Everlasting Bad Boys (24 page)

“Fine.” He sat back down and scooted his chair over to the end of the table. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

“Okay.” Fumbling a little, Beth pulled up the files she wanted. His being so near was a little disconcerting. Justin wasn’t trying to lean in or lech or anything remotely like that, and his long legs were tucked back under his aluminum chair, but even so. He radiated warm sexuality. He couldn’t help it, she decided.

“Beth, since I’ve already seen the final versions of the lamps and the beets, could you give me an idea of how you got there? Second thoughts, mistakes, and all.”

“Sure.” She tapped the touchpad to open a file.

“I’m interested in your creative process.”

Beth laughed. “If you could call it that. Sometimes I think what I do is like trying to catch light in midair. Sometimes I can hold on to it. Not often, though.”

His face grew thoughtful. “Funny you should say that.”

She looked up at him before she turned the laptop his way. “What do you mean?”

“Ah—geez, it’s hard to explain.” He searched for the right words while she waited politely. “Basically, I guess I feel that way sometimes myself.”

“Oh.”

“I just bought SpectraSign,” he explained. “I have a lot of ideas to grow the company, but I’m not sure where to start. That’s why I decided to bring in a really original designer. And by that I mean someone who hasn’t hit the big time yet.”

That would be her. But not from want of trying. “Interesting. I didn’t know that.” She made a vague gesture at the door she’d come through. “I understood the company’s been around for several years. I just assumed you were the founder.”

He shook his head. “The new owner.”

“I see.”

“And the CEO, of course. SpectraSign seemed like a worthwhile investment and a good fit for my area of expertise.”

“And what’s that? If you don’t mind my asking,” she added hastily.

“Electrical engineering. Quantum mechanics and physics.”

Mega-smart and super-sexy. Beth sighed inwardly. She was not remotely in his league. With her luck, he’d turn out to have a spandex suit and the ability to fly.

“I won’t bore you with the technical details,” he was saying. “Because they don’t have much to do with SpectraSign. Long story short, I specialized in the study of photons, angstroms, wave energy, things like that.”

Spacey things. Even though she’d been tagged as a space cadet for her comic-book habit, Beth wouldn’t know what a photon was if one bit her, and she suspected one had in Science 101 back in high school.

“Anyway, I was curious to see what would happen if I could combine that knowledge with a creative approach,” he went on, “and right now I want to build the most dazzling sign Times Square has ever seen.”

“Is there a contest going on or something?” Beth searched her brain. He must have just made half a billion by selling a tech company she’d never heard of and was looking for something else to do. Maybe he had money to burn. Hmmm. She couldn’t very well ask if he did in so many words.

“No.”

“Then why—”

“I have a lot of energy, Beth. Running a world-class sign company ought to be fun, don’t you think?”

“World-class? Really? I didn’t know SpectraSign was at that level.” She flinched the second the words were out of her mouth. “Gah. Sorry. I guess I should have known, huh?”
Good going, you bigmouth bass,
she told herself bitterly. And after he did his homework on you.

Justin only shrugged. “They started out in Las Vegas, made a fortune on the strip. Then the company founder moved to Japan for some reason. They did most of the Ginza signs in Tokyo, you know.”

“Awesome place. That’s very cool.”

“Anyway, he retired, and I bought the company just for the hell of it. First I hired the best software programmers in the business, and then got them started developing multiscreen vid displays, light-emitting diode designs, and other new signage concepts.”

“Aha. That explains the humming in the air—the worker bees are busy.”

“What humming?” he asked blandly. “I’m not following you.”

“I felt it when I touched the door.”

He rested his big hands, fingers splayed out, on the drafting table. “You know, I think you’re right. The IT department is below my office. I stay out of there, but you pegged the hum. Not surprising. It’s a rat’s nest of cables and computers and guardian geeks.”

“I know the type,” Beth said, grinning. She had just noticed, with joy, that he wore no wedding ring, and, furthermore, that there was no telltale trace of a former wedding ring indenting his fourth finger, left hand.

He was single. He radiated sexual energy. He was brilliant. A girl couldn’t ask for anything more, besides a job offer.

