Page 7 of The Arrangement
The somewhat warm expression fell from her somewhat skeletal face, and she turned into the stern taskmaster I was more accustomed to seeing every day. She placed her hands on her slender hips encased in what I was pretty sure was a Chanel dress and narrowed her eyes on me as if she meant to pin me under glass.
“Dr. Rose, you will not make this difficult. Your top priority for the foreseeable future is to rekindle your old childhood friendship with Rome Ashbridge. During that time, you will convince him to make a sizable donation to the Museum of Natural History and Science. Particularly to the paleontology department.”
“How sizable?” I asked.
“At least five million. To start.”
I swallowed hard. That was a big number. A really fucking big number.
“But the dig we have planned for next spring is almost completely funded. We shouldn’t need that much,” Emily cut in. God bless her and her attempts to save my poor sanity.
She turned her glare on my friend. “This isn’t about that funding the new dig. It’s about saving the department.” She paused and shifted that laser focus on me. “Saving all our jobs. Because I’m sure you realize that if we have to make deep budget cuts, it will be those who have the shortest tenure with the department who are let go first.”
Ugh.
Message received loud and clear.
I’d been with the museum for six months. Emily had been here for two or three years. If I couldn’t bleed a little money into the paleontology department, my position was going to be the first one to be slashed.
The department director’s expression softened in the blink of an eye, as if she’d never spoken so sternly to us. With a bright and shiny smile, she reached out and patted my shoulder. “But I know I don’t have to worry about that. You have been an involved and conscientious team player since you joined our family. I know that you’ll do whatever it takes to convince Mr. Ashbridge that he should invest in our endeavor for the betterment of the entire city.”
Oh, she was fucking good. A threat ruthlessly delivered, followed by a generous helping of guilt. This woman could have given lessons to my mother.
She dropped her hand to her side and turned her attention to Emily. “Dr. Luo, I think it’s your turn to make some rounds upstairs before all the guests depart for the evening. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and you’ll discover that you have a long-lost friend who’s also rich.”
Humming to herself, Dr. Case strode out of the lab, seeming as if she’d landed the answer to all her prayers while I was pretty sure she’d sentenced me to hell.
“What. The. Fuck,” Emily breathed. “Did she just whore you out?”
“I don’t think she meant her directions quite like that,” I muttered.
Emily scoffed. “Yeah, I wouldn’t be too sure.”
A smirk tweaked one corner of my mouth as I lifted my eyes to her. “Now that she’s got me sold off, she’s set her sights on you. Be careful up there.”
She let out a long, aggravated groan as she shoved to her feet and marched to the door.
I held my hand out, stopping her. “Lab coat.”
She glanced at herself to find that she was still wearing the white lab coat we all wore while we were working. She fought her way out of it and tossed it at my face, obscuring the bright rainbow of colors she was wearing. Emily was in many ways the tiny, slender Asian girl who appeared as if she were sixteen, but then she opened her mouth and you realized she was a twentysomething genius who’d forgotten more about dinosaurs in her short lifetime than most paleontologists who were more than twice her age knew.
“Knock ’em dead up there, killer,” I teased.
She ignored me. “Don’t sit here and panic. When I come back, we’ll put our heads together and come up with a plan to handle Rome. We can even call my girlfriend. She’s an extrovert and fantastic at knowing what to do with people.”
I nodded, trying to cling to the slim thread of hope she was extending me. We were definitely going to need the help of an extrovert on this one because my first thought was to update my résumé and start looking for another job.
3
ROME ASHBRIDGE
I closedmy eyes and let out a long, slow sigh of pleasure as I relaxed against the wooden bench in the sauna. This was exactly what I’d needed.
“I don’t know what you’re sighing about. Your week couldn’t have been that bad. You work in a library, for fuck’s sake,” Pierce griped at me from the bench across from mine.
With a smirk, I cracked an eye open and stuck out my tongue. “Not all of us were made to save the world one lawsuit at a time.”
Pierce was a lawyer who specialized in corporate law. Same as his father. And his grandfather. And his great-grandfather. Probably going all the way to medieval times or whenever lawyers had been invented. He had a fantastic analytical brain and was dangerous in an argument, which made him a great and annoying friend to have.
