I was under no illusion that Jessica would know something of my reputation. Unfortunately for me, I was like Zuckerberg or Gates or Jobs. People knew my name now. Unlike them, I also had a rep.
Wrinkling my nose as I realized she’d asked me about my home, I murmured, “Florida.”
“You’re from Florida?” she blurted out, apparently bewildered at the prospect of me being from the South.
I frowned, part-amused and part-wary by her astonishment. “Why are you so shocked?”
“I don’t know.” She turned a pensive gaze my way. “Where are the Hawaiian shirts and flip flops?”
“I buried them in my backyard a long time ago,” I told her wryly.
She laughed. “Good to know.”
“Yeah, I realized those kinds of luxuries were no longer in my future. I pull out the Hawaiian shirts on the 4th of July for twenty minutes, but then I revert to type and go back to living in my suits again.”
Laughter burst from her and as it faded, it twisted into a grin that, Lord help me, did something to me. I wasn’t ashamed to admit it, but I was surprised.
But then, she’d been surprising me all day.
That first glimpse of her hair?
Hell, I’d felt like a baby who couldn’t stop playing with his mother’s dangly earrings, or a cat who was fascinated by a piece of string.
I’d wanted to curl my fist in that hair, feel the strands slip against my fingers, have the silk cascade over my body as she kissed my chest, heading down, down, until I could feel it on my upper thighs.
My cock hardened at the prospect, and I willed it to behave. Not only because she screamed vulnerability either.
I knew hiring temps was an unusual thing for Derek to do. We, ordinarily, just transferred people around when someone went on maternity leave or a member of staff fell ill and couldn’t work for an extended period of time. But that was before the great harassment case of 2017.
Of the twelve vice presidents I had managing my company, nine of them were new this year. Why?
We’d just been dragged to hell and back by lawsuits thanks to those nine schmucks who’d routinely abused, verbally and emotionally, their PAs.
It pissed me off that I’d inadvertently created a toxic environment where that kind of thing could go down. But those nine had been overprivileged, self-important assholes.
I was self-made, and until last year, most of my VPs hadn’t been.
In the ongoing shuffle, staff were in short supply, so we’d been hiring temps from a certain agency who specialized in tech/law, and had their people sign the most iron-clad of NDAs. Though the word temp didn’t indicate a sense of permanence, we were willing to hire on their staff, most of whom specialized in something, for extended periods of time.
Was it efficient?
No.
Was it costly?
Yes.
But I blamed myself for the way my management had been acting, and knew that I deserved the punishment. Financial or otherwise.
Some days, I wanted to beat on myself for having failed to spot the signs. It was worse than when I was young and was trying to protect the women around me and failed. As Avalon was my baby, I felt it should have been inviolate, and yet, I’d learned it wasn’t.
That pissed me off more than anything else.
It had, also, encouraged me to hire more female execs.
I’d unintentionally hired all males for the top roles. Not because I was a schmuck who didn’t believe in equality. Because that was just BS. Some of the smartest people I knew had ovaries. But the VPs I’d acquired over the years had been amassed out of deals and mergers with other companies.
Only their behavior, or lack thereof, had enabled me to get rid of them. They’d breached their contracts and had null and voided any protection offered to them by harassing female members of staff. Still, if I’d known what they were doing, I’d have taken the hit to the company’s bank balance to get rid of the bastards before they could hurt some innocent PA.