“Let’s get back to Beth Danforth. Tell me more,” he was saying. “I want to know everything about you.”

An executive who didn’t just brag about himself and his company? Now that was unusual. She looked down at her skirt. The knees must be working. She looked back up. All he seemed fixated on was her face, as if he thought she was really pretty. Good going. It was almost time to trot out her talent, but if he wanted her life story, he could have it, judiciously edited to podcast length.

“Oh, I grew up on Long Island,” Beth began. “Wait a minute. You don’t want to hear that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You do? Really?”

“Yeah.” He looked totally enthusiastic. In fact, he had a born-yesterday quality that she really liked and his interest in her seemed totally unfaked.

Ahh. She felt even warmer all over. Attention, the ultimate aphrodisiac.

She took a deep breath. “I’ll make it mercifully short. My father was a comic book artist. He raised me on his own after my mother died of cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was really little,” she said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t know her, but I wish I had. No, it was just me and the Ink Man.”

She was not going to tell Justin Watts that she was Graphic Design Girl.

“Anyway, my aunt—his sister—made sure I ate my vegetables and brushed my hair and did my homework and applied to college.”

“In that order?”

“Pretty much. Eventually I majored in marketing, but I always cherished the hope that I could make a living doing what I loved.”

Justin looked at her thoughtfully. “You can do better than make a living.”

“Huh?”

Out of the blue, he named a salary for the job she was interviewing for that made tears come into her eyes. One rogue tear even trickled into her ear. Great. Her ears were crying. But she had heard him correctly.

“Are you kidding? That much?”

He only nodded. “I have a feeling you’re exactly what this company needs.”

“But I didn’t even finish my presentation. You’re not offering me the job, are you?”

“Not if you don’t want me to.” Justin grinned as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms in back of his head. “Go ahead and finish.”

“Ah—okay.” Beth shook her head, a little nonplussed, and got back to her laptop, opening file after file before he could change his mind. She lost track of time as they brainstormed ideas for a sign to end all signs, she was having so much fun. They eventually agreed to disagree on what he called the dazzle factor.

Justin was for it, she was against.

“It doesn’t matter how dazzling an ad is,” she informed him, “The second it goes up in Times Square, another company will try to out-dazzle you.”

Justin grinned. “Bring ’em on. We’ll make another one that’s brighter and bigger.”

Beth shook her head. “Good marketing doesn’t work like that. You have to reach people on an emotional level, not just blow their minds with special effects.”

“Really. Tell me more.” He sat back up, propped his chin on his hand and gave her an encouraging look.

She reached down to pick up the photo of the male model in jeans, which had slipped out of the paper clip holding it to the layout. “All right. Take him, for example—”

“Why?” Justin gave the faux farmboy a bored look. “He has better abs than I do. So I wouldn’t buy the jeans,” he said.

Beth waved the photo at him. “You’re missing the point. He’s designed to appeal to a female customer in a subtle way.”

“I wouldn’t call that pose subtle.”

“But he’s not all lit up. This looks like an old photograph of the bad boy she, meaning our hypothetical customer, used to love. Who she still wants.”

“Whoa.” Justin held up both hands. “Isn’t he selling men’s jeans?”

“Women buy jeans for their guys. Or they make their guys buy the right jeans. You know, the nuances of how jeans should hang on a male body and what jeans should do for a male butt are lost on most straight guys, who will go out and buy the cheapest pair they can find unless—”

He was smiling. Beth realized she had gotten off-topic. Way off-topic. And this was a job interview.

“Um, I talk too much. Sorry.”

“Not at all,” he laughed. “This is great. You just lay it out there. And I obviously have a lot to learn.”

“Really.” She covered her flustered feeling by talking fast. “About what? I mean, you have a major client already—Blue Blazes Jeans is huge—” She stopped, telling herself not to babble.

He looked…eager. If that was the right word. At least his face still had that luminous glow she’d noticed when she came into his office, even though both monitors on the drafting table were off and he wasn’t looking at her laptop at the moment.

“Yeah, well, they are. Anyway, Blue Blazes sent over those mock-ups and some others but I’m not sure the concept will work when the model is forty feet tall, in motion, and lit up.”

