Butt-dialing the Billionaire Page 6

  I watch her all the way. It’s wrong to want her, but I want her with a ferocious hunger I’ve never felt before.

  Ten

  Jaxon

  * * *

  Arnold opens the door and takes my coat as I step out of the elevator of La Manche House, my family’s Upper West Side residence. “They’ve delivered the weight room equipment, sir, and we’ve already put it up top. I’ve been assembling the furnishings to sell in the second-floor day room, but you’ll need to make a few decisions on the more prominent pieces.”

  “All the stuff from when I lived here goes,” I say.

  “Nevertheless,” Arnold says. “A few things need your review, and Chef’s got fresh-caught tuna. Is six good?”

  “Seven. I want to get in a workout.”

  “Very good, sir.” He hesitates. “And did you get the answer you wanted? Regarding the caller?”

  “Not yet, but I will.”

  I head up to the top floor, a former ballroom. I recall it as cold and cavernous, but it’s smaller than I remembered. I instructed Arnold to have the window coverings removed from the windows, so it’s quite sunny now.

  I peel off my mole, scrub my face, and change into my workout gear.

  Arnold appears while I’m doing squats. “So you’ll be going back, then? To your…new job?”

  “Yup.” I grab the jump rope and start jumping. “They don’t want to break ranks and give me the answer I need. But they will.”

  Arnold looks baffled. “You worked the job all day?”

  I keep jumping, whipping it under my feet. “Today was mostly training. Tomorrow I’ll have duties. There’ll be deliveries, I imagine. Somebody mentioned filing.”

  Arnold nods. “And the people accepted you as a fellow employee?”

  “Why not? But the Papaggio delivery? That was all wrong.”

  “I tried to warn you—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s fine. It was funny, actually. They thought it was a joke, and the senior designer, Jada…” I grin. Do you not take anything seriously? “She’d like to have a word with you. She found it to be a very cruel trick.”

  “Oh, no,” Arnold says.

  “She’s so serious. She’s not the butt-dialer, but she’s so intense about rules and the team and pulling together. You’ve never met such a little Joan of Arc—the shining warrior, fighting the good fight with pencils stuck in her bun.” I grab a towel and wipe my face. “She keeps looking at my eyes when she talks to me instead of staring at the mole or averting her gaze, treating me with respect and dignity. God, people can be so fucking irritating.”

  “Is this truly the best use of your time, sir?”

  What is this? The day of everybody in the universe questioning me? I give him a stern look.

  “All of this focus on a workplace issue…your parents only just died…”

  I snort and throw the towel over my shoulder, which is more than that comment deserves. “I’m going to need to bring a lunch like other people bring. The people like to bring their lunches in molded plastic containers with specific labels. I don’t know where they get them, but I’ll be needing one for tomorrow.” I grab my phone, text Arnold the photo I discreetly shot of Jada’s sandwich packaging, and then my minute break is over, and I start up the jump rope again.

  Arnold furrows his brow at his phone. “Are you sure…”

  “Of course I’m sure. Bringing the same sort of food as they bring will show them I’m one of the gang. It’s like a rugby jersey. Once they see me wearing the team jersey, they’ll pass me the ball.”

  “Yes, Mr. Henningsly.”

  I keep hopping. “Do you know a computer program called Excel?”

  “I do indeed, Mr. Henningsly.”

  “You’ll teach it to me after dinner.”

  “It’s a bit complex, sir.”

  “I need to know it,” I say.

  “Very good, sir.”

  Excel continues to be maddening. It seems to have a mind of its own, and you have to create an elaborate formula just to ask it to do something. “Who designed this, Satan himself?” I complain.

  Midway through the torture, Arnold gets an email from the tech team. They’ve enlarged the label image of Jada’s sandwich and figured out where to get one—at the airport. A courier has been dispatched.

  “Do you have a preference between egg salad and barbeque chicken?”

