Unleashing the Receptionist: ...the Receptionist, Book 3 Page 3

  Ethan stalked toward us, blue eyes blazing with unholy fury. Margo took three steps backward.

  “You can’t do that,” she said. “Have you forgotten my stake in the business?”

  “Have you forgotten all common standards of decency? Not to mention federal and state laws against sexual harassment?”

  Only a foot or so from the door, she took her stand with a snort. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re accusing me of sexual harassment?”

  “Dana,” Ethan barked without looking at me. “Have you ever been sexually harassed on these premises?”

  “Not until she walked in the door,” I said promptly. Only the truth. Everything Simon, Ethan and I had ever done together had been entirely, blissfully consensual.

  “I know what goes on here,” Margo spat as Ethan kept advancing on her, one relentless step after the other. “I’ll put you out of business. I swear I will.”

  “If you still want me, Margo, why don’t you just say so?”

  She spun around in a black-suited whirl of outrage, but not before I saw the heat that flared in her eyes. So Ethan had fucked her. He’d had his cock in that intimidating, confident woman. Or maybe he’d just spanked her.

  Her eyes, hard and green like a cat’s, sparked with outrage. Of course, I knew it was true. First of all, how could anyone be around Ethan and not want him? Secondly, a woman like her cried out for a firm hand. If you asked me, she was throwing a tantrum just so she could get Ethan’s attention.

  He stopped when he was about two inches from her. She narrowed her eyes at him and raised her chin, daring him to touch her, challenging him to cross the same line she’d crossed. But Ethan was too smart for that.

  “Out,” he said, simply. “When I bought you out I rid myself of any obligation to look at you again.” Ethan gave a dismissive motion with his hand.

  She went even stiffer than before, from executive shark to offended empress. “Don’t treat me like that. I’m warning you.”

  “Warning received and ignored. If you come back, keep your lawyer on speed-dial. Which, as I recall, he always was.”

  “So you remember the old days after all?”

  “I remember what I need to. And I don’t hesitate to use it.”

  They stood chin to chin, willpower to willpower, but Ethan didn’t back down to anyone. Before long her gaze faltered and slid away.

  “Just don’t…don’t be surprised when something bad happens. Something very, very bad.”

  I shivered. Was she cursing us? Maybe she practiced black magic. It would explain her witchy attitude.

  She backed off and hurried down the hallway out of sight. Ethan stood watching, hands in his pockets, every line of his body radiating tension.

  “Okay, Ethan,” I said as he turned in my direction. “You owe me. I got groped by someone who told me they own twenty percent of me. I think I’ve earned an explanation. Or at least a stiff drink.”

  “Probably both.” A grim smile ghosted across his rugged face. No one would call Ethan a pretty boy, but he had the kind of face you couldn’t look away from. “That was Margo Lang. She’s a snake and a rat all in one, like some sort of genetic mutation. She’s the former owner and chief executive officer of Lang and Associates, the name by which Cowell & Dirk was formerly known.”

  It took me a moment to puzzle out the “formers”.

  “She used to own Cowell & Dirk?”

  “Precisely. It was her baby. She owned it. Simon was Vice President. Then she got into some trouble with the law.” Fascinated, I watched him stroll across the lobby, a prowling wild creature in a business suit. “Financial law, to be precise. She tried to blame it on Simon. She set him up to take the fall. He was arrested and almost jailed.”

  “Simon went to jail?”

  “I said almost.”

  “You rescued him, didn’t you? How’d you do it? Did you beat someone up the way you did the Woodfield guys?”

  Ethan smiled at my flurry of questions. He sat on the edge of my desk and smoothed his hand across my hair. “So fiery. So curious. I adore you, you know.”

  “I know.” I fought back the distracting urge to melt into a puddle at his feet. “But I still want to know everything.”

