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“Aren’t you excited?” she asks, and her voice rises three octaves. “Relieved? Anything? I mean, I feel like there should be some kind of emotional evidence of your success.”
I shrug. In a way, I am relieved. But in another, much bigger way, this is just the beginning. And the rest of the story includes finding some way to lose the animosity I feel toward my new boss. Trent fucking Turner. He may be a stuck-up prick, but I doubt his opinion of me is much better. “I didn’t make a great first impression with my boss.”
“What do you mean? You got the job, didn’t you?”
I choke down an overly large bite of pastrami in my haste to answer and have to grab my throat as it burns.
“You’re not a snake, you know,” Emory teases. “You don’t have to swallow your food whole.”
I scrunch my face into a fake hysterical laugh and sneer. “I’ve hardly eaten anything all day,” I retort. “And if you keep up that kind of bitchy food judgment, I’ll assume you want me to start eating your food too.”
“Greer.” Emory just stares. I swear, if her eyes get any bigger, they’ll pop straight out of the sockets and literally push me for the answer to her initial question.
I waver between ending or prolonging her misery, but it doesn’t take long for me to decide that it’s best if her eyeballs stay secured inside her head.
“Yes, I got the job,” I finally answer. “Mr. Turner loved me. But it’s his son who’s running the New Orleans hotel and, well, it’s that Trent Turner I fucked up with.”
“How?” She scrunches up her nose. “How have you already fucked up so badly in a day?”
“Because I sort of met him the other day at the hotel, when you sent me to the gym…” My voice is needlessly accusatory. “And I might have said a thing or two I shouldn’t have.”
She pulls her sandwich away from her mouth and glares. Sometimes she really knows me too well. “What did you say?”
I shrug in an effort to play it off and pick at the seeds in my rye bread. “Just…you know…that the décor in their hotel was so hideous, I felt as though I might actually die from it.” My laugh is scary. “No big deal, right?”
Emory drops her head into her hands. “Jesus Christ, Greer.”
“I know! Gah!” I wail. “But I didn’t know it was him! He never introduced himself, and he was really fucking rude to me about my fitness. It just came spewing out like lava. You can’t blame me, really. It was a volcano!”
She’s skeptical, and it shows. I can’t blame her, really, but I’m actually telling the truth this time. Green-eyed, good-bodied Trent is a Grade A prick. “Rude to you how?”
“He said I was pretending to work out!”
Her raised eyebrow is nothing but accusatory and calling me on my bullshit. “And were you?”
“What does that matter?” I screech.
Her sandwich hits the plate so hard, it falls apart and rains corned beef on the table. I reach out to pick it up—no meat left behind and all that—and she smacks my hand.
“Here’s what you’re going to do. First day on the job in New Orleans, you’re going to march right up to him and apologize.”
“What? No! I’m not apologizing to that asshole. If you hadn’t been so busy primping, we would have been able to fly up here earlier with Quincy. I would have had more time to stabilize the bitchiness.”
“Don’t you dare blame this on me and my spa day!” she snaps. “This is on you, and you only have one option.”
I raise a skeptical brow and grimace. She doesn’t even bother to soften the blow.
“Take your pride and shame and stubbornness and eat it, Greer,” she instructs. “Pretend they’re all fried and pickled if you have to. For God’s sake, don’t you remember what you have riding on this?”
Everything, my mind remarks. Literally everything.
“Fine,” I huff, shoving her hand out of the way and grabbing her meat defiantly. “When we get to New Orleans, I’ll apologize. And then I’ll be on my best behavior. But I’m not going to like him. No buddy-buddy exchanges and shit. This is business. Period.”
Emory nods.
“And for the love of God, he better be open to suggestions. I refuse to stamp my name on the puke-worthy design they have going on in the Vanderturn Manhattan. I’d rather starve to death in my newly renovated cardboard home on the streets than do that.”
“Of course,” she says with a hum, and I decide to ignore the fact that she’s humoring me.
“I would,” I retort. “If I’m going to do a good job, he’s going to have to trust me to make decisions. I can’t work creatively when everything I come up with is being turned down.”