  I frown. The airport seems a bit of an odd place to shop. It’s not as if these people are going to the airport for their sandwiches. They must have another source for them. “The chicken, I suppose.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Eleven

  Jaxon

  * * *

  There are always a number of urgent if not hyperventilating texts, emails, and voicemails regarding the Wycliff empire, as well as the various holdings I inherited, my social calendar, and random publicity matters. I ignore them all in favor of completing tasks from Varsha’s “gopher list,” a scrawled list of mostly restocking and delivery activities. She drew what I assume is a gopher up top and handed it over, seeming to marshal every bit of willpower to gaze at my nose and not my theatrical mole.

  After I complete the tasks on the list, my overlords down in shipping have me run a few things across town, and suddenly it’s lunch.

  Jada stops by my desk with a bag of microwave popcorn. “Half a day with no demerits! Call the papers!”

  Is Control Freak Barbie joking with me, now?

  “Can you believe it?” I tease.

  “Will you be getting lunch delivered by Papaggio again? That would probably do it.”

  I produce the insulated bag that Arnold sent me with. “I brought a lunch from home.”

  She tilts her head like she can’t figure me out. She probably has a perfectly ordered and arranged world where everything makes sense. “Do you live near here?”

  I lean back and cross my legs. “I’m staying at a place on West Seventy-sixth Street.”

  “Wow. Nice.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing special, trust me,” I say, wishing I hadn’t divulged this bit of information. “Where do you live?” I decide here to unpack my lunch as a demonstration of my regular guy status.

  “A building on West Forty-fifth and Ninth—it’s the Times Square side of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s a cool place. Well, not amazing on a physical level, but a lot of my best friends live there. I had a roommate, a dancer, but she moved in with a guy, and this tiny studio opened up on the top floor and I grabbed it, even though it’s way too expensive for me…somehow I swing it, but—” She falls silent as soon as I pull out my sandwich. “What is that?”

  “Barbeque chicken.” I open the plastic shell.

  “You brought that from home?” she asks.

  “It came out of a lunch bag from home, did it not? Is there some rule in the PDF about it? Because I honestly can’t be bothered to read that whole thing.”

  She blinks dramatically. “Are you being funny right now?”

  I frown. I’m used to being the amused one, not the amusing one. I give her a stern look. She’s just a poor girl with pencils in her bun—why do I care what she thinks?

  Usually a hard look is enough to back people off, but not Jada. Also, what the hell is so funny, anyway? It’s exactly the brand of sandwich she had.

  “That is your bag lunch from home,” she clarifies.

  “Obviously.”

  “But it’s a vending machine sandwich.”

  What the hell is a vending machine sandwich? It doesn’t matter. I sit up straight, giving her the lordly look that usually wilts people. “This is the sandwich,” I bite out, “that I brought from home.”

  Jada’s eyes glow with stunned amusement, which I find I like less than simple amusement. “Who would pack a vending machine sandwich in a bag lunch from home? Oh my god, did your friend Arnold tell you to do this? Tell me the truth, did Arnold give this to you?”

  “I told him what I wanted, and he got it for me.”

  “Okay, maybe you asked your friend Arnold for a sandwich to bring, but he got it in a machine, Jack. He’s playing a joke on you, and it’s not even a funny joke. He got it in a machine.”

  Dave comes by wearing a winter hat. “Got what in the machine?”

  “That’s the sandwich Jack brought as his bag lunch,” Jada says. “He brought a vending machine sandwich from home.”

  “Dude! You brought a vending machine sandwich from home?” Dave puts his fists on either side of his head and then spreads his fingers, making an explosion sound. “That is so meta, dude! Fucking meta!”

  Jada frowns at the sandwich. “Arnold is not a good friend to you. You need to understand that.” She returns to her desk.

  “Hey, Jack, you don’t have to eat at your desk,” Dave says. “Come on.”

  I want to stay—I’m feeling unfinished with Jada, but I remind myself I’m here to ferret out the butt-dialer.

