One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) (19 page)

Certainly, getting this property would not only represent an unprecedented opportunity for Rick, but it would raise his stature in the community. Countless others would clamor to partner with him, thinking he had some magic touch that made previously unapproachable owners beg to make a deal with him. They wouldn’t know Amy was the magician; they wouldn’t need to know. Further, compared with the little Movie Colony project he was looking at—a teardown that would leave him with a tiny blank slate—Marlena’s property was a chance to build a showcase, a rare boutique hotel that could rival any of the special, high-end inns in the valley.

How could he not accept Marlena’s invitation?

But, then again, how could he? If he did, Amy would clearly have the upper hand in managing the project, perhaps even choosing the architect, creating the ambiance and gestalt of the place. What would his role be? Securing the financing? Running the permits through city hall? Would he be reduced to the role Amy was hired to fill? This was precisely the kind of takeover his father had suffered and the one Rick had vowed he would avoid.

The more he thought about it, the angrier Rick got. Finally, he could sit no longer. He got up, slammed out of his office and crashed through Amy’s door.

Amy looked up, surprised. She was on the phone, and as soon as he burst through the door, she cut off her conversation. Rick was so crazed he didn’t even hear what she said to the person on the other end. He waited only long enough for her to move toward replacing the receiver on the phone cradle before breaking in.

“What the fuck are you trying to do here, Amy? What the fuck is this?”

He held Marlena’s letter out across her desk.

Amy recoiled. He threw the letter at her, nearly hitting her on the chest. She stood up and backed away.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, her eyes widening with fright.

“What’s the matter is I just got this letter. Or should I say, I just got this blackmail. If you wanted to be COO, hell, if you wanted my job, why didn’t you just come out and say so?”

“What are you talking about?” Amy backed up more, practically receding into the shelves behind her desk. “I told you I’m quitting!”

“Here, read this,” he said, picking up the letter off her desk and shoving it at her for the third time.

Amy reached out tentatively and took the two sheets. She looked down and scanned the contents quickly.

“I don’t get it.” She looked up and shook her head. She handed the letter back to him. “This looks like good news to me. What is wrong with you?”

“So this is where you went last week?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I certainly didn’t think I had succeeded. And even if I had known that, I wouldn’t have thought you’d be angry about it. I thought you would love the opportunity to get that property.”

“It’s good news if you’re the one getting the promotion and not the one getting pushed out,” he said. He was shaking violently. He grabbed her guest chair and threw himself down onto it.

“No one is pushing anyone anywhere,” Amy protested. “What are you talking about?”

“This,” Rick said, shaking the letter at her, “this is blackmail. If I don’t assign you to the project, I don’t get the land. Here, read it!”

Amy took the pages back and read them again, more carefully.

“Well, then it seems like a win, win,” Amy said. “Marlena gets a great partner in Buen Dia and you succeed where everyone else failed.”

“You mean you succeeded. Do you think I don’t know what kind of leverage this gives you? How long is it before you’re calling the shots around here?”

As soon as he said that, Amy looked like she had just been hit with an epiphany, and the tension left her body. She smiled knowingly, and let her arms drop to her sides. She pulled her chair back and sat down.

“I get it,” she said calmly, folding her hands on the desk. “I get it now. This is about your father, isn’t it? This is about your father losing his business to your mother. This isn’t about you and me.”

“What are you talking about?” Rick yelled. “What does this have to do with my father?” Seeing Amy’s suddenly calm demeanor only made him angrier.

“Look,” she said. “You should calm down. I’m leaving anyway, so you don’t have to worry about me taking away your business. I talked with your mother, and now I realize you can’t have me here any longer if I’m going to be any good at this business. I’m too much of a threat to you—the same way your mother was too much of a threat to your father.”

“What? You talked with my mother? When?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Amy said. She shook her head at Rick as if he were a misbehaving child. “You need to get a grip, Rick. It seems to me this is an unbelievable opportunity for you, and I promise I won’t tell anyone how it happened.”

“But, according to this letter, I don’t get the deal if you don’t get to run it.” Rick shook the sheets at her again. “That is blackmail. How did you come up with that scheme?”

