The Darkest of Shadows (15 page)

“I don’t work that way.” I stalled any further comments. “You hired me, and you get me the way I am. I need to know the people around me, and just as you need to have faith in me, I need to have faith in them also. I need to get to know them, so that if I’m off on the other side of the world and I ring to get something done, I can have confidence it will be ready when I need it.”

“I can’t argue with that,” he finally admitted. “But I don’t think it’s necessary for you to be wandering around the building all the time— besides, you’re not going to have time. But I won’t stop you from meeting people you need to meet.”

“I’m not taking Charlie or Frost with me.” But he was shaking his head before I even finished speaking.

“Not going to happen,” he announced.

“You can’t lock me up, Lawrence. What about when I have to use the bathroom? Are they going to come too?” When he didn’t answer, I had the horrifying suspicion that they would. “OK. So here’s the thing, they scare your employees.”

He looked at me like I was dense. “They’re supposed to.”

“Not all of them,” I retorted. “I can’t build trust with someone when there’s a gun-carrying giant hovering behind me.”

“You can’t wander around alone, Lilly; that’s not negotiable. But I can compromise on the method,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“They will escort you to where you need to go but will then remove themselves from your general vicinity, so they don’t ‘intimidate’ your new friends.”

That might work.
“Deal.” I’d take what I could get.

We walked into one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city, without a booking, and got a table right away. Tells you a lot about a person, when he or she has that much influence—or money.

Frost and Charlie were very good at their jobs. From the moment we stepped out of the offices, they were everywhere, but yet their presence wasn’t intrusive. They didn’t hover; when Lawrence and I ate lunch, they stationed themselves near the door and stood in silent attention until we were ready to leave. As long as they could sustain that unobtrusive manner, I was a bit more confident about our future together.

When we got back to the office, I found a veritable explosion of paperwork on my desk.

“People move fast around here,” Lawrence said with a shrug, and retreated to his own office. “Come see me if you have any questions.”

With no other alternative, I settled at my desk, turned my computer on, and started to sort through the mountain of documents that hadn’t been there an hour ago.

I quickly determined that this place needed some organization. There didn’t appear to be any format to the documents; they were literally just dumped one on top of another. It took me about two hours, but by the end of it, I was pretty sure I had a clear idea of what sort of paperwork came along and what each kind was used for. They were mainly reports of various different types, investments, telecommunications, developments, financial reports, and a variety of others. I assumed these were for him to review and make the final decision. The other paperwork included official letters that required his signature and other documents that related to meetings he was to attend over the next week.

I could ignore Charlie and Frost easily, I learned. I had forgotten that they remained in the antechamber with me, although several times one of them would go into the private apartments, but for the most part they spent their time lazing around the room with me. They didn’t attempt to communicate with me—or each other much, for that matter—so I tuned them out.

I was just sending an e-mail through to Sally at C&N with all my new contact details, when thankfully a helpful, if somewhat hesitant, visitor arrived.

Jules was a very attractive young American girl, who I learned was Allan’s PA. He had sent her up to introduce herself to me, and after I pulled a chair around for her to sit next to me and convinced her to ignore the two hulking presences in the room with us, it wasn’t long before she was spilling all the important details.

“I can’t believe that you work with Lawrence Monterey!” she gasped at one point. “Oh, my God, is he, like, totally freaking you out?”

“Not yet,” I reassured her. “Maybe he’s saving that for later.” Oh, my gosh, she was, like, totally a teenager. It made me feel immeasurably old.

“He’s scared off the last four assistants,” she confided. “They didn’t last more than a month.”

“I think that’s probably a private issue between those assistants and their employer.” Office gossip…the same the world over.

“Yes, but he must have been awful for them to all leave like they did.” She didn’t seem to grasp the fact that I wasn’t going to gossip about Lawrence.

“I think that the only lesson we can learn from the situation is that finding a suitable assistant is a difficult task.”

She finally let it go, with a little more prodding on my behalf, and moved onto more important details. Like where to get the best coffee, and where the closest underground station was. More importantly, she gave me a learner’s guide phone list. Payroll, HR, accounts, legal, cleaners, travel, and a few others that she assured me I needed to know. She scribbled the names of the most helpful people, so that I would have some reference when I called. She said I didn’t need to meet the people—some of them she didn’t even know herself—but they were used to dealing with Lawrence and would probably be exceedingly happy to now be dealing with me instead.

“You won’t normally get so much paper,” she added, as she got up to leave. “But when people find out he is in the office, they think that if they give him work in a hard copy format, he might read it quicker. It’s normally all done electronically; even the mail that he gets will be sent through to you via your e-mail. All of this will be on his laptop already— and yours, too, ’cause you get a copy of all his e-mails. Makes it easier to get things back to people if you have them, too.”

This was all fairly standard practice and certainly made the pile on my desk less daunting. To be burdened with that every day would have ensured some problems.

“We don’t actually get to see you guys much,” she continued. “He travels a lot, so most of the time it’s just over the phone and e-mail that we’ll talk. So it’s nice that we had a chance to meet while you’re here.”

