Jason went back to the paperwork on his desk. “I already saw to it that Gerald sent her home.”
Glen hesitated at the door. “Risk management would advise you not to date someone on staff. So would our lawyers.”
He’d had a few hours to think about that fact.
“Rachel said the same thing.”
“She’s a smart woman.”
And beautiful, and witty . . . and someone he wanted to know better.
“Their advice isn’t going to stop you,” Glen said.
“Not this time.”
God, she loved Google. Cosmo, eHarmony, Insider . . . there wasn’t a magazine or website that didn’t weigh in on why you shouldn’t date your boss.
He holds power over you, he overlooks your faults . . . your colleagues will hate you.
Oh, yeah . . . one more tiny, itty-bitty thing.
You’ll lose your job.
Fired.
Or be forced to quit.
No matter how you spun that bottle, dating your boss was a recipe for a last place in line at the unemployment office.
Rachel tucked her feet under her on the couch and watched the rain outside her front window.
Owen was at school, not due home until three. She should probably be painting, or removing the casing around the door that attacked her. Something. Instead she stared at the drops of water falling from the sky, contemplating her life, which was stupid. She’d only known Jason for a few days.
It didn’t matter that he was the only man who had turned her head in close to a year. Wait . . . more like a year and a half.
What did she know about him, anyway? Aside from the driving himself into a ditch, or his thoughtful thank-you gifts?
He was gorgeous. She knew that.
Rachel shook her head as if her brain was an Etch A Sketch that would remove the image of him.
She tapped her finger against her knee.
What did she know about him?
Jason Fairchild.
She jumped up from the couch, caught herself when her head swam, then moved with a little more caution to grab her laptop from the dining room table.
Once settled, she googled again.
She’d googled potential dates in the past, but never . . . and she did mean never . . . had there been so much information about one person who was interested in her.
He had a Wikipedia page.
Rachel closed her eyes. How could anyone who had their own Internet encyclopedia page be interested in dating her?
She started there.
CEO of Fairchild Charters, which he owned jointly with his two brothers. Yeah, yeah . . . she knew all that.
Net worth . . .
Rachel rubbed her eyes. How could anyone who needed a ride from her be worth that many zeros?
He’d taken over the role of CEO after the unexpected death of his parents. Rachel found herself following the bouncing ball of Beverly and Marcus Fairchild.
They weren’t even sixty, and both of them fell out of the sky while on a short flight in bad weather. Some reports suggested a lightning strike, others said pilot error. The brothers argued against anything their father could have done to cause the plane to crash.
She found a picture of the Fairchild brothers standing over their parents’ graves at a funeral.
A tear dropped off her cheek. Jason stared forward, while Glen, the man she’d met today, had his arm around the youngest son, Trent. Her gaze found Jason again. Chin high, his eyes glazed with loss. The picture had been taken eight years before.
Sadly, Rachel understood death all too well.
She moved on.
The information on Jason’s personal life was limited to appearances at charity and corporate events. Most of the time he arrived solo, or on occasion he would have a date that consisted of a “family friend” or “colleague.” He wasn’t one to have the paparazzi following him, so Rachel found herself back on his Wikipedia page.
He lived in Connecticut. She knew that.
His philanthropic efforts were for orphaned children, and the company was actively working with Borderless Doctors and Organ Transfers. She had questions about the latter part of that equation. Why was this something she had to look up to hear about? Wouldn’t Fairchild Charters want to advertise that information? A company with a heart . . . literally? She wondered just how much money the company she worked for gave up for these efforts.
She bounced around again, this time on social media. She hashtagged Fairchild Charters. The usual shout-outs came from passengers who weren’t used to flying in private jets, friends of those who were paying the bill. Most of this she’d seen while doing her research on the company’s marketing. She added Borderless Doctors to her search and found a few old splashes of information, mainly about Trent Fairchild and his wife, Monica. For the next hour she read the media’s take on their story, starting with a tragedy in Jamaica and ending in Trent being the first of the Fairchild brothers to get married. She wanted to know more about that.
The front door opened, pulling her out of her research.
“What are you doing home?” she asked Owen.
“Ahh.” He looked around as if she’d asked something crazy. “School’s out. What are you doing home?”
“It’s early . . .” Only the time on her computer said it was after three. Apparently the Fairchild family did a good job of keeping her busy all afternoon. “Oh.”
“Why are you home? Get fired?”
She jerked. “No. Of course not! Why would you ask such a thing?”
“I was joking.” Owen blew past her, straight to the kitchen.
Her heart raced at the mere mention of getting canned. “I wasn’t feeling well.”
“And you look like crap.”
She scowled. “I should probably be telling you not to talk that way.”
He laughed. “Yeah, probably.”
She heard the pantry door open, the rustling of paper, suggesting junk food. “How about an apple?”
Owen laughed as he left the kitchen and ran up the stairs to his bedroom with a bag of chips and a can of soda.
“I suck at this mom thing.”
In an effort to make up for her lacking parenting skills, Rachel cooked something that required more than boiling water. While she wouldn’t be winning any culinary awards anytime soon, her chicken casserole had a fair amount of vegetables that should counter some of the junk that sustained Owen’s metabolism.
The pain in her head had eased as the day went on, even though the bruise was at its peak. Or so she hoped. Either way, she was going to work in the morning and went to bed early to ensure she had enough rest. Once in bed, she took a minute to check her own personal social media pages. The usual kitten and kid pictures littered her timeline. There weren’t many personal messages, even after she posted the picture of the snow she’d managed to get through over the weekend. No, it was as if her life in California never existed. She reminded herself that her closest friend was gone, and the time before Emily’s death was buried in her illness. Fostering friendships to withstand a cross-country life hadn’t been a priority. So people forgot about her. To be fair, she wasn’t going out of her way to keep in close contact with those back home either. She’d hoped that while she was clicking around on her media pages, someone would pop up who would spark a conversation, and she could vent about her current crazy life.
That didn’t happen, and instead of finding a friend to talk to, her mood plunged further down.
Loneliness had a cousin named self-pity. And she was a bitch. Picking up the phone to talk to Julie about her dilemma was out of the question. Talking about it online was job suicide. Her mom would tell her to date the man so she’d get fired and somehow be forced to move back to California, which couldn’t happen even if Rachel wanted it to. She didn’t have a sister, and her brother, as much as she loved him, lacked the common sense gene. He was three years younger than she was and already had one divorce behind him. Relationship advice wasn’t something she was going to go to Steve for.