“Yes, I saw that,” Amy said. She didn’t deny the blackmail; she simply smiled sadly. “But I’m sure Marlena will be overwhelmed by your good looks and your charm, and she will work with you anyway.”

Amy’s flattery nearly disarmed him, and Rick sat back and fumed.

“I don’t know where we go from here,” he said, flipping back and forth between the two pages of the letter and shaking his head.

“I think I know,” Amy said. “I am going to leave, and you will convince Marlena that you are a good guy and that I left for personal reasons. I think she will understand that. She’s a very warm, empathetic woman.”

Rick threw his head back and looked at the ceiling. He needed to calm down, whether that was Amy’s idea or not. Throwing a temper tantrum was no way to run a business, and certainly not a way to assert his authority over an administrative assistant. Especially not one as maddening as Amy. He closed his eyes and sat without saying a thing for a couple of minutes. He focused on his breathing and slowing his heart rate. Amy wasn’t his enemy, he told himself. The enemy was the empty slate of projects that Buen Dia faced. She had merely pulled off a major coup that should make him happy to have her on the team.

But then, she was leaving. She had already quit. So maybe, this was the best of both worlds: he got a project that would be envy of the town’s developers, and she was no longer going to threaten his business.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. She looked both relaxed and sad. She met his eyes and held them. He was torn between an intense love and an intense fear.

Wait a minute! Did he just admit to himself that he loved her? He squinted his eyes in pain at the thought. Loving a woman like Amy was a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe it already had happened.

Without a word, Rick got up, concentrating on the idea that he was leaving his confusion behind in the chair in her room, and returned to his office. He had work to do, and nothing said he had to think about Marlena Benavides de Pascal today. He needed to hire his new COO and finish the negotiations on the Movie Colony property. Marlena could wait. He’d get to her when things calmed down.

He picked up the phone and called the golf pro who wanted to come to work for him and offered him the job. Then he called his mother and asked her to meet with him for dinner.

~

Rick hung up the phone. His mother would meet him for dinner, and while he didn’t expect it would be fun, after the nasty exchange with Amy, he figured things couldn’t get much worse. It had been one of the ugliest days of his life, and he wasn’t even sure how it had happened. Here, he’d just gotten a letter offering him a chance to develop the most coveted property in Palm Springs, and instead of rejoicing and thanking Amy for making it possible, he’d driven her away.

Sandra called in on the intercom.

“Two things, boss,” she said. “One, Amy just left. Looks like for good. That’s too bad, or at least I think that’s too bad, and I’m guessing you do, too. And secondly, there’s a guy here who says he has an appointment to talk with you. Should I send him in?”

“Who is it?” Rick threw open the calendar on his desk and looked down the day’s list of things he had intended to work on. There was no appointment listed. Perhaps Amy had made one and forgot to tell him.

“He won’t say.”

“Well, tell him I’m busy, I don’t have an appointment with anyone today. If he won’t say what he wants, just ask him to leave.”

“Okay, boss, I’ll try.”

A minute later, Sandra’s voice squawked over the box with new urgency.

“Sorry boss. He’s coming back. He won’t take no—”

At that moment, Rick’s door slammed open, and his father stood before him.

Shaken by Rick’s reaction to Marlena’s letter, Amy decided she had better go right away. She packed her meager personal belongings and carried the box to the car. There wasn’t much; she had been there only a total of three weeks.

It was the shortest job Amy had held in Palm Springs, and sadly, she thought, it was also the best job. Maybe she only thought that because she hadn’t had time to get tired of it or bored. Or maybe it was because she was working with Rick.

She walked back into the front lobby and said goodbye to a shocked and perplexed Sandra.

“I thought you were going to be really good at this,” Sandra whined. “And I was sure you had something going with Rick. Why do you have to leave?”

“That’s probably why,” Amy said, “I overstepped some boundaries. I hope you find someone else soon.” She bowed her head and walked out without talking with anyone else in the office.