  “Part of this story is Simon’s. I can tell you that I knew Simon. I’d known him for quite some time. Thanks to him, I’d had my eye on this firm. I thought it had potential, in the right hands. I’d been in talks with Margo about joining the firm, but we couldn’t agree on who would be in charge. Margo and I explored a sexual relationship but I quickly realized it would be a disaster. If there’s one type of woman I can’t abide, it’s the backstabbing sort. When I saw what she did to Simon, I moved fast. I maneuvered things so she had no choice but to let me buy her out. And yes, she did retain a meaningless twenty percent of the profits, but she has no vote in any of our decisions. Simon will have to tell you the rest.”

  “The rest of what?” Simon leaned against the doorway to the inner offices. He’d loosened his tie. The knot was now hanging to the side, like a noose. His hair stood in black, mussed-up waves. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he’d been getting busy in his office. The naughty busy, that is. Not the work kind.

  “You all right, chap?”

  “I’m not sure. I just got a call from the IRS. It looks like we’re being audited.”

  Chapter Four

  “Margo.”

  Ethan and I said the name at the same time. Simon frowned. “What do you mean, Margo?”

  “We just received a visitation from the Queen of Spleen. She made some vague, cryptic threats.”

  “And she touched me.” I still couldn’t get over it. The nerve of the woman. And then what she’d done to my Simon… Next time I saw her I’d skip the professional demeanor part of my job and go straight for the carotid.

  “Touched you?” Simon looked utterly confused.

  “She said she owned twenty percent of me.”

  Simon twitched his eyebrows into a disbelieving grimace. “She’s got some gall.”

  “We can’t let her win,” I said fervently. “I’m not afraid of her. Are you guys? Are we in good shape, tax-wise?”

  “We should be. We pay our accountant enough to make sure we are. But…” Ethan frowned down at the floor. “An interesting thing happened last night. Seeing Margo’s name on the receipt set off a red flare. I checked through some of our latest P&L’s and noticed some discrepancies. This morning I placed a call to Burke and his phone was out of service.”

  Silence followed this recitation. Burke was our accountant. I’d only spoken to him on the phone, but he had a pleasant, high-pitched voice and always called me doll. I’d liked him.

  “But Burke has been with us since…” Simon broke off.

  Since Margo’s days, I mentally completed the sentence. Ethan strode across the room and pushed past Simon. Off to finish his investigation, presumably. There didn’t seem much doubt as to what he’d find. Simon and I stared at each other in dismay. A poison pill accountant and a vengeful ex-boss. It added up to trouble with a capital I.R.S.

  The tax auditor was due to arrive the next day. Ethan called Simon and me into a closed-door meeting. Naturally, this was nothing like our usual closed-door meetings. The situation had us all on edge. Ethan sat behind his desk, looking remote and all business. Simon and I sat in the two chairs facing him. I took out my cute little stenographer’s notepad. Old school, I know, but so much sexier than a BlackBerry.

  “When the auditor arrives, we’re to make all our files available to him. We will treat him with the utmost professionalism. Whatever he needs, we get for him. I brought everything over from Barnes’s office—I had to break into it, by the way. The place is shut down tight. But I will find him, eventually.”

  I felt sorry for Barnes when he did.

  “The auditor is going to have to go over our books very carefully. We hide nothing from him, do you hear? If something’s wrong in our tax filings, we’ll deal with that. We
keep everything aboveboard.”

  I nodded, scribbling on my notepad. I wrote, “Professional. Whatever he needs.” Which sounded contradictory to me, but that’s because I have a dirty mind.

  “Should we say anything about Barnes and Margo?” Simon asked.

  “No. He doesn’t need to know any of that. Once we know what we’re dealing with, we can consider various approaches. But for now, we keep it simple. Here are the files. Here’s an office. Would you like some coffee? The bathroom’s that way. Etcetera.”

  Made sense to me. I wrote, “Coffee preference?” Then I nibbled on the end of my pen, various scenarios flitting through my mind. Maybe I could drug his coffee, then use his unconscious hand to sign something absolving the firm. Maybe I could win him over with my fabulous cream-adding skills.

  “Dana, what are you thinking?” Ethan narrowed his eyes at me. “I know that look. Your wheels are turning. Make them stop.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I chewed innocently on the end of my pen.

