What Her Dad Doesn't Know(12)

“Come in, come in. How long have you been waiting?”

“Just a few minutes,” I say.

He flashes an annoyed look at his assistant and shakes his head. She quickly stands up and offers to make me some coffee.

“Nevermind that,” Andrew says. “Noelle can raid the fridge in my office.”

He ushers me in, and I can’t help but smile a little. That’ll keep his secretary guessing for a while.

Andrew’s office is amazing. The glass walls extend into here too, and wraps around the corner so that more than half the room feels open to the outdoors. We’re so high up that instead of concrete and steel, I can see the mountains off in the distance, and an endless blue sky. Fluffy clouds like cotton candy hang high in the air. Wow, talk about inspiring, I think in awe as I take it all in. Andrew’s gone to the right, where a mini kitchen has been built.

“Do you want anything?” he asks.

“Water’s fine,” I say as I step towards the window. I can see tiny people and toy cars whizzing around below us. “This view is incredible.”

“Isn’t it? When you’re at the top of the world, it feels like you can do anything.” He opens up a bottle of sparkling water and pours it for the two of us. “Come and have a seat.”

He guides me over to a beautifully carved mahogany desk. There’s a huge iMac monitor, a few pens in a cup, and a narrow black tie lying on it. He picks up the tie and dumps it into a drawer.

“Sorry,” he says. “I hate the damn things.”

“No worries,” I murmur, but now my eyes are drawn to his chest, where he’d unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. I fought back the urge to help him unbutton the rest of them, seeing just how far the light scattering of chest hair went.

“So, let’s see here.” He clicks on a few things on his computer, then turns to me. “We’ve got a few different positions that you might be interested in but I figure I should ask you what you prefer.”

I drop into the soft leather chair in front of his desk. It’d be a great chair to sink into and relax with a cup of hot cocoa, not discuss business in. I have to work hard to sit up straight in it. I guess that’s a good thing though, because this meeting was supposed to be about my internship and not about undressing my dad’s best friend. I pretend to dig through my purse for a notebook and pen so he can’t see the blush that always shows up on my face.

“Well, I originally went into business so that I could learn how to launch my own jewelry line. But I’m starting to discover that the classes aren’t really meant for that. It’s all about working for or managing a big company. And that doesn’t interest me. At all.”

“You don’t want to expand your jewelry line into a big brand one day?”

“No way,” I say, warming up to my topic. “Drawing it out and getting it manufactured in China or somewhere else has zero appeal to me. I want to be the one who works on it from start to finish. Maybe I could have a few people help me. I wouldn’t mind that so much. But I don’t want to expand so big that I lose touch with the creative process. That just makes me sad to think about.”

“Do you think you can make a living off of that?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe all it will be is a hobby or a side job to what I’ll have to get for a few years. I’m okay with that. I don’t mind working on it at night after I get home, and selling my stuff at a craft market on the weekend. I’m not in it to get rich. I’m doing it because, well, I need to. Making stuff with my hands makes me happy, and I’ll always keep doing it, even if nobody ever buys my stuff. I mean, I think it’s good enough that people will want it. I hope. I just can’t imagine being a cog inside of a big corporation for the rest of my life.”

I falter a little bit. Am I getting sidetracked here? Maybe this isn’t what Andrew’s looking for in an intern. I mean, what do people want in interns anyways besides someone who’s going to follow orders and do whatever the business needs it to? And I’d just shot my mouth off saying how I had no interest in that. I stop talking and glance at him beneath my lashes. Instead of frowning however, Andrew was all smiles.

“You sound just like me,” he says, leaning forward. “Building things up from scratch was always my favourite part too. I wanted to get my hands dirty, know how everything was going, really understand the guts of my company. I know exactly how you’re feeling because that’s where I am at right now too. It’s a hell of a lot harder to extract yourself from it though when you’ve already got it all built up. But don’t worry. I think I know what we can do to make sure you can get the experience you want out of all this Noelle. It’ll be a pleasure to help make that happen for you. In fact, I’m going to get Miranda working on that right now for you.”