Driving back to her apartment, she put a set of headphones in her ears and used voice command to dial Rob’s home number. She left a message telling him she would be moving to L.A. a little earlier than planned, and she’d explain as soon as she got there the next day. Then she called Katie.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” she said as Katie answered.

“Good news first.” Katie decided for her.

“Okay. I’m done working at Buen Dia right now. Just left.”

“That’s good news? What’s the bad news?”

“I’m done working at Buen Dia. Just left.” Amy caught herself choking on the words.

“Oh, honey!” Katie moaned loudly. “I’ll come over right away. Are you at home?”

“No, but on my way. Please come.”

Amy was barely inside her condo when the doorbell rang, and without waiting for permission, Katie burst into the apartment.

“What happened?” she asked, holding her arms wide to take Amy in her embrace.

Amy frowned, and then tears poured down her cheeks. She cried for the next three hours, at times with Katie’s arms wrapped around her, and at times standing in the kitchen pouring herself sequential glasses of wine. By the time Katie left around eight o’clock that night, she had quit crying, and was anesthetized to the point she couldn’t feel much of anything.

And she decided: that’s the way she wanted to be for the foreseeable future.

~

The next day, Amy awoke with a sloppy hangover, but she told herself she felt better for the simple reason that the confusion of what to think about her job and her attraction for Rick were no longer going to concern her. Even with all the disappointment that she expected to feel over the next few weeks as she tried to replace the best job of her life with something even half as good, at least she knew where she stood with Rick and with Buen Dia. Nowhere. It was, finally, time to accept the inevitable and settle for a life with Rob—for as long as it lasted.

She packed most of her clothes in three large suitcases, leaving some summer outfits and her swimming suit in the closet and dresser. She emptied out the refrigerator except for the condiments on the shelves inside the doors. It would be at least a couple of weeks before she and Rob returned for a Palm Springs weekend get-away. She took the trash down to the big bins on the ground floor, and called the newspaper to stop delivery. When she felt steady enough to drive, she delivered two small houseplants to Katie’s house and left them on her front doorstep, and she stopped at the post office to fill out a change of address form.

Rob sounded cheerful but also slightly reserved when he returned her call from the night before. He had just finished his morning news show. She told him she had quit her job and would be driving to L.A. immediately.

“Really?” He sounded surprised.

“You don’t sound too happy about this,” she said, hearing the hesitation in his voice.

“No, no,” he said, but he missed a beat. He cleared his throat and started over. “This is really good news. Things have started to improve a bit here for me, for sure, but I’m glad you’re ready to come over. We’ll just see how it goes.”

“Well, I’m sure it will take a bit of adjustment,” she said. What did “see how it goes” mean?

“Sure. Anyway, I’m back on the air in two hours, and I’ve got to meet with the newsroom now. But you’ll be here by the time I get home. If you want, just wait at the cocktail lounge next door. I’ll find you there.”

Amy wished he could have simply left a key to his condo with the neighbors or under a mat so she wouldn’t have to cool her heels waiting for him. Perhaps, she decided, it would be better if she just waited in Palm Springs and took off a couple of hours later. She put her purse and the few things she hadn’t yet packed in the car by the door, and stretched out on the living room couch to take a nap and, she hoped, sleep off a bit more of her hangover. She’d call Rob once she left for L.A., and tell him that she was held up by traffic and wouldn’t be able get there until mid-afternoon.

Before she fell asleep, she called her mother to warn her she was coming to town.

“What happened to your job there?” her mother asked. “I thought that was going well. Did you quit?”

“Mom, let me be blunt. I made a big mistake. I slept with the boss.”

“Oh,” her mother sounded shocked, but then she gained her usual cynical composure. “Well, I guess that’s one way to succeed.”

“Or not,” Amy said. “In any case, it’s over and so is the job. Rob didn’t sound terribly excited about my coming to L.A., so if it turns out he’s sleeping with bimbos again, maybe I can come and live with you for a short time.”

With that back-up plan in place, she pulled one of the perfect decorator pillows she had carefully chosen for the condo two years before, stuffed it under her head, and fell asleep. What woke her up again three hours later wasn’t a call from Rob, wondering where she was; it was the insistent sound of the doorbell.