Page 41 of SKIN

Elliot obviously didn’t take the hint and continued to lean one of his arms over my headrest, his breath so close I could feel it on the side of my face. “There’s an easier way to do that, you know.” He tapped a finger against my screen. “Add a formula to the bottom cell and it will auto-calculate the sum.”

“No?” I gasped while slapping a sarcastic hand to my chest. “You don’t say. And here I was, using my teeny-tiny girl brain to manually add all those giant man numbers.” I rolled my eyes before pinning Mr. IT-Hotshot with a seething glare. It wasn’t his fault I hated his gender right now, but he was about to take the brunt of my annoyance. “I know what I’m doing, thank you very much. I add the formulas after I double-check the values. Relying on a computer to do all the work for you leaves room for error.”

“Kinda like human error?” he countered without missing a beat.

“Oh, there’s human error all right.” I scanned Elliot from head to toe. “Pretty sure I’m staring at one right now.” It was a low blow. An inaccurate one too, at least on the outside. And we both knew it. But I wasn’t about to admit that out loud.

Instead of replying, Elliot rose to his full height and barked out a laugh. “Now I see why he likes you,” he muttered under his breath as he turned on his heel and walked down the hall towards the boardroom and not the IT department.

It took me a moment to process his words and by the time I yelled out, “Who?” after him, I could barely make out his faint response.

“No one important.”

That post-lunch irritation was in full effect as I entered the breakroom later that day. Cursing Grant, Elliot, and basically all of mankind under my breath as I swiped out an arm and grabbed my mug from the Keurig machine. I took a deep breath and sucked the scent of freshly brewed coffee into my lungs.

I’d landed this job in the financial department of Prescott Research and Development almost straight out of college, after graduating a year early. It was funny how productive I could be when my focus was shifting away from dumbass frat boys and onto my studies. Still, I realized how rare an opportunity this was. It was almost impossible to get your foot in the door, unless you were related to or sucking off the CEO.

Tate Prescott was as slimy as they came. And the office was a lot easier to tolerate without him slinking around the halls, trying to lure the newest youngest intern into the back room with the promise of some cushy secretary job. Which was code for: his personal fuck doll. And just like any spoiled brat with too many shiny toys at his disposal, good ol’ Tate would toss the girl aside as soon as something better caught his eye. By better, I meant blonder or sluttier or with a larger set of tits.

Point was… none of us were questioning his absence. It’d be like looking a gift horse in the mouth. And I preferred this particular horse as far away from me and my mouth as he could get.

If I were being completely honest, Tate Prescott could drop dead in the middle of the office and I wouldn’t give the fucker a second glance when I stepped over his corpse to get to the copier.

“Oh my god! He’s dead!” Sarah came running into the breakroom, her eyes wide and her breathing frantic.

“Who?”

“Tate Prescott!” she gasped before covering her mouth with her hands to stifle her sobs. She was our boss’s latest fling, and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the waterworks were more for his little black credit card than the man whose name was on it.

51

EMILY

He wasn’t dead. It seemed none of us were that lucky. Tate Prescott was just missing… and presumed dead. Which was something else entirely, if you asked me.

There were cops everywhere, a sea of uniformed and plain-clothed officers taking over the various rooms of Prescott R&D. Warrant in hand, ransacking the labs and digging through private documents. As if our CEO would just pop up from one of the filing cabinets like a whack-a-mole waiting to be clubbed.

Bet if it were any of the rest of us, shit wouldn’t be as accessible. The board of rich white men as obliging.

This was what happened when the wealthy went missing. Suddenly, overtime wasn’t an issue and resources were unlimited. Time seemed to stand still for me while everyone else rushed by, everyone but the figure I saw leaning against the far wall staring directly at me. Mr. IT himself.

Good looking or not, I didn’t like the way Elliot was seemingly watching my every move. His arms crossed over his shoulders and his head tilted to one side. That wasn’t the way someone focused on a stranger. A coworker. It was the way you honed in on a target. His stare sent a shiver down my spine and had me dropping my head.

When I chanced another look, Elliot was gone.

Then everything seemed to stop entirely, the crowds parting when Mrs. Prescott walked in. The clicking of her heels on the tile flooring echoing in the silence of the bustling office space. And her long, tone legs and high, red-soled shoes adding an air of femineity to her perfectly pressed power suit while her jet-black hair was pulled high on her head in a cascading ponytail that landed midway down her back. Where Tate was like a gnat buzzing in your ear, Marisela was a wasp, her deadly glare nearly as venomous as the sting of her harsh tongue. Which was quick to tell you what she thought about you. The good, the bad, and the deeply insulting.

That said, I respected the woman. When it came to anything other than her choice in men, Mrs. Prescott was brilliant and unapologetic about that very same brilliance. She was the brains while her husband was the wallet—the wealthy name behind a brand that relied on the expertise of those who weren’t born with silver spoons in their mouths. People who made the Prescott legacy look good to the rest of the rich fuckers at the country club. People who were invisible to the world around them. People like me.

“Ms. Shaw, I’d like to see you in my office now.”

I’d been so lost to my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed that the object of my fascination was standing in front of me, impatiently tapping one of her pointed heels.

“That wasn’t a request,” Marisela stated before pivoting in the opposite direction. Then her shoes were clicking again. This time down the long hall that led to the executive suites. No-man’s-land as far as the rest of us pencil pushers were concerned.

I stared at the perfectly white paint and opaque glass. The name Marisela Cruz Prescott, COO staring back at me from the gold-plated plaque mounted to the door in front of me. For far longer than seemed appropriate, given the fact I’d been summoned by the she-devil herself.

I didn’t personally give her the office nickname, but it didn’t make it any less fitting.

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