Blame It on the Bachelor (15 page)

She wondered if she should go to the minor emergency room to check if she’d cracked it, but dismissed the idea.

Instead she took four ibuprofen and a quick hot shower before redressing for the office. It was late in the afternoon, and she didn’t
have
to go back, but she was always conscious of image, and she didn’t want anyone to think that she’d played hooky.

Now in a black skirt and similar blouse in taupe, she forced her feet into heels, grabbed her bag and slowly made the trek out to her car, moving like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Agony as she got in. She prayed for the ibuprofen to work fast. And then she put the car and her dignity into gear and drove back to work.

Kylie hobbled through the glass doors of Sol Trust’s building and through the tiled lobby with its jungle of tropical plants. She hoped to get to the elevator and then her office without anyone commenting, but no such luck.

To her consternation, Milty Goldman stood in the direct path of the elevators, surrounded by a group of dark-suited men whose demeanor screamed investment banker. She offered a weak smile and tried to dodge around them.

“Miss Kent,” Milty boomed.

Her spine snapped to attention, causing her tailbone to shriek in pain. For a moment she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. She erased Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
from her face and slowly turned around, producing her best corporate smile.

“Yes, Mr. Goldman? How are you today?” She forced one foot in front of the other in a sort of military goose step until she got to the edge of the group. She must have looked like a flamingo on Xanax.

“Kenny, Mort, Dave, Steven, I’d like you to meet Ms. Kylie Kent, one of our up-and-coming account managers, here at Sol Trust. Kylie, these gentlemen are going to give us more money to look after.” He turned to them with an ingratiating smile. “Aren’t you, boys?”

They all chuckled and backslapped him. Everyone was a little too jovial, and she wondered if they’d had drinks at lunch.

She kept her eyes on their faces, even though every single one of the men covertly assessed her breasts. The one called Mort openly checked out her ass.

“Will you be joining us for dinner this evening, Miss Kent?” asked Dave.

Her gaze flew to Milty’s. “Oh, no, I don’t think so—”

“That’s a great idea, Dave,” said Milty.

Worse and worse. This was clearly a case of invite-the-pretty-girl-along to keep the big boys happy, which could be very good for her career, even though it made her angry that the gesture had to do with her looks and not her competence.

She should go.

On the other hand, she couldn’t possibly tolerate the agony of having to sit in a straight-backed chair in some formal restaurant for hours. She simply couldn’t do it.

“I’d love to, Milty, but I took a bad fall earlier today at a customer’s business and I’ve hurt my, er, back. My, ah, tailbone.” She felt her cheeks growing warm for the second—third?—time that day.

Now all the men had an excuse to look at her backside, and they did.

Kylie gritted her teeth.

“I see,” the chairman said, with an odd expression. She was clearly the only employee who’d ever turned down an invitation from him. She should probably map the way to the unemployment office on Google when she returned to her desk.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I must say that your gait did seem a bit unusual.”

Great. So she
had
looked like some strange bird. And now they were all checking out her legs.

Then Milty frowned. “You fell at a customer’s business, you say?”

She could see him adding up nasty worker’s compensation figures in his head. “Yes, but it’s nothing, really. I just need to rest for a few hours this evening.”

The man called Kenny clucked his tongue and rocked back on his heels. “Can’t be suing a customer for damages, now can you? Bad PR.”

The other men laughed. It wasn’t that funny. She decided that they had definitely been drinking.

“Oh, no! I’d never—” Kylie blanched at the idea of explaining in court documents how she’d fallen out of a walk-in fridge in a disheveled state, with the client on top of her. No, not even for fifty million dollars would she sue. Not for a hundred million.

She chuckled right along with the rest of them.

“Well,” Milty said, “you boys ready for a tour of the premises?”

They all moved as a group into the reception area, and Kylie figured she’d dodged a bullet. She breathed a sigh of relief.

“Oh, Kylie,” called April, the receptionist. “You have a package. Courier-delivered.”

Kylie took it with thanks. The parcel was about the size of a pizza box and the wrapping was professional. “Who’s it from? Was there a card?”

April shook her head.

“Must be your birthday, Miss Kent,” said the tall, gangly banker named Mort.

“Happy birthday!” said the one named Steven. A chorus of happy birthdays sounded.

Kylie flushed. “It’s not my—”

“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” prodded Kenny.

Milty inclined his head, the king ordering his subject to comply.

“Um, sure.” Kylie slid her index finger under the tape sealing the gift—if that’s what it was. Probably a calendar from someone she did business with.

She unwrapped the paper and lifted the lid of the box.

All of the bankers, including Milty, craned their necks to see the contents, and one by one they snorted with amusement at her expense.

Inside was an inflatable, red rubber doughnut for sitting on. It had been sent from a medical supply store.

And she knew exactly who it was from.

MORTIFICATION PREVENTED KYLIE from using the rubber ring at work, and the obnoxious bankers had, thank God, stopped short of suggesting that she put her lips to the inflation device and blow it up while they watched. She spent the remaining hour of the afternoon torn between outrage at Dev for sending it, helpless amusement at her own expense and fear for the repercussions to her career.

