Mr. Brandt made a noise in his throat. “You used to take on a lot more. You seem to be slowing down, dear.”
“I believe my clients would say that the work I’m doing for them is both timely and excellent.” Laine squared her shoulders. “I might not be taking as many clients as I did before, but I’ve brought in so many accounts to this firm, and ones with such deep pockets, I think that it’s time for someone else to step up. It isn’t as though you really want my hands on your best accounts anyway.”
“You are taking things very personally,” he said with a shake of his head. “This is business, Laine, pure and simple.”
Laine felt her face growing warm and remembered something Aziz had once told her.
“Everything is personal, Mr. Brandt. Americans love to cut our lives into pieces and pretend that we are impartial and infallible, but it’s just a lie that makes it easier to do want we wanted to do in the first place.” She shrugged. “It’s intensely personal that you don’t give me credit for the work I’ve done, and it is incredibly irrational of you to turn down the amount of money I could bring you if I had proper support.”
Mr. Brandt started to turn red. “Miss McConnell—”
“I’m not a little girl. I’m a woman who graduated at the top of her class at Parsons and was hand-selected by a sheikh of Bahrain to decorate his palatial home.”
“Yes, and I have heard of how you were ‘hand-selected,’” Mr. Brandt said, almost pleased at the turn of phrase.
Laine paused. She pursed her lips, giving him a long stare, and his amusement turned to discomfort.
“You have known me long enough to know that a dance and a few rumors have little to do with how I conduct myself professionally.” Laine clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Even now, I expected better of you than to participate in petty gossip. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded so much that you disregarded me if I hadn’t had so much faith in you as a businessman. I truly expected, for longer than I should have, that working hard here would get me somewhere. It hasn’t. So I have chosen to do good work and to have a life.”
“If you want to continue to do any work here, you can’t expect to shirk your duties!” Mr. Brandt slapped the table angrily.
“You expect me to do ten times the work of everyone else, with none of the credit and half of the pay! And you expect me to do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, or I have somehow failed.” Laine stood and put her hands on her hips. “I once saw working here as a stepping stone, but now I see that you have simply caught my ankle in a trap, and you expect me to be grateful for it!”
“You cannot speak to your boss like that!”
“I’m not. I quit.”
Walking out of his office wasn’t quite as satisfying as nearly breaking Amin’s arm, but it was up there in her top life experiences. Especially since her coworkers had apparently been listening, and a few of the temps were trying to hold back scandalized laughter.
“Tamara, could you get me a box, please? I need to pack up my office,” Laine asked one of them pleasantly.
Maybe being a free agent was too much of a risk. There was a chance she wouldn’t be able to get enough clients on her own to make it work or that the rumors spreading about her had spread too far already. But Laine decided, as she carefully set her pictures into the box, that this was the only reasonable way to end her time here. She’d paid her dues and then some, and she had simply outgrown this place. She wasn’t going to win back her reputation with the measly support she received here.
On her way out, Mr. Brandt had a security guard follow her. She rolled her eyes so hard that she might have sprained them. The guard helped her by carrying an extra box and left her once she was at her car in the parking garage below the building. She packed her things into the back as she hatched her plans for the next few days.
“Hey, Lainey.”
She looked up to see Adrian Ramos waving a thick, leather-bound contact book in front of her face.
“What is that?” she asked. “And what are you doing with the black sheep of the interior decorating world?”
“If you’re looking for company, it’s a list of potential leads that aren’t signed with Brandt Interiors yet.” Ramos flicked his shoulder-length hair back. “If you’re not, I’m out for a smoke.”
Laine crossed her arms and leaned back against her car as she looked at the contact book.
“How do you have that ready? I didn’t even know I was going to quit until today.”
Ramos shrugged. “I think about quitting every time I’m in the room with that fossil of sexism and idiocy. And I can’t say I wouldn’t jump at the chance to have your creative brain on board when I get my own company rolling.”