Page 98 of Crazy for this Girl

It’s going to be a shitshow, I can feel it.

Not only has my morning been a blast, but I didn’t want to move my ass from Pasadena, California to Chicago, and the hotel chain, the one I was so graciously given by my piece of shit dead father, was the least profitable here.

Hence, my visit here to fix it before I head back home.

Striding inside my building, I take the top floor to my COO’s office and pass the receptionist desk. My phone burns inside the pocket of my suit jacket to text Laynee again, but I refrain from touching or obsessing over her speaking to me.

I survived my darkest hours—some of them—without her. I can do my first day in this stuffy office that smells of cleaning products and way too much cologne without having a full-blown moment.

Finding the first conference room with several people on their phones, waiting on something, more than likely me, I stride in with restlessness and an urgency to already get this over with.

“Let’s get going, shall we?” All eyes fall on me as I enter the floor to ceiling windowed meeting room and sit at the head of the long wooden table.

I’m already in a mood, and this meeting is going to throw me into another one.

I look over to my right, seeing a young woman in her mid-twenties sitting next to me, looking shell-shocked and confused. Her tight black dress is cut too low in the front for what I would consider appropriate. She looks like she’s about to head to the bar for a one-night stand, not the workplace. However, maybe she’s the attention-seeking female in the office that likes the married men to eye-fuck her on the daily. There seems to be one in every office.

“Are you Mr. Harper?”

“Yep.” I watch her smooth ivory skin flush pink against her dark brown hair. “Who are you?”

“I’m Victoria, sir. I’m one of the two sales managers here.”

You’d think if she wore that dress at every meeting that my sales would be up and I wouldn’t be here.

“And why are there two?”

Victoria straightens her spine and looks over at the woman next to her, wearing a similar it’s okay to dress sexy at the job outfit as well. Her maroon dress doesn’t recede as low, but it’s just as molded to her skin as if it were.

“Well,” Victoria finally says, “I think Mr. Abners thought it might be best to have two heads, over one. To get an advantage, I guess.”

Not her problem, but it just became mine.

“I’m Melody, sir,” the woman next to her conveys, flinging a manicured hand in my direction. “It’s really nice to meet you. Welcome to the company.”

The company.

My company.

I don’t want to take her cheery gesture for too many reasons to count.

One, being that I never wanted this fucking company in the first place. Two, I had to keep it for family reasons and a way of income. And, lastly, and even more importantly, it was one of the reasons Laynee and I never got to be together when I was finally able to crawl out of bed after over a year and a half.

I finally return Melody’s gesture, wishing hers and Victoria’s two heads would be enough to solve my sales problem at this location but, alas, the problems here seem to be growing by the second.

Victoria clears her throat. “Well, as you know, sales are from—”

“I want to know how we’re going to fix it,” I proclaim, glancing at the band of three people on the other side of the table. “I’m guessing you’re the marketing managers?”

“We are,” the only man in the room besides me replies, looking as if he just walked out of a college classroom. “I’m Xander. These ladies”—he motions to either side of him—“are Zoe and Amanda.”

“Any ideas of how we can get people to book us over The Majestic? That is the top hotel in the area, correct?”

“Correct,” the little, short-stacked woman, Zoe, replies, in her beige cardigan and pigtails.

What the fuck.

“They are cashing a lot of their marketing on commercials,” she continues. “I swear I could say them in my sleep.”

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