Page 37 of Mr. Hook-up

Again?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Easton

Five and a half years later

I hung up the phone with Rachel, our recruiter, and carried my coffee and the résumés down the long hallway of the executive floor of our building in the Back Bay. My first stop was Holden’s doorway. “Do you have a second?”

He looked up from his computer. “For sure. What’s going on, my man?”

I held up a finger. “Let me see if Grayson’s busy. I’ll be right back.” I continued to the end of the hall, leaning against the frame of Grayson’s doorway while I looked inside his office. “Can you meet with Holden and me?”

“You do realize it’s month end and I’m in the middle of hell, don’t you?”

I maneuvered the papers so I could flip him off. “That makes two of us, asshole. Your hell isn’t any worse than mine. Get up and follow me to Holden’s office.”

Instead of waiting, I walked there alone and took one of the empty seats in front of Holden’s desk. “He’s in a mood.”

“Isn’t he always?” Holden replied. When Grayson walked in, Holden added, “Ah, there’s Mr.Sunshine—we were just talking about how happy you are today.”

“Fuck the both of you.” Grayson slumped down in the chair next to mine. “Can we hurry this up? I don’t feel like sleeping here tonight, and at this rate, that’s going to happen.”

I set the résumés on Holden’s desk and wrapped both hands around my mug, wishing more than anything it was a tumbler half-filled with a single malt, aged at least twenty years. “I just got off the phone with Rachel, and she’s found three solid candidates to fill Marvin’s position. I need you guys to look these over because our assistant is going to be setting up interviews.”

Marvin, our director of app development and engineering, had resigned a few days ago. It was imperative that we replace him, not just for the future of our company but because we needed someone to manage and mentor our large team of coders and developers. In addition, Hooked was presently a national app. Whoever took over this position would be launching the app internationally, something Marvin wasn’t capable of doing, and that was the reason he’d quit.

Grayson crossed his arms over his chest. “I hope you gave Rachel shit for not renewing her Hooked membership.”

“Thanks to Hooked, she found someone, so there’s no need to renew it,” I told him.

“Hell yeah,” Holden said. The forever romantic was even more of a relationship softie now that he was a single dad to Belle. He held up his hand to high-five me. “Another relationship in the books due to our genius invention.”

Since launching, many things about the app had changed, and that included the addition of two other divisions. When users created a profile, the first question they were asked was whether they wanted to only hook up, whether they were looking for a long-term commitment thatcould result in marriage, or whether they were single parents searching for a partner with children, like Holden.

“I don’t know why you’re celebrating,” Grayson said to him. The dude was still hotheaded as ever and completely allergic to monogamy. “The only reason she settled was because she was tired of waiting for Easton to fuck her.”

I shrugged. “Truth.”

“I don’t care,” Holden said. “I’ll still take the victory.”

When Holden lifted the résumés and began to read them, I said, “Rachel’s favorite is Drake Madden, the one I placed on the bottom. I guess he’s a tech rock star, über talented, has all the credentials we’re looking for.”

“Hire him,” Grayson said. “Offer him the world. Whatever it takes for him to say yes. Because the second Marvin leaves, which is in, like, three days, I’m taking that spot in the interim, and I don’t know a goddamn thing about coding or framework or any of that shit.”

“Get our boy a drink,” Holden said to me. “Quickly.”

“Both of you need to pipe down,” I ordered. “Grayson isn’t getting a drink yet. It’s not even ten in the morning, and we have a long day—and night—ahead of us. And”—I paused to look at Grayson—“we’re not hiring Drake without interviewing him and the other candidates. All three deserve a fair shot, and hell, we might like one of the others better.”

“Do I need to remind you that in exactly three days, I’m going to oversee our entire coding department, ensuring every user among all three divisions has a friendly and efficient experience on our app? That their payments are properly processed?” He raked his hair. “What the fuck do I know about friendly?”

“At least he’s got that part right,” Holden mumbled.

I laughed.

But the truth was, we’d hit a growing pain, and it was a good problem to have. The first time we’d felt this kind of stretch was whenwe came up with the idea to launch the two new divisions. Now we were here again, and we were taking this app to a place that no other competitor had ever reached.

With that came complications.

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