“Again, I’m only a year younger than you.”
Natalie pointed a forkful of loose tuna salad at Hazel. “You need to take that internship, or whatever it is Cartwright is offering you.”
“Are you kidding? Why would I subject myself to that?”
Natalie ate the bite of tuna and then held out her fingers to count on them. “For starters, he’s a dish, even if he’s an asshole, and I want to hear everything you get on him—”
Hazel started to protest.
“But second, you also need to be developing your connections, Miss Save the World Businessgal. Third, after you’ve made your connections with him and whoever you’re able to work with at his company, he will almost certainly write you a letter of recommendation for a job or graduate school. And fourth, you know as well as I do that it’s harder than ever to get a job without already having experience, and this would give you that, in spades. Who’s going to say you’re underqualified after you worked for Ian Cartwright?” Natalie stole a baby carrot. “No one, that’s who.”
“Why do I let you boss me around?”
“Because I’m cute. And I’m always right.”
Hazel sipped her smoothie and thought about that for a moment. Hazel liked to think of herself as practical, but sometimes her principles did get in the way of pragmatics. Natalie was the kind of girl who was unapologetic about the things she wanted and how she went about getting them. Hazel often wished she could be that way—just going out and demanding what she wanted. And more than that—not feeling bad about having wanted something more than what she had. Maybe it came from being a twin, as well as the only girl. There were times when her brothers were given things so easily, but her mother would deny her the same treats and give her more chores. She hadn’t seen her real father in years. Steve was a dick, but at least he was around after getting her mom pregnant. It seemed like whenever she asked too much of her father or made him feel like she needed him, he pulled away even further. Rationally, guilt wasn’t a functional emotion, but Hazel had never been able to rational her feelings.
They just were. Ever-present and beyond her control.
“I guess I’ll think about it. There’s good for my career and good for my sanity. This would definitely be the former, only,” Hazel said.
“Get a better shrink and take the job.”
Hazel rolled her eyes. “Who needs another shrink when I have you?”
“Exactly.” Natalie waggled her brows. “I’m gonna go get one of those suspiciously good vegan brownies, and you’re gonna share it with me.”
Hazel took a napkin and wiped the mustard from her sandwich off her fingers. Could she do this? Could she force herself to spend so much extra time out of class with Ian Cartwright? She had to admit that he was incredibly easy on the eyes. He got her pulse up, and not always because she was angry. But he was such… what was the word?
A corporate dick. He was everything she fought against every day of her life, and she wasn’t sure why he would ever want to work with her. Sure, he’d said it was because of her GPA, but Hazel had a hard time believing that she was the only overachiever in the class.
What did he really want from her? The thought made her start to shake all over again.
***
After class, Ian had called a car to return to his office at the edge of town. He’d prefer to drive to campus, but given the parking situation, and the abysmal driving skills of the faculty and staff, Ian would prefer to sacrifice comfort and keep his baby from getting scratched all to hell.
As matters stood, though, the twenty-five-minute gap in his schedule when he rode in the back of his driver’s town car had become an anticipated break in his daily routine. Otherwise, Ian was scheduled down to the minute, with time in the office before and after classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, conference calls with the offices overseas on Wednesdays, and full days of meetings on Monday and Friday, unless he found himself traveling over the weekend. If he did not, he spent time on his book, which was proving more intractable than those he’d already published.
Truthfully, the semester had been a lot more intense than Ian had been expecting. He’d expected a few hours of work on class days, with the rest of his time devoted to managing the onsite business. It was a PR slam dunk, offering himself to the business program of Peachtree University, where the latest arm of Cartwright & Benton Industries had settled. There was an automatic connection there, with his business offering scholarship for business degrees and internships based on merit and need. But he’d found himself devoting a lot of his time upfront to planning semester activities once he’d met the student and discussed their expectations for the class, and that had gotten him behind on everything else. As it turned out, teaching was harder than he’d thought.
