Shopping for a CEO (Shopping for a Billionaire Series Book 7) (5 page)

Some days, she can’t even joke.

“You’ll find your billionaire some day, honey,” she says, yawning.

I already have
, I want to say. I pinch my own forearm, willing the thought to go away.

Spritzy runs into the room, collar clanging.

Mom winces. “We need to do something about that collar. The metal against the metal makes my silver fillings hurt.”

Sound sensitivity comes with her fibro, too.

I pick up the little teacup chihuahua, giving him some love. Spritzy shakes in my arms with an unremitting joy that makes me wonder why on earth I keep spending so much time obsessed with worrying about whether I’ll ever find true love. 

I’m holding it in my arms right now, all 2.7 pounds of it.

Too bad you can’t really date your dog. At least, your dog’s personality.

 “I can order the plastic tags, Mom. He doesn’t need the metal ones.” As if he agrees with me, Spritzy nods his head. Then I realize he’s licking my hand over and over, his head bobbing. He must taste rescue cookies. 

Verbal Mistake Number 2 with my mother. We’ve been through this before, and....

“It’s a waste of money to swap them out. I just need to learn to live with the sound.”

And 3...2...1...

Cue a big sigh.

Am I callous for thinking about her fibromyalgia in terms of a rubric? It’s like when I create and implement a new mystery shopper’s questionnaire for a new marketing campaign. Study the objective. Determine the best way to meet the goal. Meet customer expectations. Exceed customer expectations. 

And always, always, manage expectations.

But the true measure of success comes in predicting what happens next.

“I can see you’re having a tough time, Mom,” I say. My compassion is real. I remember the mom she was before the car accident. I know she doesn’t want to be like this. I know pain can change a person. 

“I am,” she says. Her voice is filled with a thousand regrets and a million feelings she wants to convey but can’t. I get it. I understand. I’m a fixer. I can detect nearly any problem in a person’s voice, in the way they bounce their legs, in the nervous twitch of an eyelid.

In the taste of a man’s kiss when he’s trying to silence me from detecting exactly what I’m trained to do.

Spritzy’s licking my face now. It’s cute, but he’s no substitute for Andrew.

“Can I help? Heat up a rice sock for you? Run you a bath?” I ask Mom. 

Her voice starts to tremble, the ripples of sound an apology for something she feels sorry for, though it was never her fault. “Thank you. The rice sock sounds lovely.”

I plunk Spritzy down on his impossibly-tiny dog bed and make my way to the kitchen. It is spotless. Crumbs on the counter are like germs in an oncology ward: carefully exorcized and kept at bay at all costs, as if the punishment for a breech is death.

In my mom’s world, it is.

The rice sock has lavender in it, and as the microwave performs its magic, I lean against the counter and take a deep, cleansing breath. The adrenaline from the night’s events drains out of me, the mild rush now turning into the mind-racing of the damned. The entire evening replays itself like a digital film reel being edited on a computer, going in reverse in 2x, 4x, 16x. Then back to the beginning with Ron the Dog Butt Masseuse, to my own massaging of a much more appealing ass.

What have I done?

Ding!

Spritzy comes flying into the kitchen at the sound of the microwave alarm, his little body too fast for his impulses, his nails so long he slides across the kitchen floor and crashes into the wall, jumping up and blinking like the wall attacked him.

He actually growls at it.

Watch out, wall!

I laugh and reach into the microwave, the soothing warmth and waft of lavender giving me some gentle clarity I really need.

Mom’s grateful response as I set the rice sock on her shoulders fills me with a kind of sadness I’ve come to know all too well. It’s the sense of a life lived for everyone else. Everything I do involves fixing problems for other people—for my boss, for our clients, for the mystery shoppers I manage, for my friends, for my mom, for the world. 

I can’t let it go.

Spritzy is on the carpet in the living room as I take a step to go upstairs and put the day behind me. He looks at me, eyes beseeching, and then he plants his little ass on the carpet and uses his front paws to drag himself across the carpet.

Oh,
no
.

My phone buzzes just then as my horrified eyes take in the dog’s obvious, uh, clues.

It’s a text from a private number. One I haven’t seen before.

And all it says is:

Meet me tomorrow in my office at eleven. Your discretion is required. Lipstick is optional. AJM.
 