  I follow Dave into the gloomy break room. It’s here that I notice what I thought were display cases are machines that sell sandwiches like mine, along with other food items. These apparently are the vending machines.

  “So meta,” Dave says, feeding a bill into a slot. He pushes a button and a bag of pretzels falls down. He bends down and takes it from a small door, then moves to another machine, this one for soft drinks. “You ever try this?” he asks, sitting down and ripping open the bag. “Pepsi with Snyder’s Pretzels. It can’t be Coke, though. The sugariness of the Pepsi contrasts with the salty.” He takes a bit and a swig. “Mmm. Otherwise,” he adds with his mouth still full, “I’m gonna recommend Cheez-Its and Cherry Coke. Savage flavor bomb. Savage.”

  I spread a paper napkin on my lap. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “Don’t mind Jada. She can be intense, and she works like a maniac, but I guess we should be thankful. This department wouldn’t function without her.”

  I nod, wishing people would stop talking about Jada. It’s like this whole place is the Jada show where you can’t stop thinking about her, even when she’s not around.

  “Sounds like somebody needs to get a life outside of work,” I say.

  “And whatever you do, don’t insult this place. She’ll go ballistic,” Dave warns. “This place is everything to her. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want this place shuttering, either, but Jada would shoot herself out of a canon in a flaming barrel if it kept this place open longer.”

  I sit next to him. “Why bother? It’s just a job that doesn’t produce much beyond misery for people in cubicles, as far as I can tell.”

  Dave nearly chokes on a pretzel. “Do not, I repeat, do not say that in front of Jada.”

  I make a note to repeat exactly that in front of Jada. I can’t wait. She’ll get that frown and stare pretty daggers at me.

  “Promise,” Dave says. “Oh, also—” He holds up the pretzel bag. “These pretzels with the saltwater taffies that Varsha keeps in a bowl at reception? Killer combo. Her family has a saltwater taffy shop in Atlantic City, and she brings them for us special.”

  “So what’s your job here exactly?” I ask.

  “Accounts receivable and payable.” Dave pulls out a Tupperware of something that might be gazpacho. “Billing specific to the design department. It’s just a stepping stone while I go to night school. I’m working to be a CPA. A good CPA is worth their weight in gold.”

  “So…three million and some?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You weigh what, one sixty? A pound of gold is twenty thousand. Last I knew.”

  “Huh.” Dave stirs his cold soup. “I suppose that’s a good fact to know. Strange but good.”

  “A stepping stone to where?” I ask, pulling the bread off my sandwich and looking inside. There is no way I’ll be eating this sandwich.

  Dave takes off his hat and sets it aside. Everybody here seems to have the same clumsily knit hat in the same shade of royal blue with a big pom pom on the top.

  Dave tells me about his dream job. He’s speeding up his plans due to “Wycliff-pocalypse,” as he calls it. He promptly launches into a lot of bad Bert stories, which gives me the perfect segue.

  “I hear there was a butt-dial incident during a company call. And Bert was livid…”

  “That was hilarious. Just…wow.” He tosses a wrapper into the garbage. “You would’ve loved it. I mean, the guy deserved it. Some pompous jackalope who never worked a day in his life telling us how to feel.”

  “And somebody was…making fun of the guy?”

  Dave snorts. “It was savage. You would’ve loved it.”

  “I love it,” I assure him. “Who was it?”

  Dave turns to look at me now. “I’d tell you if I could, but then I’d have to kill you. And then people would kill me.” He snorts. “Bert was pissed, though!”

  I give him my best conspiratorial smile, the conspiratorial smile that has pried bits of gossip from tight-lipped royals and coaxed the primmest of socialites into outrageous misbehavior. “Now I have to know.”

  “Dude,” he says. “I can’t.”

  “Just between us,” I say. “Renata?” I try. “Shondrella?”

  “There was a pact.” He shakes his head. “I can’t.” Like he’s powerless over the whole thing.

  “I won’t tell,” I say.

  “We said it wouldn’t leave the room,” Dave says.

