type of thing.”
“Ah, yes. The paper trail,” he said, returning to reality and not bothering to hide his bitterness. But he sat and accepted the pen and file folder she handed to him.
Arianna “the piranha” DuBose was no doubt furiously adding as much as she could to the paper trail that would indicate he should be fired.
The trail would not include certain important information: that Arianna had lied, backstabbed and schmoozed her way into her current position as his boss; that she was extremely threatened by Dom and didn’t want him around to expose her or show her up; and that she’d deliberately picked a fight with him so she could get him some “help” for his “negative attitude” and “tendencies toward insubordination.”
He shouldn’t have fallen for her tricks. Damn it, he knew better. What had gotten into him? Why had he let her anger him? And why hadn’t he made sure someone else was in the room during the entire standoff?
The only blessing Dom could count was that Arianna-the-piranha hadn’t accused him of sexual harassment.
Still, he was here in Jane O’Toole’s office to be evaluated—probably to commence “sensitivity training,” anger management and who knew what else. General kowtowing, he supposed.
In the meantime, he had a market analysis due, the regulators breathing down his neck and the licensing agreements to sign off on. Arianna would be nosing around every step of the way, erasing the dots from his i’s and smudging the crosses on his t’s. Anything she could use to trump up a case against him—she’d latch on to it with those flesh-eating fangs of hers.
Dom realized that Jane O’Toole was saying something to him. “What?” he asked gruffly. “I didn’t catch that.”
His eyes went from her mouth to her neckline, where she was fidgeting with—hoo, boy—a string of pearls. Again his male radar perked up. Hmm…
As soon as she followed his gaze, she dropped them as if they were hot.
He lifted a corner of his mouth. He didn’t mean it as a sneer exactly, but she seemed to take it as one, since she stiffened.
She was extremely attractive, with a mess of dark curly hair. This was cut at a sensible chin length and offset by huge brown eyes. Her cheekbones weren’t high but soft and rounded, blending into a surprisingly strong square chin.
She had plenty of interesting curves, too, though they were mostly hidden by a dark green pantsuit. He had a suspicion that lush, heavy breasts nestled against the lucky lining of her jacket. If Dom had met her in a bar—not that he usually went to bars, except to play pool—well, hell, he might have stiffened, too. So to speak.
His eyes strayed once again to the pearls at her neck, and he fought off an image of them in a darker, duskier place—attached to a scrap of silk.
“I asked you if you’d like a cup of coffee, Mr. Sayers.” The flush in her cheeks had spread down to her neck now, providing an interesting background for her pearls.
“Coffee would be great,” he said. He accepted it with thanks, omitting sugar or cream. He focused on the hot, black stuff and not Jane O’Toole’s possible tastes in lingerie. Grow up, Sayers. But hell, he felt all of thirteen, having been sent to the principal’s office.
Ms. O’Toole mixed her own coffee with as many cancer-causing substances as she could scrape together and stirred the disgusting brew with a long stick, which she tossed into the trash. “Why don’t we go into my office?”
The other two women involved in the kinky undies discussion—a six-foot Harley babe and a prim china doll—had vanished behind their respective doors. Dom shrugged and followed Principal O’Toole into her den of discipline. They might as well get on with his knuckle rapping.
“Have a seat,” she told him. She walked to a filing cabinet and bent over the second drawer, retrieving a sheet of paper from a manila folder. “This is a permission form—I always videotape my first session with a client. Then I’ll make a couple of tapes midway through our course together and one during the very last meeting. It’s just to document progress. I don’t release them to anyone, under any circumstances. But I do need you to sign off on the form.”
Dom folded his arms across his chest and told her he didn’t like the idea at all.
“Why not?” she asked calmly. “Is there something about being taped that threatens you?”
“No, Ms. O’Toole. I don’t feel threatened. But I would like to discuss a few issues with you and I don’t necessarily want them on record.”
She sat in her cushy leather chair opposite him and crossed her legs. Then she folded her hands across a leather-bound notebook in her lap. A pen emerged from the bundle of fingers, punctuating her air of cool disapproval like an exclamation point. Damn Arianna. He’d already been tried, judged and found lacking. But all Jane O’Toole said was, “Fine.”
“I want you to know that I’m not a behavioral problem,” he said. He could hear the anger in his own voice; saw her note it. “I do not have insubordination issues. I am not a chauvinist jerk who is unable to work for a woman. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” she said. “So now that you’ve told me what you’re not, how about telling me what you are?”
“I’m a red-blooded American guy who doesn’t enjoy being manipulated by a power-hungry bitch.”
Her jaw dropped open and he heard her teeth click together as she shut it. Gotcha.
“Mr. Sayers, I’ve been called a lot of things during the course of my career, but that is a first.”
“I meant Arianna DuBose, not you!”
“I’m relieved to hear it. So tell me more about your working relationship with Ms. DuBose.”
A nice open-ended question. Gave him lots of rope to hang himself. Well, what the hell. He already had. “Ms. DuBose is an ambitious sociopath, and I happened to get in her way.”
“I see.”
“No, I don’t think you do. I was in line for a promotion and should have been a shoo-in. Suddenly the other regional managers were eyeing me uneasily, and Arianna got the job. Now she’s got it in for me. She wants me gone.”
Jane O’Toole took a careful sip of coffee and set her cup down on a side table. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, unconsciously exhibiting lean, muscular calves. “So you’re battling a certain resentment that Ms. DuBose was promoted ahead of you. I can see how that would make you angry.”
She didn’t believe him. Of course she didn’t. It all sounded like sour grapes to his own ears. And paranoid, to boot. Dom felt tension growing in every muscle, fresh anger seeping through his veins. Arianna had him just where she wanted him: by the short and curlies. But by God, he wasn’t going to let her win. He had to get through to this O’Toole woman.
Charm. Where had his charm gone hiding? He almost growled out loud. Due to the sheer injustice of the situation, his charm had been squished beneath his heel like an old piece of gum. But he’d better figure out how to scrape some off and resurrect it into a nice big pink bubble, or Jane would unwittingly help Arianna destroy his career.
Ugh.