AJM?

I frown at the screen while Spritzy violates the carpet. I reach the top of the stairs and it hits me.

Andrew. Andrew James McCormick. AJM. 

Andrew is finally texting me. Nearly two years of wondering and waiting, of late nights talking with Amy and Shannon, of dissecting and analyzing and giving up.

I had to slap him to get him to contact me?

Men.

Chapter Five

The next morning, I park my Turdmobile in the employee parking lot and click my remote to lock it. Then I unlock it. I only lock it out of habit, from when I used to own my own car. 

This one? I
hope
someone steals it.

My boss, Greg, got an account where we drive advertisement-covered cars all over town. I inherited Shannon’s car when she was offered the ideal job at Anterdec by Mr. Flawless Billionaire and she decided to reach for perfection and we crabs in the pot that is called Consolidated Evalu-Shop couldn’t grab her ankles fast enough to pull her back in.

Er, I mean...I’m happy for her.

And I got her car.

It’s really an ad for a coffee shop. The brown, roasted coffee bean on top wasn’t supposed to look like a giant turd, but it does.

The coffee shop’s slogan,
Coffee Gets Everything Moving
, doesn’t help.

And yet, it’s all a postmodern marketing campaign. None of the companies we advertise is real. We drive around and test whether people will go to the websites advertised on the cars. So far, response has been great. We get the cars for one more year. I sold my junker and have diligently saved a car payment every month so I’ll have enough to buy something new if this account goes down the toilet.

To the dogs.

You know—belly up.

Speaking of bellies up, I look over as I walk into the building and see my coworker Josh’s car, with Marie’s face plastered across the side of it, advertising erectile dysfunction medication. Turns out he’s picked up more men with this quirky ad wrap than he ever did driving his nicer car, so he’s sticking with what he calls the PickUpMobile. 

Get it?

I trudge up the concrete steps. Our office building looks like Leningrad and the Boston Government Service Center building got married and had a baby.

Before I even sling my overloaded purse onto my desktop Josh is standing in my doorway like a sweaty, half-bald vampire living off the blood of the damned.

The DoggieDate Damned.

“How was your date?” he asks, handing me a latte. Ah. There we go. He knows me so well. Almost too well. There are long dry spells in my romantic life where I wish he and I weren’t attracted to the same sex. He’d be the perfect boyfriend. He cooks nice meals, he cleans, he gives a good foot rub and he’s remarkably tolerant of character disordered people.

Don’t discount that last trait. The older I get the more I realize how crucial it is.

“Anal glands,” I say, fishing through my purse for my receipts from yesterday’s mystery shops.

“You touched his anal glands?” Josh says, his voice going through four octaves. “Isn’t that more like a third date phenomenon?” 

“No.” I’m distracted by a pink plastic box in my purse. Why is my diaphragm in there? Not that I need it these days. At this point, I should just use it as a flexible shot glass. “Wait. Do humans
have
anal glands?”

He just frowns.

I clear my throat and look at him pointedly. “This really is
your
territory. I can’t believe you don’t know the answer.”

“I was a comp sci major. I never took anatomy and physiology.”

I just cross my arms over my boobs and stare him down.

He finally flinches and points to the latte. “C’mon. I brought you coffee. Espresso-based coffee.”

I take a sip. It tastes like pumpkin-mint. I wince.

“This was a freebie from a mystery shop, wasn’t it?”

He goes shifty eyed.

“
Joooooossssshhhhh
!” I whine.

“What? Carol made me do two of them. The pumpkin-mint taste isn’t so bad if you plug your nose while you drink.”

He demonstrates for me, pinching his nostrils and tipping his head back.

This is not a ringing endorsement for a new product.

“That coffee tastes like pumpkin mint
gland
.”

“What’s with the anal gland jokes?” he asks. 

“The guy DoggieDate matched me to spent most of the date describing how he saved twenty bucks by learning how to express his dog’s anal glands via YouTube videos.”

Josh drops his coffee in shock, the top loosening. Half the liquid pours out, covering the brown, industrial carpet. Remarkably, you can’t tell. You literally cannot tell that eight ounces of whole milk flavored with espresso, BenGay, and rotten pumpkin just seeped into the carpeting here at Consolidated Evalu-Shop. 