  He snorted. The man knew me far too well. “I don’t want anything to get in this guy’s way. We let him do his thing and deal with the fallout when it comes. And one more thing.”

  I waited, pen poised.

  Ethan dropped his bombshell. “We all need to abstain until the auditor’s gone.”

  “What?” I nearly dropped my notepad. “You mean, totally? Or just here at work?”

  Next to me, Simon laughed softly and put a hand on my knee.

  “Starting now,” said Ethan. “No physical contact whatsoever.”

  Simon snatched his hand away. I tried to envision my daily life without touching or being touched by my two lovers. I went completely blank.

  “It’s fine, Simon,” I said. “There’s always my place.”

  “No. I mean no contact anywhere, at work or outside of work.”

  “What? Why?” I looked from one to the other, wondering why Simon wasn’t protesting the madness of this pronouncement. Instead, he crossed his hands behind his head and gazed up at the ceiling. “That seems crazy. Why would the auditor care what we do outside of work?”

  “He shouldn’t. But I don’t want to arouse his curiosity. He’s an unknown, so I’m wary. If Margo has something to do with this, I’m even warier. We keep it simple. He does his job, we do ours.”

  “But, but…” I sputtered to a stop and fell silent. Ethan had made his decision, clearly, and there would be no changing it. It’s not that I couldn’t live without my naughtier receptionist duties. I wasn’t hooked on Ethan and Simon, nothing like that. Really. I’d be fine for a few days.

  Hopefully a very few.

  But I didn’t like Margo or a tax auditor affecting our decisions. Neither of them had any say in our private, personal sex lives.

  Maybe I ought to march on Washington. Write a letter to the newspaper. Start a petition.

  Or maybe I should just accept reality and dance to Margo’s tune for a while. Except that I still remembered the casual way she’d reached out and flicked my nipple as if she had the right to touch me.

  I still had a score to settle with that woman. In the meantime, I’d be a good little receptionist and…whatever. Answer phones. Take messages. Whatever. I could do it. No problem.

  The tax auditor arrived at eight fifty-seven sharp the next morning. I was prepared for that possibility and had arrived at eight thirty. Coffee was dripping.

  So was the auditor’s nose.

  He wore gray dress pants and a yellow shirt with a yellow paisley tie. His color scheme did nothing for his eyes, which blinked madly at me as he walked in. They looked watery and bloodshot, but I thought they were probably as gray as his pants.

  “Good morning,” I said, the good little receptionist.

  “Hardly.” He wiped the corner of one dripping eye. “Only in the sense of an obligatory salutation could it be considered a good morning.”

  Right away I knew I had an oddball on my hands.

  “Allergy attack?” I smiled with fake sympathy.

  “No. Who are you?”

  “Dana Arthur. I’m the receptionist here at Cowell & Dirk.”

  He put a worn leather briefcase onto the floor next to him and blinked some more.

  Maybe he was upset about something. Relationship problem, if weird IRS auditors had relationships. I checked his ring finger. No marks whatsoever, not even the telltale divorce/separated/liar-and-cheater white line.

  I remembered my orders. Help this man with whatever he needed. “I have some eye drops if you’d like.”

  “I’m fine,” he said with a doomed attempt at dignity. “I made the mistake of wearing contact lenses, as I often like to do on my first day. They don’t agree with me.”

  Wow. A vain tax auditor. Who knew? “Why don’t you take them out? The bathroom’s down the hall.”

  He closed one eye in apparent agony and turned in a complete circle.

  This move had the unintended side effect of giving me a nice long look at his physique. A little shlumpy, a little stoopy around the shoulders, but the man had a better body than you’d expect under those boring tax-guy clothes of his. When he’d finished his little runway twirl he veered toward the plate-glass wall next to the door.

  “Stop!” I yelled before he smashed his face into it. He jolted back onto his heels. “Let me show you.”

  “I can find it, you’re probably busy, really don’t want to bother you…” The one eye stayed closed while the other fluttered frantically.

  “Really. No bother at all. Come on.”