  I can’t believe how intent everybody is to uphold this ridiculous pact. “I’m so curious now. Come on now,” I say breezily. “Don’t be boring!”

  “Sorry.”

  I study his face, shocked. I’m used to people falling all over themselves to anticipate my needs and desires, to give me what I want before I can even ask.

  Now suddenly I’m in this opposite world where these people are withholding information for no other reason than their little pact.

  Never mind.

  Nobody keeps secrets from me for long.

  Twelve

  Jada

  * * *

  The next morning, Jack leans casually on the wall in front of Varsha’s desk like he’s some bored prince on a yachting holiday, chatting away with her.

  He’s wearing yet another oversized 1990s button-up shirt. This one is bright yellow with blue and black triangles and circles all over it. Still, you can tell he has a muscular build under there—entirely due to genetics, no doubt, considering that this guy is the laziest assclown I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting.

  He’d have lovely black hair if he hadn’t messed it up with those bleached tips. His brows are dark and harsh—the kind you’d imagine on a villain. They add this alluring intensity to his gaze. Especially when he bothers to remove his itty-bitty shaded rectangular glasses that he possibly time-traveled to steal from the face of Leonardo DiCaprio circa 1995.

  Where does he shop that he’s getting those things? Why did nobody stop him? Of course it perfectly goes with his personality. Why be pleasing to the eye when he could be trolling people with his weirdly squandered hotness potential?

  And then there are the things he can’t mess up. His nose, for example, is on the large side, roughly sculpted in a good way that goes with his cheekbones and strong jaw. His lips are expressive—very “there” lips.

  He looks over and catches my eye. He tips his head down and peers at me over his glasses, gaze glittering under those villain eyebrows.

  A rush of feeling arrows to my core and I look away, because I can’t even. His eyes are golden brown like burnt butter, with thick lashes, of course. Offensively thick. You could expect nothing less from Jack Smith, entitled delivery driver.

  I grit my teeth. I told him to look busy—why is he bothering Varsha? The man has the worst work ethic I’ve ever witnessed, though I do have to admit that he completes his delivery duties with shocking speed.

  But other than that, the worst!

  Renata told me that he attended school here as a child, but mostly grew up in an impoverished, rural Türenbourgian village where they lived in decrepit homes without proper heating. “All goat carts and rat-infested stone rooms, from the sound of it,” she said. “Very backwards, like medieval!”

  She also thinks he lied on his resume, which is increasingly easy to believe. The possibility that his only work experience is from a rustic village on the other side of the world explains his ignorance of basic office operations and his bewilderment about things like bag lunches, which that asshole Arnold took such advantage of.

  Maybe Jack is from humble circumstances, but for Arnold to order white-glove meal service for his clueless friend on his first day at work? And then the next day he gets him to pack a vending machine sandwich for his bagged lunch? What a psycho!

  It’s my guess this Arnold character is well-off—that Upper West Side place is probably his. A bored rich bro with no conscience.

  Tragic poverty would also explain Lacey’s report that Jack nearly keeled over in shock when he saw her drinking from a water fountain out in the hall. “Is that…tap water?” he’d asked, horrified.

  “I explained it was perfectly safe, but the way he acted, you’d think it contained bubonic plague spores,” Lacey had whispered to Renata and me afterwards. “Has the man never seen a person drink out of a water fountain?”

  “Maybe their water back home is full of bacteria from unsanitary farming practices,” Renata had said. “Maybe he doesn’t understand that it’s safe to drink the water here in America.”

  “I told him it was safe, and he wouldn’t believe me,” Lacey said.

  I look back up. Jack smiles at me. I frown. He shouldn’t be goofing off with Varsha—he’s liable to get another demerit, and worse, he might get her one, too. Jack is mostly useless, but Varsha isn’t.

  He seems amused that I’m frowning, judging from the width of his smile.

  It’s not his fault that his parents raised him in a village where he acquired all of the office skills of a rabbit, but he needs to at least try to be a decent employee.