“Yeah, thanks for taking the time to come up and meet me,” I told her, as I walked with her to the elevator. “No doubt I’ll be speaking to you again soon.”

She left, and as I walked back toward my desk, I noticed Charlie watching me. His amused expression spoke volumes.

“She must be very good at what she does, ’cause for the life of me I don’t know how Allan puts up with all that dizziness,” I told his smiling face.

“Who’s dizzy?” Lawrence asked from the door.

“No one.” I answered immediately. I didn’t want to be spreading rumors or bad opinions about people, most especially not in front of the boss. “Doesn’t matter. Was there something you needed?” I asked.

“No.” He waved my question aside. “Just wanted to know how you’re doing.”

“Now that I know all that paperwork isn’t normal, I’m a lot better.” I spared him a glance as I sat down again. “I assume that you don’t need most of this. What do you do with it all? Do you check them off your own e-mails, or do you need me to print them all out for you?”

“I’ll go through them on my own computer, and then when you catch up with me during the day, I’ll give you an outcome, and you send the response through from your own computer.” He picked up one of the documents from my desk. “There is a case number on the top of each document, so that should help you identify them. Also, there’s a formal procedure in place for them that makes sure everything that happens is approved. When we approve the report, the MD will prepare a short summary page with a part at the bottom for me to sign off on. Absolutely nothing happens on any project until that piece of paper is officially signed.”

I pulled his schedule up on my computer. “I’ve got your schedule now. I see that you have meetings here in the morning and then a site visit tomorrow afternoon, and dinner with clients tomorrow night. Will I be attending all those with you?” I was trying to plan my day, and it helped to know if I was going to be spending half of tomorrow wandering around a construction site.

“Unless I need you for a specific purpose, you shouldn’t have to sit through meetings with me, at least not while we’re here in the offices. I’ll give you a brief rundown of what happens at the end of them, anyway, but there’s no need for us both to waste our time. You don’t have to come on the site visit tomorrow, either. I’ve asked for more detail on one of the projects, and the engineer thought it would be better if he met me onsite to show me what he meant.”

“What about the dinner?” I asked.

“That you have to attend, sorry,” he said. “I know it’s late notice, but the dinner is small; and it’s actually to talk about a charity opportunity, so it shouldn’t take too long.”

“No, that’s fine. I’m happy to go.” I would be requiring new clothes fairly soon, however. My list of formal clothes, if I had to attend every function already listed in his schedule, runs out in exactly four days, so there was going to have to be some shopping before we left. “We’re leaving late Wednesday, and I’ve seen your appointments for the next few weeks. If you want me to attend all those formal events, I’m going to have to do some shopping. Do you mind if I do that while you’re out tomorrow afternoon?”

“Not at all,” he assured me. “Which reminds me.” He walked back into his office and returned a moment later with an envelope. “These are for you. There should be two credit cards—one in your name, one in the company name—and security cards. The blue one will get you into any office in this building, including the private apartments, and the green cards are for our corporate offices in the States. There is also company ID in there and contact details for my personal lawyer.”

I must have looked a little confused, because he added, “We have in-house legal services, but I keep a high-profile lawyer on retainer. His name is Wallace Alexander, and he handles all my personal business, but also takes on the companies more complex issues. Anyway, that’s enough for today. It’s just past four; why don’t you take off and get your house sorted out before it gets too late?”

Not surprisingly, Charlie came along for the ride. At least he would be good for the heavy lifting. That thought made me smile mischievously to myself. Charlie caught the smile and asked, “What’s so funny?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

I made a quick phone call to my landlord while we drove to tell him that I’d be away for a month. I wasn’t ready to give up the apartment; I might need it in a month, so for the moment, I was happy to just have it sit there empty.

I had the driver stop at the post office near where I lived and arranged for my mail to be redirected to the offices in London, then sent a quick e-mail from my phone telling the records department to expect it. I hadn’t realized quite how large a project this would become. Being homeless was difficult.

My apartment came furnished, so there wasn’t actually a lot of stuff that personally belonged to me, and most of that would stay, at least for the moment. I stashed Charlie in the lounge—he made the space look extremely small—and set about packing everything I owned into my two suitcases. When I surveyed the final result, it didn’t look like much. It’s strange how everything you are can be bottled up into something so physically small.

“OK, wonder boy,” I announced happily to Charlie, as he sat watching TV. “Your turn!”

“My turn for what?” he asked cautiously, switching off the TV and walking into the bedroom after me.

“Well, if I have to cart you around with me all the time, there has to be some benefit, and I’ve decided that you can carry my bags. Where’s your muscles, boy?”

Charlie’s slow grin lit up his face, showing a stunning set of dimples in each cheek. “Do you really want to see my muscles?” he asked in a horrifyingly sexy voice.

I wasn’t going anywhere near that! “Just get the bags, Charlie.” I shook my head in exasperation. Seriously, with men it was
always
about sex.

I picked up my shoulder bag and a few small boxes that I didn’t want crushed and followed him out of the apartment. I took a moment at the door to look around, to remember that I had liked living here, and to reassure myself that if I wasn’t happy with the mess I’d gotten myself into, this would always be waiting for me. It helped to buffer me against the craziness of Lawrence’s world.