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I knew I had a meeting with the marketing team that was going to last for at least two hours. It was something that had been planned for weeks, so there was no way I could back out of it. But, to be honest, it was the last thing on my mind. For some unknown reason, the young woman in the elevator had shaken me to my core.
Granted, she was a pretty little thing, but not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination. All eyes and pink cheeks. It was her reaction to me that really set my heart racing, but I couldn’t really understand why. I had embarrassed her, something I didn’t feel proud of. I don’t know why I made that stupid-ass comment about her name. Admittedly, I was a notoriously cantankerous asshole, but it wasn’t my style to make fun of people, and that hadn’t been my intention. Most women would have kicked back with some sassy comment or at least bantered with me a little, but not this one. She couldn’t even look at me.
Coupled with that, there was something strangely familiar about her. I could have sworn I’d seen her somewhere before, but where that might have been completely eluded me.
I flopped down into my leather chair and looked through some of the paperwork for the meeting, but it was all swimming in front of my eyes. It had been a long time since a woman had affected me in this way. Years, in fact. For the past seven years, escorts had provided me with everything I needed. It was transactional and clear-cut. They had no expectations of anything other than a business arrangement, and that suited me just fine. I used the top agencies, and the girls were both beautiful and discreet.
Once my business had taken off when I was in my early twenties, I had been unspeakably busy, often working twenty-hour days and surviving on little more than my wits and caffeine. I wouldn’t say success came easily to me, but when things did take off, they did so with a vengeance. Although my chief love would always be physics, the big money at the time was in technology. After I founded my web software company, I never expected it to take off the way it did, but I think I was just in the right place at the right time. One of the big corporations offered me $400 million for that little start-up operation and I was on my way.
I had dabbled in all kinds of things, including online banking technology and aerospace, but more recently my passion has been renewable energy. I knew it was the way forward and I poured millions of dollars into research, and I wanted to be at the forefront of that research.
I’d spent ten years developing my business, but now I yearned to get back to my first love of science. I knew I needed to keep my finger on the button, but I had an exceptional management team in place and I really wanted to spend more time in the lab. I just needed to find the right research assistant. The last one was an absolute dead loss, but the problem was that HR didn’t seem to know what it was that I needed. I sat there, fretting that I would probably have to take on the interview process myself, something I was reluctant to do.
I wrote the words Seraphina Ellis in loopy writing on my pad like a lovesick school teenager. Her name just rolled off your tongue like a beautiful cadence. Fiery angel, I laughed to myself. There was nothing fiery about Ms. Ellis, unless you counted the heat of her rosy cheeks. Maybe there was a fiery side to her. Maybe she was fiery between the sheets. I shook my head and snickered, not knowing where that last thought had come from. She was, for all intents and purposes, a complete ingenue. Why the hell was she taking up my brain time when I had a million other things I ought to be doing? I definitely needed to get laid. I made a mental note to contact the escort agency later that day. Hopefully one of my regular girls would be available.
I groaned and reluctantly turned my attention to my current major irritation, my lack of a research assistant. My research had come to a grinding halt because I’d recently fired my most recent assistant. Michael was the latest in a long line of dismissed staff. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Some I had fired, and some had left because they had found it impossible to work with me. To be fair, I warned everyone who worked with me that I could be a little volatile, so it wasn’t strictly my fault that they were too sensitive to deal with that.
Some of them had been reasonably capable, but I always felt like I had to invest too much time in telling them what to do and, to be honest, I probably could have done it faster myself. Michael, on the other hand, was just plain incompetent and had spent months working on what I considered to be a basic task and had come nowhere near providing me with some results. “I’m on it boss,” is what he would say to me every damn day.
I sat at my desk in a foul mood because I knew I would have to tackle his work myself and I just didn’t have time to do that. There was a knock on the door and my assistant, Melissa, came in with some files for the meeting. She took one look at me and frowned. “Is there a problem, Dr. Grant?”
