Page 17 of Baby Bombshell for the Boss

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to! I mean, the inside of SmartSilver? That’s got to be all kinds of classified.”

“Well, ask if you can take pictures,” Janelle pressed her. “I want to see what it’s like in there. And besides, I don’t see how he can stop you from at least taking shots for your portfolio. You have the right to do that much, don’t you?”

“I guess so,” Ivy said. “I’ll ask him, at least.”

“There you go,” Janelle encouraged her. “And, you know, even if you don’t want to get with him again, maybe the two of you can at least be friends. That would still be something pretty cool, right? Friends with a billionaire!”

“You need to stop fixating on his money,” Ivy said. She couldn’t help recalling how she and Elliot had bonded over the fact that he didn’t like it when people acted exactly the way her younger sister was acting right now. Although, she had to concede, she couldn’t be sure if that conversation had been genuine. According to these articles, he was quite the charmer. Maybe he had just been trying to come across as humble and self-effacing because he suspected — correctly, to be fair — that she would like him better that way. Was it really possible that a man who routinely slept with supermodels, and every other woman he could get his hands on, could get that upset about the idea that women were only interested in him for his money? He was only interested in them for one thing, quite clearly — so why should it matter that they were also only interested in one thing? That should just make it more balanced.

Something definitely wasn’t adding up about Elliot Livingston. But it didn’t matter, Ivy decided. She didn’t need to understand him romantically. All she needed to understand was what he wanted his office to look like once it had been decorated. She would do the job she had been hired for and then the two of them would part ways, and that would be that.

Janelle might not like it. But Ivy’s sister was young — not even out of college yet. She didn’t understand the way the world worked. In a few years, when Janelle had a bit more experience under her belt, she would see this Ivy’s way, and the two of them would laugh at the fact that Janelle had ever thought Elliot Livingston was someone worth wasting time on.

CHAPTER 8

ELLIOT

“I’ll let you work out of this office while you’re here,” Elliot said, opening the door to one of the spare office spaces in the building and showing Ivy inside.

The room was pretty bland — it had a desk, a chair, some shelves, and a few random pieces of art on the wall that Elliot hadn’t liked enough to put anywhere else — but Ivy looked at it as if she had never seen anything so special. “I wasn’t expecting my own office space,” she said, running her fingertips over the desk.

“You have to have somewhere to work,” he said, bemused.

“I know,” she said. “But most of what I’ll be doing involves moving around — looking at your space, shopping for the supplies I’ll need to decorate, things like that. I wasn’t imagining having a space to work out of like this.”

“Can you use it?”

“I can,” she said. “It’ll give me a place to call vendors from — usually I have to do that from my car.”

“Well, yeah, I’m not going to have you making business-related calls from your car while you’re working for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t even ask you to make personal calls from your car, honestly. I know this is a big business, but I do like to take care of my people that much.”

“Well, I appreciate it,” Ivy said.

“So you’ve got a landline in here,” he said, pointing it out to her. “You’ll dial nine to get an outside line — although if you prefer to make calls on your cell, that’s fine too, of course. Whatever works for you. If you need to use the printer, let someone know, and they’ll help you connect your computer to the network. And if you have any questions, or there’s anything else you need, you can always talk to me about that.”

“Hang on,” Ivy interrupted. “There’s a lot more I need.”

“You don’t have everything you need to get started?” He frowned. “There are pens and paper in the drawers.”

“I’m not talking about office supplies. I need to get on the same page with you about your vision for the office. I can’t start designing and ordering things until I know what you want. And I can come up with my own vision, of course, but it might be completely on the wrong track. We need to talk before I’ll be able to get started.”

“Okay,” he agreed — what she was saying made sense, and on further reflection, he should have thought of it. “What do you need to know?”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

He grabbed the chair that stood by the wall, pulled it in front of her desk, and sat down. It was odd to be on this side of the desk — he couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat in someone else’s office. It was the kind of thing that didn’t happen when you were in the position he had reached in his career. But Ivy didn’t seem to find anything odd about it. She didn’t offer to take the meeting to his office, the way many of Elliot’s other employees would have done in the same situation.

“Okay,” she said. “First of all, your color scheme. It’s cobalt and white, right?”

“Our logo is blue and white, if that’s what you mean.”

She laughed. “Should I be speaking with your graphic design department?”

“I mean, maybe,” he admitted.

“I’ll get the exact shade of blue from them, if you tell me who to talk to. It looks like cobalt to me. So I’m thinking we do a statement wall in cobalt, and then the white is a little too light to make an impact, so maybe we use a neutral color on the other walls. Not taupe, that’s played out in office spaces — maybe a tan would be good. And then we use the white as an accent color. What do you think of all of that?”

Elliot was having trouble envisioning what she was talking about, if he was being honest. “I trust you,” he said. “Do whatever you think.”

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