Page 4 of Savage

“Just a little after five.” That was usually when she got up so didn’t bitch about being awake. “You’ll get to go home today if you have someone that can stay with you. Is there anyone you want me to call for you?”

“Not unless you can raise the dead, then no.” The girl asked her what she said and she told her that she had no family to speak of. “They’ve all disowned me or written me off long ago. It’s doubtful that I could pick them out of a lineup either.”

“All right then. I’ll let the doctor know.” She started to leave but turned back. “You should call your breakfast in now if you’re ready to eat. They’ll start getting busy when the rest of the patients get up in about an hour.”

Kaida wasn’t all that hungry yet but she knew that skipping meals was as bad as over eating. You were fucked either way. As soon as she hung up the phone, a man came into her room and started barking questions at her. Some point in his lecturing her about how things were going to go, her breakfast arrived and she tossed half of her bagel at him. That got him to shut up.

“What the hell was—” She told him her name and put out her hand to get his name. There was rudeness, she was good at that, then there was just plain being an asshole, which it seemed to her he could have cornered the market on. “Savage. I think one of my cousins said my first name was Tucker.”

“You don’t know your name?” He said it had been a while since anyone called him that. “I see. So you go by Savage. Is that your trademark, Mr. Savage or have you, like Tucker acquired that name from one of your cousins. I do hope that you don’t leave the office too much or you’d be shit out of luck with your mannerisms coming out so pleasantly.”

“You’re not so nice yourself.” She told him that she never said she was. “All right. I’m guessing that now that we have the pleasantries out in the open and you dislike me as much as I do you, but I own the business that you were hurt at and I want to get to the bottom of how it happened.”

“I’m fine by the way. Since you didn’t care if I was or not, maybe you should get your information from Mac. His name, in the event that you’d care is Donald MacKenize. His employee number is eight thousand and twenty-three. That’s how many people have been hired and gotten rid of since I’ve been working there. Mostly it’s management. You might want to put that on your to-do list as to why you have such a high turnover. I know but it’s best if you find it. I get into trouble by ‘nosing’ into places that I shouldn’t. Which makes no sense either as I’m the only one that knows how to operate the machine that prints badges.” He asked her why. “Why you ask? That’s another thing you might want to put on that list. Why am I training all your management on how to operate the machinery—including and not limited to the fork lifts and stoles that are used here daily. When they’re out the door a few months later. I don’t teach them to work here. I train them on the operations part but not the management part. That’s where they’re failing. Or someone is.”

“You seem to know a great deal about my business.” She didn’t even blink at the man but let him figure that out for himself. If he could. “All right. How long has Mac worked there before yesterday, and who is his direct report to.”

She gave Savage the answers and more information than he might need or not about both men. Kaida thought that she might know more about the employees there than any one person in Human Resources did. She was good at remembering details and information like that. Anything that she’d read or seen as a matter of fact. Kaida could just remember it.

After three hours she was ready for her lunch and a nap. Her temper wasn’t any less volatile than his was but she was enjoying putting him in his place when he got nasty with her. He was there because he needed her, not the other way around.

“You said that your first name is Kaida. Do you know what it means?” She told him. “Little dragon suits you more than I think the person who named you is aware of.”

“Same as you, Savage.” When he stood up and stretched, she looked away. There was more to him than the owner of the company that she just happened to work for and it had her body tingling in places she’d not thought of in months. “Are you about finished? I need my lunch and to find someonethat I can stay with tonight. With the concussion, they don’t want me passing out when I get home alone.”

“You’ll stay with me.”

~*~

Savage was still trying to figure out what made him offer up his home and quiet to the girl. She was ruder than he’d ever come across in a human. It also startled him when the more she bulked at the idea, the more he fought in telling her that she was going to do what he said. Like he actually wanted her to stay in his only breathing space and quiet on this earth.

It wasn’t until he had Kingston talk to her that she finally agreed. Telling her some bullshit about her being under their care because they owned the company and didn’t want her to sue them. Sounded plausible to him, but she was still bitching as they were getting ready to transfer her over to his home.

