Lucien(3)

Raven grunted and hung up.



Elise stared at the phone and replayed the conversation in her mind. The longer she thought about it, the angrier she became.



Rain pelted the roof of Andersen Corporation’s building and the windows shook as thunder boomed overhead.



Elise picked up a spare pen cap and toyed with it before clamping her teeth down on it and gnawing it to death. “This bites big wankerdoodle,” she complained into her cluttered cubicle. “What was she thinking not to pay her taxes?”



She picked up a folder from the top of the stack she had to muddle through before clocking out and arranged the papers on the tray next to the monitor. “I’ll tell you what she was thinking. ‘Government, I don’t need no stinking government.’”



Elise threw down the mutilated pen cap and grabbed a fresh one. “Ha! It’s all that nonsense preached about at The Guiding Light of Gaia which has brought the tax police down on her.”



She moved the mouse and clicked open the file where she kept all of Luc’s notes on the computer. “Well, Moonbeam, let’s see Gaia get you out of this one.”



A bright burst of lightning flashed outside the window and the lights in the building died as a resounding explosion rocked the corporate office. From somewhere in the middle of the cubicle farm, a co-worker’s blunt, explicit curse reverberated between the walls.



Papers slipped from the tray and floated down into her lap as Donna in the cube next over asked, “Elise, do you smell smoke?”



Lights flickered and the air conditioner groaned back to life.



Elise’s jaw dropped as a tuft of smoke unfurled from her computer. “Oh my goodness.” She looked straight up and said fervently, “I didn’t mean it, Gaia. Honest I didn’t. I’ll never say another bad thing again. Just let me keep the hard drive. Please. I was so close to being finished,” she finished in a pathetic whisper.



“Elise,” Lucien Masters, her boss, called from behind her. “Have you finished the notes from this morning?” He was back from lunch and, more than likely, ready to dictate more changes to his plan for the financial reconstruction of Andersen Corporation.



She swiveled in her chair and gazed up into his clean shaven face. The fear she felt must have been written all over her expression, because his blue-green, grayish eyes moved, looking over her shoulder to the sizzling computer. She cringed inwardly as his relaxed appearance transformed into his patented Lucifer look. His attention fastened on her face and his jaw tensed, along with his shoulders, his hands, and in all likelihood the rest of his body.



“Tell me it’s not as bad as it looks,” he ground out.



She hesitantly lifted her shoulders and picked up the papers from her lap, holding them with a white knuckled grip. “It’s not as bad as it looks. We’ve still got the hard copies.”



There was a loud crack from behind her, then a hiss.



“It’s gonna blow,” Donna cried.



Luc lunged forward and yanked Elise bodily out of the chair. “Someone get a fire extinguisher before the sprinklers go off,” he ordered. He snatched up the folders from the desk and thrust them into Elise’s arms. “Not a word,” he warned.



Her knees shook and she clutched the folders to her stomach then sank to the ground. Her mother owed five hundred thousand dollars or more to the government. Her brother was selling his motorcycle. Her computer was on fire. Her boss was mad at her. And Elise had lost six months’ worth of work on a project which Luc had informed her yesterday would be completed within a few days.



Life couldn’t get much worse than this.





“Elise, where are the notes from the meeting with Hayworth?”



On my fried computer, she nearly answered aloud. “They’re under that stack over there,” she said, pointing to a pile on the corner of his desk.



“I looked there,” he said. Luc ran a frustrated hand through his chestnut brown hair and cursed under his breath. He pushed back his chair and surged to his feet, then leaned over the desk to rifle through stacks of folders.



Elise set aside his laptop computer and went to help him. “I put it with the files from your Tuesday talk with Smithers.”



Luc spared her a glance. “In the same folder?”



“No,” she explained patiently. “It’s in one of its own. I know I brought it in here. It was on my desk before Gaia destroyed by computer.”



“It wasn’t Gaia. It was lightning. And it wasn’t your fault,” he muttered. “So don’t start apologizing again. You heard Jim explain why it happened to your computer and no one else’s.”