There was the silly part of her that was touched by Dev’s thoughtfulness: he hadn’t sent the doughnut entirely out of a desire to embarrass her. He’d actually thought she might need it.

Truth to tell, she did. But she’d rather be battered, deep-fried and served with coleslaw than have anyone she worked with see her sitting on the thing.

Kylie sat with another rapidly cooling café con leche, ostensibly running numbers on another loan, but actually agonizing over what damage she might have caused to her career today.

She’d lost her mind and her dignity in that walk-in fridge, and then turned down a dinner invitation from the CEO of Sol Trust before losing her dignity for the second time—and in front of the man who held her career in his manicured hands.

She told herself she could have made it through the evening. She could have scored some sedatives two blocks away from the bank—this was Miami, after all, capitol city of pain clinics and auto insurance fraud. A wad of cash and you could find a crooked M.D. to write a prescription for anything.

Right.
Go to dinner with Milty Goldman and a bunch of financial players stoned out of her gourd and slurring her speech? Great idea.

No telling what was actually in the meds on the street. She might not feel the pain in her tailbone, but she probably wouldn’t be able to feel her own feet, either.

Kylie reminded herself that she hadn’t gotten where she was in her job already by being stupid. Well, except for today.

But she continued to agonize about the repercussions. And then there was Devon and the unwelcome effect he had on her. What the hell? The guy made her drunk or something.

He was jeopardizing not only her dignity and her job, but also her self-respect. And hadn’t she learned her lesson from the first dirtbag? She needed to trade up, not down, from Jack.

Jack had at least had a bright future at one point. He’d had an MBA and a vision of success, like her.

And Dev? He had a wild past, an irresponsible streak a mile wide and a dubious future as a bar owner and restaurateur. Most restaurants went belly-up within the first year of opening. She wasn’t aware that he had any prior experience even managing a fast-food joint.

The more she thought about it, the more she wondered how Dev had gotten Priscilla to sign off on his business loan. There had to be a personal connection somewhere. Kylie blanched, horrified, at the thought that maybe Dev had put his charm to work on her boss in the exact same way he was applying it to Kylie herself. Had Priscilla been in the walk-in fridge?

Dear God.

When she began to wonder if her boss’s baby was, in fact, Devon’s, she stood abruptly, winced at the pain in her tailbone and fled the office in search of a cold glass of wine—or maybe three.

15

SATURDAY MORNING, the Dawn of the Date, was a rough one for Dev. He’d been at the bar until 3:00 a.m. managing things. The
things
had included a spat between Marla and Maurizio, who’d underbaked a batch of potato skins then burned the replacement batch to a crisp, resulting in unhappy customers who’d bitched her out, demanded their drinks for free and left her no tip.

The
things
also included Dev having to bounce out a drunk who’d reached across the bar and honked Lila’s breast like an old-fashioned bicycle horn. Lila, who’d been filling a glass with tonic at the time, turned the tonic dispenser on the guy with one hand and slapped him silly with the other.

Most normal people would have vamoosed at the time the enraged Lila started screaming Spanish invective, but this particular man stayed around to enjoy it. He then begged Lila to come home with him and spank him.

That was the point at which Dev had locked an arm around his neck, yanked him off his stool and propelled him by the belt to the exit, inviting him to come back and apologize when he was sober.

Dev himself hustled drinks until Lila came out of her subsequent snit in the ladies’ room, her talons smelling of fresh nail polish.

The last
thing
he’d had to deal with before closing time was the fact that the men’s room door had been locked for a solid hour and nobody could get in. Of course it fell to Dev to pound on the door and then use a master key to unlock it with great trepidation when he got no response.

This was South Beach, and literally anything could be going on in there: a long cell-phone conversation, a three-way or an overdose.

Thank God he found only one body and it wasn’t dead, merely a drunk who’d passed out on the crapper. Dev threw a glass of cold water in the guy’s face, turned his head while he pulled up the man’s pants and then had the dubious honor of flushing before he staggered out of Bikini.

Dev used up half a can of Lysol in the room and then advised the gentleman who was waiting to use the facilities that he might wish to wait until the air freshener had taken effect before going in.

This was his glamorous life as an entrepreneur. Dev longingly eyed the full complement of rum behind the bar, but told himself to forget about it. He had to be responsible and he couldn’t manage a business half in the bag.

By the time he fell into an exhausted sleep, it was almost 5:00 a.m. He woke at noon, showered and then took a look around his condo, which was a bachelor’s disaster of epic proportions. Normally this wouldn’t have bothered him, but since this was the Dawn of the Date, it was very possible that he’d be bringing Kylie back here for dessert.

And if he hoped to convince her that he was a good candidate for a relationship, he’d better get busy, since the girl he’d hired to clean “regularly” had been a lot less than regular lately.

Dev grimaced. This, after he’d fallen for her hard-luck story about getting evicted from her boyfriend’s apartment and given her an advance on the next three months’ cleaning so she could get her own place. He hadn’t seen her, of course, since he’d handed her the cash. He was a chump. Why did he have such bad luck with employees? Why was he forever giving people a second or a third chance?