The room instantly fills with the scent of Lifesavers sacrificed to an angry Pumpkin King.

“Did you kiss him? Sleep with him?” Josh’s
non sequitur
throws me for a loop.

“Nothing like changing the subject,” I mutter as I fire up my computer. Why did Andrew McCormick’s face flash through my mind when he asked me that question? Certainly not Ron’s. 

“Nothing says romance like spreading your dog’s butt cheeks,” Josh says cheerfully. 

Greg picks that exact moment to walk in. He looks at Josh, frowning.

“Son,” he says, placing a hand on Josh’s shoulder. “I’m worried about you.”

Josh’s smile falters.

“Maybe you need a little time off.” He gives Josh a sympathetic look. “Unpaid, of course,” he quickly adds.

“I wasn’t—” Josh sputters. “It’s not what—I’m not—we were talking about
dating!
”

Greg’s frown deepens.

“Quit talking. You’re not helping yourself,” Carol hisses, walking in with a coffee tray filled with what I presume are more coffee disasters. “It smells like an air freshener from a T station bathroom had sex with a pumpkin pie in here,” she complains. 

Greg’s phone rings. He answers it, gives Josh a quick squeeze on the neck, and turns away, muttering about compliance and QA into the phone.

Josh turns to me, eyes filled with a strange mix of shame, fury, confusion and impotence.

“This is all your fault!” he cries. 

“My fault? How is it my fault you were waxing rhapsodic about dog butts?”

“Hmm, there’s a new motto,” Carol murmurs. “DoggieDate: For people who
really
love dogs.” 

“GROSS!” Josh and I snap at her. The apple didn’t fall very far from the Marie Tree, did it?

“You were telling us all about your date!”

“And....?”

“And what?” 

“Did you sleep with him?”

“No.” I shudder. 

“Any kisses?”

Any kisses.
Any kisses?
My microscopic pause as I attempt to figure out how to answer that question in the most honest way possible makes Carol and Josh exchange a look so lecherous I feel like I need a pimp to protect me from whatever they’re planning for me.

“You kissed him!”

“Who?”

“Anal Gland Hands Man!” Carol exclaims.

Josh’s eyebrows go down like The Very Confused Caterpillar. “No, she didn’t,” he says slowly. “She said so earlier.”

They look at me like detectives in an SVU episode. I feel like I’m in an interrogation room with the nondescript character actor whose name you can’t recall, but you remember her face from those irritable bowel syndrome commercials.

“Who, exactly,
did
you kiss last night?” Carol asks.

“She kissed Andrew McCormick,” announces a voice that is, in timbre, just a few shades off from Carol’s. 

“Shannon!” Josh squeals, dropping me like he’s Ben Affleck and I’m Jennifer Garner. “What are you doing here?”

“Damage control,” she gasps as Josh squeezes her like she’s a Koosh ball.

Her eyes meet mine.

And narrow.

Uh oh.

She
knows
.

“What were you talking about?” she asks as she looks around the office with an expression that says,
I can’t believe I ever worked in this crap hole.
 

“Amanda’s date! She kissed him.” Josh is so breathless he sounds like he’s having an asthma attack. 

“You never told us you kissed your fake date,” Shannon says calmly, eyes a mixture of calculated cool and determined interrogator.

“That’s because I didn’t.”

“You really kissed Andrew? Andrew McCormick?” Carol asks in a low voice. “Again?”

“
Again
again,” Shannon says.

Carol frowns. “You mean you’ve kissed him
three
times?” The woman can’t balance a checkbook but she can decode complex inferences to kissing in closets. Sex math has its own logic, apparently. 

“Yes.”

“Why?” Carol asks.

“Have you
looked
at the man?” Josh says in a disturbingly low voice that sounds exactly like Carol’s a moment ago. “He’s a delicious
god
.”

“He is not,” I say weakly. “He’s hot, for sure, but
god
might be taking it a bit far.” 

All three of them snort. Even Greg snorts from the safety of his office. If Spritzy were here, he’d snort, too.

“How about
demigod
?” Josh challenges. 

“Fine. He is,” I concede. “But that’s not why I kissed him.”