I treated Melissa with the utmost care and respect because there was no way I could afford to lose her. She was the most efficient assistant I’d ever had, and she’d been with me for several years. She tolerated my volatile nature, but I seriously reined it in when she was around. I waved a ream of paperwork at her. “Michael’s research,” I said. “I have no idea what he did while he was here, but working on this was not one of those things.”
She smiled. Melissa was a shrewd individual and not much got past her. “Michael liked cats and Tik-Tok videos and he liked combining the two.”
“Oh Lord, give me strength,” I said, my head in my hands.
“Dr. Grant, forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, but we employ around three thousand people here. Surely there’s someone qualified enough to work as your research assistant.”
I looked up at her, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Well, we have lots of brilliant people here. Maybe one of them would like a change and would like to come and work with you.”
I shot her an incredulous look. Anyone who had worked at Grant Innovations for longer than half a day knew what kind of person I was and wouldn’t want to work with me. That was precisely why we always hired my assistants from outside the company, so they didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for.
“I think the problem is that my reputation goes before me.”
She tried to conceal a smile, but she knew as well as I did what people thought of me. “Perhaps you need to offer some kind of incentive. A bonus if they survive you for a month. An extra week’s vacation if they survive for six.”
She left the files on my desk and went back to her office while I mulled over what she had said. She was right, of course. We definitely had some brilliant people on staff who had the skills to be my research assistant, but maybe I needed to be a little more furtive about it.
Instead of putting out a job ad and running the risk that no one would apply, I could just get HR to identify the staff with the right qualifications. They must have that information in their database, I thought. With that in mind, I put together a wish list of the ideal qualifications. The right person needed to have a graduate degree and preferably have studied both computer science and applied mathematics. Hell, if they had any experience in the renewable energy field, that would be a bonus, but that was like shooting for the moon. Experience working for assholes was a must, but no one put that on their resume.
With my list in my hand, I strolled casually down the hall to the office of the director of human resources, Alex Winter. Alex was a highly experienced HR professional who had worked for some of the world’s most prestigious corporations. He was calm and even-tempered, and I know my somewhat mercurial side bothered him. Marching into his office, I flopped down in the chair across from him.
“Milo,” he smiled with a look of amusement, “you look like you’re a man on a mission. What can I do for you?”
I thrust the paper with my scrawled ramblings under his nose. “I need you to find the person with all these qualities.”
He screwed up his eyes and tried to read my somewhat indecipherable scribbles. “That’s fine, I’ll get one of our HR assistants to draw up an ad for you to approve.”
“No, you misunderstand me. I want you to find the person from our current staff. Run the qualifications through the database and give me a list of the people who have all these skills. Oh, but don’t bother with the managers. They won’t want to be my research assistant.”
He frowned at the list. “What if they’re happy where they are? What if they don’t want to move?”
I leaned back with my hands behind my head and grinned. “I’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.” He had opened his mouth to object, so I jumped up out of my seat to leave before he could talk me out of it. Convinced that this plan would work like a charm, I put on my bad boss face and stalked off to the marketing meeting.
TWO HOURS LATER, I was heading back to my office with an intense craving for a strong cup of coffee. Hell, a shot of whiskey in it wouldn’t go amiss either. Parts of the business operations left me cold, and marketing was one of those areas. I could afford to hire the best people in the business, but I still felt the need to keep my finger on the pulse of every aspect of the corporation. That often meant spreading myself a bit thin, but I’d seen what could happen if I let go of the reins. I’d spent too much of my life building this empire and I wasn’t about to make the same mistakes I’d seen others make. I’d rattled through the meeting with my usual acerbic comments that left some of the junior marketing assistants looking like they were about to burst into tears.
Melissa came in carrying a tray laden with a French press and some cream and sugar. She was also carrying a manilla folder, which she placed down in front of me with the tray. “Alex asked me to give you this. Apparently, only one person has all the qualifications you requested that isn’t on our management team.”
I had to admire his efficiency. The thing about Alex Winter was that if you asked him to do something, he did it. That’s why I paid him the big bucks, and it was also why I had no intention of losing him to the competition. He had gotten me out of a few sticky HR situations in the past, and I valued his experience and calm demeanor.
