Arrogant Playboy(11)
“Your personal life is none of my business.” I wave him away. “Forget I said anything.”
I lift my laptop lid and sign out of my Facebook so I can get back to work. Beckham lingers some more. It’s hard to work with him staring at me like that.
“You’re staring.” I type away, avoiding giving him too much of my attention.
“Why’d you jump earlier anyway?” His arms fold, his shoulder bumped up against the doorframe. “Were you…were you Googling me?”
Narcissist. “Absolutely not.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me.”
“Show me.”
“I will not.”
“It’s a legitimate request, Odessa. If you’re working for me, I want to ensure you’re preoccupied with your job duties and not wasting time researching my personal affairs.”
“First of all, I’m not working for you, I’m working with you. Your company hired me to help. Second of all, you’re the last person on earth I’d be preoccupied with. You’re honestly not my type. At all.”
“Likewise.” He lingers, and I wish he’d get on. “If you weren’t researching me, you should have no issue showing me what you were just doing.”
I could claw that smug look off his infuriatingly handsome face if it wouldn’t cost me this consultancy. Two-hundred dollars per hour times forty hours times three weeks is not worth sacrificing. Not for him.
“It’s personal,” I say, realizing it doesn’t help my case. Everything I say, my protective body language, my apprehension, only serves to fuel his insane notion that I was Googling him. And now it makes me want to Google him because obviously there’s something out there with his name on it or he wouldn’t make such a big deal.
“Everything’s personal.”
“Still not going to show you.”
“Then I stand by my assumption.”
“You do that.” I’m not budging. I don’t have to prove anything to him.
He’s gone before I have a chance to fling some smart mouthed comment back at him. I need to be nicer to him, at least for the sake of making the next three weeks bearable. But it’s so hard to be nice to someone as arrogant and self-assured as Beckham King.
The second I hear his door shut, I Google him.
Chapter Five
BECKHAM
“There you are, you naughty minx.” I lean back in my chair and face the window, watching the blonde in the office across the way saunter around her office and pretend like she doesn’t know I’m watching. We play this game all the time. She bends, fusses with her hair, unbuttons her blouse and nibbles on her finger before crossing and uncrossing her legs. It’s a win-win exchange: she enjoys the attention and I enjoy the view.
After a good six or seven minutes, the blonde leaves her office. The show is over. Back to work.
My inbox is what I like to call organized chaos. I should have Julie do something about it, but she’s already swamped doing all the other things I don’t have time to do.
An hour from now, I’m supposed to report to Peterson Corporation to discuss a partnership with one of the country’s largest fast-food franchisees. David Peterson wants to make his four-hundred plus burger joints run on solar panel energy over the next ten years. He could be a huge client of ours, our biggest yet, and Dane would murder me if I screw it up.
Lucky for him, I’ve got this.
I spent most of this week researching Peterson Corporation and assembling reports and estimates and timelines. I’ve spoken to vendors and ensured supplies are stocked and ready to go should David want to pull the trigger on this today.
I keep an eye on the time as I glance over my notes one last time. A text comes through fifteen minutes later from my driver downstairs. Within the hour, I’m sitting at the head of a fifty-foot conference table on the forty-fourth floor of some downtown high rise. David sits to my left along with three of his associates. They’re all cut from the same cloth: silver hair, black and gray suits, blue and red ties. Frown lines. Pot bellies. They reek of new money and excess, not giving a damn about the fact that their wealth was built on the backs of eight dollar-an-hour burger flippers.
But I’m not here to judge. I’m here to sell the hell out of solar panels.
“Beckham, I’m not sure if you’ve met my partners.” David clears his throat. “Mark Whitaker is our CFO. Daniel Davis is our COO. And Harris Cleveland is our Vice President of Marketing.”
“Good to meet you, gentlemen.” I nod, smoothing my tie flat across my chest, ensuring it’s straight as an arrow. Nothing worse than talking business while looking like a slob. “Shall we start?”