Page 4 of Interning For A Billionaire

“I can’t remember the last time we had sex,” Clint said, sounding depressed. “Probably before the baby was born. Well, definitely, then, anyway,” he gave a sarcastic laugh. He gave another sigh. “If I knew it was going to be like this I might have hung on to Anne. We never had sex but at least I got to sleep at night.”

“Coming back to targets…” I said, trying to steer the conversation back to work, but Clint interrupted me.

“You never married?”

“Uh… no.” This wasn’t a conversation I was particularly comfortable having but I realized it was the only thing Clint wanted to talk about today and if there was one thing I’d learnt in business, it was that you gave the client what they wanted. Whatever that was. Keeping them happy sometimes took interesting turns, like this conversation, which I had expected to go in a completely different direction.

“I haven’t had too much luck in that department,” I told him rather honestly. “There’ve been girls, but somehow they’ve never stuck around long enough.”

“Sounds to me like you are lucky after all,” he said darkly. “Because when they do stick around, they suddenly tell you they want kids, and you need to sell your sports car because the kiddies booster seat doesn’t fit.”

“Sounds like you need a boy’s weekend,” I said. “Maybe some drinking, some gambling, definitely a hotel room to yourself for a whole night. It’ll be on us, a business weekend of course. What do you say?”

“When?” He couldn’t say yes fast enough.

The thought of a boy’s weekend cheered him up and he sounded more upbeat. By the end of the call, we had set a date for a night on the town.

The day just kept getting weirder and weirder.

In the middle of the morning, Josie came by with the new intern. I recognized her straight away, it was the girl from the hotel room last summer. I had completely forgotten about the whole incident, me walking out stark naked as she was leaving. The look on her face! It was priceless! Really a funny situation, I hadn’t even realized I was naked until I saw the utter shock and dismay on her face.

I was ready to laugh about it now, to be honest, I was looking forward to a bit of lightheartedness after that conversation with Clint.

But, again, it seemed, no fun for me.

As soon as the young and lovely Belle Scuziak saw me, her eyes widened in horror and disbelief. Her face turned bright pink, as if she had walked into a sauna. She was mortified, that much was obvious.

I tried to lighten the mood with a joke, and she sort of took a step back, as if I had threatened her somehow.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The girl was acting as if I had somehow harassed her or behaved improperly towards her. It was a funny moment, surely, she could see that?!

But before I could make her aware of that, my phone rang, and I had to get it.

I tried to go over to see her a few times, but each time she shrank from me like I had done something to her. It was not on.

I went to see Josie and told her to get rid of the girl.

“Belle? Why?”

Josie looked at me, surprised.

“She is totally immature and clearly not ready for this job,” I said calmly. “I’m not sure how she got this position in the first place?”

Josie got up from behind her desk and walked around to face me. She was frowning.

“Belle made a very good impression at the interview. She had some great ideas for improving company morale.”

“Company morale?”

Belle gave me a hard look.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that survey we did at the end of last year after all the retrenchments? Close to 38% of staff said they were thinking of leaving or looking for another job.”

I waved a hand dismissively. “It’ll blow over.”

“No, it won’t,” Josie said warningly. “We are in a tech hot spot here, there are many places that would jump at taking our people. We can’t afford to lose any more personnel.”

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