She nodded in agreement, although she wouldn’t have minded seeing that particular male model strutting his stuff at any size. Come to think of it, that went for Justin Watts too. She doubted that the model had better abs than Justin. She would guess that they were about even when it came to world-class male abs.

“Your company has at least one sign in Times Square right now, right?”

“We do.” He named the brand and the global food conglomerate that owned it. “It’s a great big bag of holographic potato chips. The bag rotates and the potato chips float out. The idea is that they’re lighter than other potato chips.”

“Got it.”

“Of course, we don’t show the calorie count or fat grams. Both would give a cardiologist a heart attack.”

“I understand,” Beth said, laughing. “But that’s a great account to have.”

“But visually not exciting. There’s a limit to what you can do with potato chips. Seen one, seen ’em all. That’s why I was so interested in what you did with the tap-dancing beets. They had personality.”

She smiled. “That wasn’t easy.”

“I can imagine.”

“So…” She was curious, and he had asked all the questions. “You really do have the Blue Blazes account?”

“Yup.”

She nodded in understanding. “And you want to do a jeans ad that will have everyone talking and stopping to look.”

“That’s right,” Justin said. “But I don’t think their approach is going to do it.” He flicked the photograph of the male model to one side.

“Hmm.” Beth clicked through older folders in her documents. “Let me show you the first sign I ever did—here it is. I scanned in these drawings.”

Justin peered at the image on the screen. “What is that?”

“A fried clam. Sammy the Clam, to be exact.”

“You’ve improved.”

Beth laughed. “Well, I was only seventeen when I did those. I worked at the Olde Clamme Shacke as a waitress and the owner needed a new sign. So I came up with Sammy. The orders went up right away.”

“Why?”

“We printed Sammy on the menus and the placemats, too. He was a goofy little character that stuck in people’s heads, I guess. Different from what I usually drew.”

Justin shot her an interested look. “Which was?”

“Superheroes. If you grow up reading comic books, it comes kinda naturally.”

“I see. Doesn’t seem like a girl thing to do, but why not?”

“Hey, I put plastic dinosaur heads on my Barbies. I wasn’t ever a girly girl—basically, I was just a weird kid.”

“Weird kids usually grow up to be some of the most interesting people, Beth.”

Awww. She beamed at him, momentarily forgetting that she was supposed to be in interview mode. “Sometimes I was shy and sometimes I couldn’t stop talking.”

“I’m not sure that’s changed.” Justin chuckled in a very nice way. “So keep talking.”

Encouraged by his wink, Beth took a breath and continued. “Um, I never really felt like I belonged in suburban Long Island. When I was old enough, I took the train into New York every chance I got. It always seemed like a perfect place for superheroes and it felt like home to me. Lots of comics are set in, quote-unquote, Gotham. Anyway, blah blah, I went looking for the settings I’d seen in my dad’s portfolio and I actually found a few.”

“I’d like to see them.”

Beth gave him a curious look. “They’re still there. Maybe not for long. The city’s getting ripped up and torn down.”

“I know what you mean. An entire YMCA can disappear overnight.”

“Yeah. At least in comics, an intergalactic rec center would pop up in its place.”

“Sign me up,” Justin said with a huge, guy-type grin.

Beth grinned back. They just looked at each other for a minute that didn’t feel at all uncomfortable or weird.

“So,” he said at last, “how would you define your approach to a campaign like this?”

Beth thought it over. “You have to make people believe that wonderful, impossible things are real. It’s all about that.”

“Which makes you perfect for advertising work.”

Beth smiled. “I hope so.” Perfect for this job would be just fine. Had he decided? Evidently not.

“Show me more,” he said.

Beth clicked open a few more files with drawings and concepts for all kinds of things. Then she came to one with a title she didn’t recognize and opened it without thinking.

The image appeared. It showed a canopy bed with four posters made of neon tubes. Hot pink neon tubes.

“What’s that?” Justin seemed more than curious. He leaned in for a really good look.

Holy cow. She never should’ve clicked on that one. Beth wanted to close it out, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to. It would be like slamming a door right in Justin’s face.