“What was up with that? Did my stink overcome you and you turned werewolf or something?”
She laughed again, more relaxed now that he was laughing it off. She looked out the window. “I was daydreaming about Brad Pitt, I guess.”
“Oh yeah, I get that all the time. The likeness is uncanny, so I’m told.”
She rolled her eyes. “You look exactly like him, sure. You could be his wax statue.”
“His wax statue?” Sean laughed. “Tell me honestly… You were actually going for my jugular, weren’t you?”
She gave another relieved laugh. “You caught me. I figured I’d end it there, but then I realized that Marcus would tell and I didn’t feel like going to jail.”
“Consider me warned.”
They drove for a while longer in silence. Krista turned to him suddenly.
“You’re happy to finally get to meet Ben, aren’t you?” she asked suspiciously.
It was one of the reasons he was in such a good mood, just about the only one that he’d openly admit. “Guilty. I want to see if he is as good as he seems. And if he is, I want access to him. We could use him.”
“He’s in school. He only works part-time.”
“Good. He’s cheaper. If he is a fast worker, we only need him part-time.”
“He’s terribly slow with art.”
“You probably think that because you get bored watching him do it.”
“And listening to him talk about it.”
Sean laughed as they pulled onto Krista’s street. She directed him to her house then jumped out to get Ben, who answered the door with arms full of what could only be called junk.
“What are you mak—actually, no, never mind. C’mon.” Krista took a large piece of Styrofoam and turned back to the car.
“I ate your pizza,” Ben said as he navigated down the steps.
“You ate my pizza?” Krista whined.
“I am doing you a favor over finals weekend. You owe me. I decided that pizza was the payment.”
“Can I help?” Sean asked, not sure what to grab because there were pipes and ribbon and all manner of odd things.
“There is more in the house,” Ben threw his head toward the open door, getting to the sidewalk. “Is this the car?”
“Sean, you owe me pizza,” Krista yelled after him. “And I want Goat Hill because it is delicious and I was really looking forward to it.”
Sean passed her with a pile of pipes. “Done. I’ll buy, you get delivery.”
Ben gave Sean direction on how best to fit it in the trunk. Then the boys faced each other.
“I’m Sean.” He extended his hand.
“The Captain?” Ben asked, shaking hands.
Sean smiled. “I loved what you did with Krista’s presentation.”
“Oh, that was easy.” Ben cast his eyes at the ground. “You should see what she does with my finances.”
“C’mon,” Krista said, getting into the car.
“I think I put her in a bad mood,” Sean apologized.
Ben stepped around him toward the back door on Krista’s side. “Oh no, I knew full well what I’d get if I ate her pizza. She gets cranky when she’s hungry. Or when you eat leftovers she was looking forward to. She’ll get over it.”
Sean crossed to the driver’s side as the other man got into the car. Ben was a trip. Small, nerdy, mousy—he wasn’t a type of guy Sean had ever hung out with—which was about to change. Ben obviously knew Krista well, which meant they were friends. It was another “in” to her life, and Sean would take everything he could get. He wanted to get bit again.
When Sean crawled in, the two were sitting in silence. “All set?”
“Yup,” Ben said, crossing his hands on his lap. Krista looked out the window.
“Kris, I didn’t have any choice. You can just order more,” Ben said reasonably.
“I know. I need a minute to mope.”
“Are you like this with all food, or just pizza?” Sean asked as he started the car.
“Never touch her chocolate,” Ben declared as he looked over his pile of art in the back seat.
“So what are you working on?” Sean asked Ben.
Chapter Eighteen
Krista immediately zoned out. Once Ben got going he was unstoppable, and it all sounded harebrained. To Krista, a sculpture made out of junk was still just a pile of junk. To Ben, it was an expression of humanity’s struggle with garbage. And he was paying top dollar to express that. Purely illogical.
Once they got to the building and parked, Krista and Sean helped Ben carry all his crap up to the office Sean would soon move into. Apparently Ben would get to work in the art department later, after Sean was sure everyone had gone home. They all walked in to the giant office, equipped with a bookcase, a giant desk, a table with chairs around it, and a great view.
“Nice life,” Ben said, looking around. “It’s bigger than my bedroom.”
“It was not easy to get.” Sean crossed to a visitor chair and pointed for Ben to take the plush leather seat behind the desk. Ben looked way out of place.
“Krista, show him what we got and what we need,” Sean said as he leaned back, closed his eyes and crossed his ankle over his knee.
“Please,” she replied in her mother’s voice.
“S’il te plaȋt,” Sean said in French with a smirk. Krista got a zing in her stomach that he used the familiar form. Also that he even knew it. “But first, look in the right top desk drawer.”
Krista slid the drawer open and stared down at a well-organized drawer full of office supplies.
“Right desk drawer.”
“Oh,” Krista said, not quite done moping about her pizza. She’d grown up with a little sister who ate everything of Krista’s. Literally everything. Ice cream was the worst. When you got home after school and you wanted your Rocky Road, especially after thinking about it all day, and you opened the carton, so excited, and you found … an empty freaking carton with a note that said, “Loser!” it really killed a girl’s mood. It didn’t matter where she hid her food, either, her sister found it and ate it—even the stuff the wench didn’t like.
It was now one of her biggest pet peeves.
She opened the drawer and found a Snickers.
“Will that help?” Sean asked, observing her.
Krista snatched it and met his sparkling green eyes. “You keep candy in your desk?”
“Snickers for when I can’t get out to lunch and need a lift, but I’ll start stocking more from now on.”
“Wise,” Ben nodded.
Krista held on to the Snickers as she leaned over Ben and logged into the computer. She accessed the art database and presentation, both showing him the research, which he blinked at and shook his head, and then the art portion.