  Ethan hadn’t mentioned physical contact with our guest, so I came from behind the desk and took him by the elbow. I tugged him behind me down the hall to the men’s room.

  “Can you take it from here?”

  “Where is this? Oh yes, certainly.” He pulled the door open and bonked himself in the face. “Ow.”

  I sighed. “Anyone in here?” When no one answered, I steered him inside the men’s room and planted him in front of the sink. “There. Now I’m really sure you can take it from here, right?”

  There was no way I was sticking my finger in an IRS guy’s eye. It would be too tempting.

  He looked around in blink-eyed confusion. “Where’s my briefcase?”

  I sighed. “Be right back. Stay there. Don’t move.” Who knew what damage he could do alone and half-blind in the men’s room? I dashed back down the hall and grabbed the briefcase. I might have thought about peeking inside. But my brief contact with the tax guy had endeared him to me. He was cute, in an utterly nerdy way. I couldn’t bring myself to spy on him.

  I knocked on the men’s room door.

  “Come in,” he said anxiously, like a baby bird waiting to be fed. Inside, he was waiting exactly where I’d left him. Exactly. It looked like he hadn’t moved one milli-mini-micro-inch. A weird sense of power crept through me. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I shoved it aside.

  I heaved the briefcase onto the countertop. “Now where’s your eye stuff?”

  “Outside right-hand pocket.”

  I retrieved glasses, a lens case and some solution. Wincing, he took out his lenses and closed his eyes with one long sigh of relief. Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes. I held out his glasses for him—dull brown aviator lenses. Really, he ought to see Margo for some new frames.

  “Listen, Mr.…” I said, seriously.

  “My name’s Peter Standish.” Cautiously he opened his eyes.

  “Maybe you should reconsider your contact lenses on the first day policy.”

  “Hm.” He surveyed me with bleary, but clearing, gray eyes. When he wasn’t squinting or tearing up, he was much more attractive. Early thirties, fine brown hair, a boyish look about him. Not a hunk like Simon or a badass like Ethan. But he had a certain appeal. “Well, thank you for rescuing me. Wait. Where are we?”

  He looked around in sudden horror, then back at me as if I’d suddenly sprouted devil horns.

  “This is the men’
s room,” he whispered.

  “And me without my strap-on,” I murmured.

  Me and my big mouth—I knew he heard because he hiccupped in shock. This poor dude really needed to get out more.

  I quickly switched back to ultra-professional mode. “It was an emergency situation. Normally I would never think of breaking the rules like that. I don’t know how I’d live with myself, honestly. Rules are there for the comfort and safety of all of us. Shall we go back to the office now?”

  “Er…” He’d been staring at me, but now he stopped. “Yes.” He picked up his briefcase and we left the scene of the crime behind.

  Back in the outer office of Cowell & Dirk, I waved at my desk. “That’s where you’ll usually find me. Anything you need, come to me first if it’s something simple, like paperclips or coffee.”

  “No coffee. I brought my own tea bags.”

  “Really?” There went my elaborate coffee-drugging plans. “Well, I can brew it for you if you like.”

  “I’m quite particular about my tea.”

  “Fine. You can use the kitchenette whenever you like.” I gestured to that room as we passed it. “But if you need anything, please come find me. I’m here to serve.” My professional, non-double-entendre tone would have won a gold medal in the Receptionist Olympics.

  As instructed by Ethan, I brought Standish to his office for formal introductions.

  “Ethan Cowell,” said my number one boss, rising to his feet with his hypnotic physical grace. “Senior partner. This is my associate, Simon Dirk.” Simon strolled over from the bank of windows, and they all shook hands. Peter Standish’s glasses slid down his nose. I fought the urge to push them back up.

  “Peter Standish. Well, you know that already.” He cleared his throat awkwardly, looking from one spectacular specimen of manhood to the other. “I, uh…”

  I stepped in. “You’re probably wondering where you’re going to be working.”

  “Precisely.”

  Ethan shot me an amused look from under a raised eyebrow. “We’ve cleared our file room for you and moved a desk in there.”