“You could have just left me at home, you know. I can no more afford to sue you than I can put a downpayment on a house. That’s all I’m working for. A home with a little picket fence around it for me to let Geoffrey out.” It was Kingston that got out of her that it was her only friend and a cat that cared for her. “He seems to think that the apartment that I live in is his, and I’m the persona non grata that he graciously allows to live with him.”

“Cats don’t care for us.” She glanced at him when Kingston laughed. “You’d be wrong about them not liking Savage. All animals love him. I think he has a couple of dogs and three or four outdoor cats hanging around his barn now, too. I think there might have been a squirrel and a couple of snakes that have taken to hanging out at his home.”

“Figures about the snakes.” No more was said as they got her in the car. Since he was the only one who drove, they all had licenses, but he was the one who had the most experience with it. He drove her to his home. It gave him time to think about the twit in the back seat of his car.

She wasn’t just a smart ass but a clever one as well. He thought she could stand toe to toe to any of them and come out the winner. None of them were barred from her sharp tongue or wit either. For whatever reason, he found himself thinking up things to say to her that would get her going. Or to touch the temper that he knew she had.

His cousins decided to stay for dinner. Not that he minded all that much. The house could certainly hold them all for dinner. But like he’d been doing, they seemed to tweak at her to see what she’d say next. Like it was a challenge to see who could get blasted by her first. None of them had, so far, gotten her as angry as he did, and was glad for that.

She begged for a nap, and they all left her to it. As she stepped into the room, he could see her concern or whatever one might encounter upon seeing a room decorated just so. Savage would admit this to no one but he hated the room and most of the house too.

He’d had a decorator come and finish up his home after it was built, and he hated every part of it. The room that she was in, the blue room the woman had called it, didn’t have a spot of blue in it anywhere. And she had thought that it was funny. Not to him. If it was the blue room, then it should be called that because it had too much blue in it. Not devoid of the color on purpose.

When his cousins all left an hour later, with the promise of coming back for dinner, he wandered around the house looking into the places that she had commented on. Like the blue room, she had questioned his use of no color in the opening entrance hall. It was all white. Even the vase and flowers that were all plastic or some other shit that she told him that he should be ashamed to call it an entrance. An entrance into what? Hell, she’d asked him.

“The stairs to the second and third floor were, in her words, ‘hooker red’ like the place you’d find in a ‘brothel that handled prostitutes and madams.’ He didn’t know why, but that was all he could see now that it had been pointed out to him. Savage decided that she’d be as good as him when it came to crossword puzzles. There were other references as well.

The front doors were off-center. He’d known that when the place was built and thought that he could live with it. As soon as he could get to a phone, he was going to have that fixed. He didn’t know how much that bothered him until then.

In addition to the front hallway and stairs, there were the rooms that were just off from the room. The library with all the books turned the wrong way as well as no pictures were annoying. He had plenty of them, so why didn’t they get to be hung in his own house. He was going to get onto that as well. Also how the hell did he ever find a book the way that they were. Savage simply ended up buying another copy if he needed a book he knew he had because of that.

The office doors were closed, and he was sure that she’d have something to say about it. He did. Plenty. All the equipment, the printer, the safe, and the terminal were all hidden behind walls. To make it appear as if he didn’t do much work in the room. That was the only thing that the woman had gotten right. He couldn’t work in the room at all. It took him a month in the room to know that he did indeed have a computer. He just had to dig it out of the desk that he hated as much as he was beginning to hate the house.

Savage hadn’t been happy with the house when he’d had it built. There wasn’t anything wrong with it other than it was way too feminine for his tastes, as well as too many things that were not up to his standards. It didn’t help either that he’d fired the decorator before she was finished with it. She had told him that the house needed a woman’s touch, and she was going to be the woman that touched all the shit in the place for him. That, more than anything, had soured him to the place. That and the fact that it was at the wrong angle to the street—his mind seemed to close down when he heard his name being called.

---