I poured my coffee before flipping open the file to find a very professional-looking resume. The name at the top of the page made me almost spit my coffee across the room. Seraphina Ellis! The blushing angel in the elevator. I snorted in disbelief before I read the contents of her resume.
She had clearly put a lot of effort into putting this together and, as I looked through her educational background and experience, what I read made me stare in bemused wonder. This little mouse had majored in math and computer science at MIT before doing a master’s in applied mathematics at Yale. What interested me the most was the fact that she had worked at a renewable energy research facility in Colorado. I could have written the job ad just for her; she had just the kind of experience I’d been seeking for over a year. What I wanted to know was why she hadn’t been interviewed for the position of my research assistant. Had she not even applied?
I shot out of my office and marched swiftly back to Alex’s door, file in hand. “Why was I not informed that this person was working for us?” I announced abruptly.
Alex was very familiar with the way I worked, and he smiled at me good-naturedly. “Do you mean the member of staff with the qualifications?”
I slapped the file down abruptly on his desk. “Yes. Seraphina Ellis. She has all the qualifications I need for a research assistant and then some, and yet she’s working in some junior development position on the twenty-third floor. Why was she not interviewed for my research position?”
Alex calmly took the file and flicked through some of the pages as I watched impatiently. “She did apply for the research job. She didn’t get it. Michael got it over her.”
I was trying to rein in my frustration, somewhat unsuccessfully. “Michael!” I spluttered, feeling the vein on the side of my temple pulsating. “Michael was a terrible research assistant. He spent most of his day watching cat videos. That’s why we had to let him go. Who the hell interviewed this person and deemed she wasn’t good enough? Have you actually read her references? She’s a fucking wunderkind.”
Alex refused to be baited by my inflammatory approach and continued to calmly peruse the file, smiling serenely to himself. He’d known me long enough to know not to be drawn into battle. “Okay, look Milo. Jenny Galloway interviewed her. Here are her notes. Looks like she didn’t interview well. Jenny wrote that she didn’t elaborate about her experience and didn’t do well with the situational questions.”
I felt like I was going to explode. “No kidding. Because she’s a fucking academic. They don’t work that way. If you’d asked her about the properties of the Fibonacci sequence, she’d have been fine. She probably can’t answer the fluffy ‘tell me about a time’ type of questions. God, I hate those things.”
He was shaking his head. “We use standard questions for everyone. That way, it levels the playing field. Jenny also wrote that she seemed unduly nervous and not very articulate. I think she was doing her a favor in giving her the job she’s got now.” He shut the file. “She just didn’t interview well, Milo. We’re not mind readers.”
“I’m not expecting you to be mind readers. What I am expecting is people to think outside the box and look further than the end of their noses. I want her up here this morning so I can talk to her about working for me.”
Alex looked uncomfortable. “Milo, I understand you’re the boss, but you can’t just poach her from software development like that. Graham Bentley is really short-staffed down there. There are channels we should go through. She should apply for the job again, and then we can interview her and—”
I cut him off abruptly. “I don’t have time for all that. Every time we have to stop and advertise and interview someone, it sets back my research at least another two months. We have the perfect candidate already here. Make it happen, Alex. Get her up here and let me know when she’s arrived.”
Without waiting for his response, I stalked back to my office and my lukewarm coffee. I was feeling unduly riled up, and I wasn’t sure why. I was aware I should go through the proper channels to install her as my assistant, but I didn’t want to wait. She’d already proved she was perfect and no one was going to tell me otherwise. I was cranky, and I probably needed to eat something. I was never very pleasant when my sugar levels were low.
Looking at my watch, I realized it would soon be lunch. Maybe if Alex could catch Ms. Ellis, I could arrange some lunch for the two of us. We’d got off on the wrong foot in the elevator that morning and it might make her feel more comfortable. I buzzed through to Melissa and asked her to organize some food to be brought to my office. We had a corporate contract with a local caterer, and they were great at coming up with something on the fly.
I reclined in my chair with my hands behind my head and smiled. I had the feeling that my research assistant problems would soon be a thing of the past.