Page 13 of Bully's Second Chance
She shrugged. “Well, lunch isn’t for another hour. And I know you don’t currently have anything on your schedule, so why don’t we go through some of the red stapled papers now?”
I plucked a black ink pen from my pencil drawer and handed it to her. “Fine by me.”
I scooted as close to my desk as I could as I walked her through the basics of what she was filling out. The first was a W-4 form, which I had every intention of walking to payroll myself. Then, there were the health benefit outlines she needed to take a look at before choosing which plan to take. Then, there were the 401(k) forms the bank had already sent over outlining how to set up an account with them, how to take funds out of her paychecks and put them into that account, and how that money would be invested over time.
All of that took us right up to lunch. But, when she got up to go back to her desk, something came over me—a protective sort of feeling that made me guard myself. “Miss DeMarcus.”
Lily paused before slowly turning around. “I’m ‘Miss DeMarcus’ now?”
I licked my lips. “Do you have any secretarial experience at all?”
She blinked. “Now you’re second-guessing hiring me? Is that seriously what’s going on?”
I planted my hands against my desk. “I’m just trying to do right by you for once, and I know how this is going to look to people. I hire you on a whim without even looking at your resume, and all of a sudden, I’m paying a secretary five times what I usually pay them? That’s going to look bad.”
She shrugged. “Sounds like a personal problem.”
I straightened my back. “And now that you work for me, it’s your problem as well.”
She clicked her tongue. “It’s not my fault you didn’t hire me with any—”
I felt something inside of me snap. “For now, your position is temporary.”
She gawked. “Now that’s not even fair. That is nothing close to what we discussed, and you know it.”
I slid my hands into my pockets. “I’ve had some time to think about how this is all going down and—”
“And now I’m the one paying because you’re a hot-head, just like always.”
I pinned her with my stare. “You’d be wise to understand that you’re currently speaking with your boss.”
“Yeah, a boss who is already slipping back into the bullying ways I know him for. I won’t let you do that to me again. I won’t let you treat me like that anymore. Either you hire me, or you fire me. I won’t do this temporary crap with you just so you can feel better about your knee-jerk decision.”
My eye twitched. “Get your resume on my desk by the end of the day. You’ve got two weeks to prove your worth to this company and prove to me that you’re a good fit before deciding whether or not to onboard you for good. Understood?”
She turned her back to me. “Clear as crystal,sir.”
The second she left my office, I flopped back down into my chair. I didn’t know why the fuck I felt the need to do that sometimes. To throw up fences and make sure people were blockaded off. Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to have personal relationships that weren’t beneficial to me somehow. Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to do anything but work. After all, that was all my parents fucking did when I was growing up. But, I felt myself slipping further into Lily’s orbit, and the whole point was to get her orbiting in my atmosphere, not the other way around.
“Fucking hell, what have I done?” I growled to myself.
The entire day, I kept my office door cracked so I could steal glances in her general direction. I watched how she quickly filled out most of her paperwork and walked her resume right over to my desk three hours before the day was over. I watched her become familiar with the phones while she patched people into my office and distributed calls to other floors as if she had been doing this her entire life.
But, when I picked up her resume, there wasn’t anything on there that explained the kind of skills I saw rising up within her, especially since her only claim to fame was part-time work at the spa while she was in college.
That explains why she was there. She probably still gets a discount or some shit.
Still, she had a great deal of voluntary accolades that were impressive. She made the Dean’s list all eight semesters of college. She got her degree in business with a minor in accounting and placed in the top five percent of her graduating class. She got a promotion at the spa while she was working there part-time, which was practically unheard of in the business sector, and the internship she did during her senior year at a start-up company gave her such a well-rounded view of a business starting from the ground up that her senior research paper was published inForbes.
She had been published in fuckingForbes Magazine—at twenty-one years of age.
“Jesus Christ, this woman is a powerhouse,” I whispered.
The more I read on her resume, the more impressed I became, and pretty soon, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I couldn’t have hired anyone more qualified for this position. She was worth every penny, all the way down to how quickly she caught onto things with the job I had given her, and I actually chuckled. I actually made myself laugh at how one of my knee-jerk decision shad actually turned into something good.
Suck on that, Mommy Dearest.
I filed her resume away with the rest of the things I had gathered on her, then I got back to work. I typed away with emails and signed on some new businesses I needed to travel to to give my expert advice. That was what I did for a living, you see. I was sort of a flipper of houses, but instead of houses, I flipped businesses. Struggling businesses, both big and small, that were about to go under would call me and pitch their shot to my marketing department. And if that department felt we could not only do the business some good but market them in the process to the following we had built around the company, then we took them on.