When she was done, he said, “That’s a mess.”
“Can you put it together?” Sean asked, hope replaced with worry.
“Well, do you have any other pictures? Those don’t really go with what you’re trying to convey.”
“Show him the files,” Sean gave a vague motion with his finger.
“Please,” Krista said again, hiding a chuckle as she clicked the mouse over Ben’s shoulder.
Sean sighed. “Pretty please.”
“Don’t sigh around Jasmine,” Ben said as his eyes followed Krista’s hands on the keyboard. “She’ll flick you in the head. It hurts.”
Sean sat forward laughing as Krista showed Ben how to search the database. Ben was a smart kid—it took him one pass and he was on his own. He made happy sounds of an art nerd’s wet dream. It took him all of fifteen minutes to find what he was after, then another fifteen putting everything together. He lost no time in accessing Krista’s research and changing the layout. “Kris, I don’t know how to work with this graph and stuff.”
Mouth full of Snickers, she saw her information in different colors and different places on the page. The only thing she’d done that still looked the same was the actual data.
“Sean seems to think I do good work,” she said in humorous exasperation. “Then you come in and change everything like I’m a dunce.”
Ben shrugged, “It’s the hair color.”
Sean started laughing again.
Ignoring Sean, but unable to keep a small smile from her lips, Krista changed the graph to Ben’s precise, and irritating, qualifications, then straightened up and looked at him.
“Print,” Ben commanded. “Now you can just put it together while I look through all this great art! My company doesn’t hold a candle to all this!”
Sean opened his eyes with a gleam. He now knew how to sell Ben on a job. Krista wondered how long it would take to bring him over to the dark side. Her guess was not long.
She got everything off the printer, put it in order, including her revamped table of contents, and gave it to Sean.
“Amazing,” he breathed quietly.
“It will work then?” She asked, inadvertently noticing the bulge of his pants as they tightened over his man parts. She wondered what kind of underwear he wore. Also, if he was this big when relaxed, she wondered how big he was when he was at full mast...
Sean glanced up and caught her look. He cocked his head with that devilish grin playing on his lush lips. It was awfully hard to bluff when you kept showing your cards to everyone at the table.
He held her eyes for a moment longer, heat kindling, before he tore them away and looked down at the new report. He cleared his throat then said, “This is perfect. I need to add a few things of my own, then it’s ready for John. This company needs people in charge like you and Ben. This took half a work day, tops, and it’s in perfect shape. Just think what we can do with more time?”
After the report was ready for Sean, and Ben got a tour of the art department, which had his eyes sparkling like a man in a mid-life crisis looking at a Ferrari, everyone was left to their own devices, which meant Krista, who refused to take Sean’s money for pizza, went home alone to an empty house and an empty calendar. She would have had an empty belly, too, since without the pizza the fridge she was down to moldy cheese, OJ, and Abbey’s labeled items, but five minutes after she got home she got a text from a number she didn’t recognize telling her Goat Hill was on its way.
She now had Sean’s number. It was the whipped cream to the mud pie of the day.
Once Sean had Ben’s phone number, effectively pushing aside the middle man—Krista—it was only a matter of time before he talked Ben into a job. She had absolutely no doubt it would happen. Not many people could say “no” to Sean for long when he had something in his sights, and Ben barely needed a push. Once he saw the empire the catalogers had built, and the fully stocked art department, he was begging to be brought over.
So barely a week later, when Ben plopped down next to her on the couch one evening, she figured Sean was somewhere, relaxing, complimenting himself on his effective sales work.
“He talked you into it,” she stated without preamble.
“He said that someday I could be the head of the art department. And after all, I need a job, why should it matter which company? And your company is seriously set up in a way my other company wasn’t.”
“Ben, he could tell anyone they could be the head of the art department. It doesn’t mean you will be.”
“But he said if I worked with you then we would probably rise up together. And that makes sense because we do make a good team.”
“We would be in different departments. It wouldn’t be our choice to work together.”
“But he’s right; I can work anywhere while I am going to school. I might as well work in the place that gives me the best deal.”
She couldn’t argue with that. If it was a good deal for Ben, and knowing Sean, it was, then she couldn’t fault Sean for making it happen.
She answered by shrugging. The decision was made and she hoped Sean and company didn’t gobble him up.
After watching TV for a few minutes, Ben said, “He is a very attractive guy.”
That’s an understatement. But where was he going with it? Ben wasn’t g*y, but he did have an artist’s perspective. A glance at him revealed nothing. Was it just commentary in general, or aimed at her specifically? She knew Ben would never point out that Sean was out of her league, but her brain certainly put the implication there.
“Indeed,” she replied nonchalantly, hopefully leading him nowhere with her response so he would have no choice but to elaborate.
Frustratingly, he left it at that! That meant she had to, too, or else it would be glaringly obvious she liked the guy, which was something she didn’t even want to admit to herself, let alone say out loud.
The day approached for the long-anticipated dinner and wine fundraiser. As promised, the whole team would go sans dates, along with, but not in the same ride as, the executives and some prominent members of the company. Sean’s team would be solely responsible for hanging around and hopefully talking to someone important. They were given assigned tables and, apparently, paired with someone they could dazzle. Krista’s person of note was one of the guys in the presentation room so long ago. In other words, no one of consequence. All she had to do was let him look at her boobs and it was in the bag.
Which meant she had an excuse to show them. Dazzle factor: check!
She was wearing a new dress that made her bod look super sexy, but was still mostly conservative. It covered all the necessary elements while still showing off her form. And yes, maybe it could have covered a little more boob, but it was still G-rated, and she did have an excuse for that, so she didn’t worry about it.