Page 14 of Recruited By the Billionaire

“Even the ones we discarded?”

“That’s what the recruiters want, yes. Why they’re acting as if one pick throws everything into turmoil is a mystery to me, but that’s what they want. And they want hard copies they can tear apart.”

“Why?”

“Beats me. But that’s what they want.”

“Laine?”

It was her walkie talkie. Laine quickly pressed the button. “Yes?”

“Mr. Marris is on his way up.”

Laine was shocked. “Already?” She looked at Frankie. “Make sure Brenda get those files prepared ASAP!” Then she flung the long sheet she had in her hands on one of the desks in her sight for a quick perusal before she had to face the fire.

Frankie hurried to the copy room to help Brenda, but as soon as the door opened, Brenda yelled at her. “I’m moving as fast as I can! I don’t have ten arms!”

“Nobody said you did.”

Brenda looked back. “Oh it’s you, Frankie. Thank God! Laine acting like the world has come to an end.”

“For Aaron Thomas’s family, it has,” said Frankie.

Brenda looked at her and exhaled. “Sometimes we get so caught up in the moment, we forget about the tragedy of it all. You’re right.”

“Mr. Marris is on his way up,” Frankie said to get Brenda back working.

But Brenda was shocked. “Already? I thought Laine said he wouldn’t be in the office until this afternoon.”

“Well he apparently changed his plans. He’s here now. You’re printing the stat sheets on all two hundred also?”

“That’s why it’s taking so long,” Brenda said. “They want all two hundred. And each one has twenty or more pages with it. But who needs two hundred players to assess just because one guy’s gone? That makes no sense!”

“He was our top draft pick. All the other picks were centered around how they could make him a better player. It changes the equation completely,” said Frankie. “What about the narratives? You’re printing those too, right?”

Brenda slapped her forehead. “I forgot, Frankie. Laine is gonna kill me. I forgot!”

“You just finish the stat sheets. I’ll take care of the narratives,” Frankie said and hurried out of the copy room.

Her desk, like all of the assistants desks, was right in the middle of the office space. Nobody had private offices except for Laine and the recruiters.

She hurried to her desk to pull up the narratives on her computer. She sat her briefcase down, removed her skirt suit jacket and flapped it over her chair, and began pulling up the narratives to print. But just as she pressed print on her computer screen, the doors opened and Robert Marris, with an entourage of three assistants, all senior people in the organization, entered the recruiting office.

Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare at Robert. Even Frankie did the same. When they said he was in the building, she assumed he would go straight to his office, which did not require him to come through their offices, like he always did. She was told he had never come to the recruiting office ever. Now he was there? Right in their faces? Everybody froze.

Except Laine, who stood in the middle of the suite. She used to be his publicist before he promoted her to VP. “Robert, hey,” she said as she hurried toward him. And she and Robert began talking right in front of everybody, although they were far enough away that nobody could hear their conversation.

Frankie had never seen a billionaire in person, and it was a shock to see Robert Marris. He looked older than he did on TV, for one thing, and to Frankie his so-called great looks were great looking only if you went for that white boy, thick-head-of-blonde-salt-and-pepper hair look. Some press reports referred to him asRobert Redfordrather than Robert Marris, because he looked so much like the legendary actor when the actor was in his prime. Frankie had to Google Robert Redford to find out who they meant, but she could see that comparison somewhat too. But what really took her breath away wasn’t his looks, but the fact that he seemed so serious and somber, as if he understood the human gravity of the situation better than Laine and Brenda had understood it. And that surprised her.

Since coming to work for his organization and learning about him, Frankie always thought of him as some entitled playboy who didn’t care about anybody but himself. Didn’t even speak to his own children, was what she’d read. But in that office, standing there, that persona didn’t seem to fit. He looked like a well-dressed prominent businessman deeply hurt by the turn of events. He looked to be suffering, to Frankie’s shock, as if it had been his own son killed on that motorcycle.

But she also noticed that all of his aides were females. Great looking, bosomy, twenty-something females: two white, one black. And they all seemed to want to outdo each other to be next to Robert.

But then a yell came from the other side of the room. “Watch out!” somebody yelled and everybody turned just as those two hundred files filled with hundreds of pages were falling from Brenda’s hands and spilling all over the floor.

“Gotdammit, Brenda,” yelled Laine, “what’s wrong with you?!”

The recruiters, who were relying on a hard copy of that information ASAP, were yelling at her too.

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