her laugh again, which pretty much solidified his resolve to stop talking. The less she laughed like that, the better.
“We weren’t expecting you,” Val said conversationally and indicated the seat next to him, then waited until Laurel slid into it before taking his own. “Though we’re impressed with your enthusiasm. Right, Xavier?”
Figured that the second after he’d vowed to shut his mouth, Val dragged him right back into the conversation.
“That’s one way to put it,” he muttered. “I would have liked to schedule an interview.”
“Oh, well, of course that would have been the appropriate thing to do,” she admitted with an eye roll that shouldn’t have been as appealing as it was. “But I’m so very interested in the job that I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. So I thought, why wait?”
Why, indeed? “What about directing a food pantry excites you so much?”
“Oh, all of it,” she answered quickly. “I love to help people in need and what better way than through one of the most basic fundamentals? Food is a necessity. I want to feed people.”
“Well said,” Val murmured.
Since his brother could have written that speech word for word, Xavier wasn’t surprised he’d been moved by her passion. It sounded a little too memorized to Xavier’s ear, and his gut had been screaming at him from the moment he’d first handed Val Laurel Dixon’s résumé.
Something about her was off. He didn’t like her. Nor did he like the way she unsettled him. If he had to constantly brace himself to be in her presence, how could they work together?
“Your experience is on the sparse side,” Xavier said and tapped the résumé between them. “What did you do at the women’s shelter that will segue into a services manager at a food pantry?”
Laurel launched into a well-rehearsed spiel about her role, highlighting her project management skills, and wrapped it up by getting into a spirited back-and-forth with Val about some of her ideas for new outreach.
His brother was sold on Laurel Dixon. Xavier could tell. Val had smiled through the entire exchange. Sure enough, after the candidate left, Val crossed his arms and said, “She’s the one.”
“She is so not the one.”
“What? Why not?” Val dismissed that with a wave without waiting for an answer. “She’s perfect.”
“Then you hire her. In three months. I’m still in charge here and I say I want a different candidate.”
“You’re being stubborn for no reason,” Val shot back, and some of the goodwill that had sprung up between them as they navigated the Great Inheritance Switch—as Xavier had been calling it in his head—began to slide away.
His caution had nothing to do with stubbornness and he had plenty of reasons. “She’s got no experience.”
“Are you kidding? Everything she did at the women’s shelter translates. Maybe not as elegantly as you might like, but you only have to deal with her for three months. After that, I’ll be the one stuck with her if she’s the wrong candidate. Humor me.”
Xavier crossed his arms. “There’s something not quite right about Laurel Dixon. I can’t put my finger on it. You didn’t sense that, too?”
“No. She’s articulate and enthusiastic.” The look Val shot him was part sarcasm and part pity. “Are you sure you’re not picking up on the fact that she’s not an emotionless robot like you?”
Ha. As if he hadn’t heard that one before. But obviously Val had no clue about what really went on beneath Xavier’s skin. Xavier just had a lot of practice at hiding what was going on inside. Edward LeBlanc had frowned on weakness, and in his mind, emotions and weakness went hand in hand.
“Yeah, that must be it.”
Val rolled his eyes at Xavier’s refusal to engage. “This is not the corporate world. We don’t hire people based on how well they rip apart their prey here in nonprofit land. You need someone to replace Marjorie, like, yesterday. Unless you have a line of other options hidden away in the potato closet, you’ve got your new hire.”
The damage was done. Now Xavier couldn’t readily discount Laurel Dixon as a candidate, though the barb had hit its mark in a wholly different way than Val probably even realized. No, this wasn’t the corporate world and his raging uncertainty might well be rearing its ugly head here.
His father had done a serious number on him with this switcheroo. Xavier was only just coming to realize how many chunks of his confidence were missing as a result. How much of his inability to take an applicant at face value had to do with that?
Everything was suspect as a result.
“I’ll deal with Laurel Dixon if that pleases your majesty,” he told Val. “But I’m telling you up front. I don’t trust her. She’s hiding something and if it comes back to bite you, I’m going to remind you of this conversation.”
Odds were good it was going to come back to bite Xavier long before it affected Val, who would leave to go back to the world of sane, logical, corporate politics in a few minutes. Xavier, on the other hand, would be working side by side for the next three months with a new services manager who made his skin hum when he looked at her.
He had a feeling he’d be spending a lot of time avoiding Laurel Dixon in order to protect himself, because that was what he did. No one was allowed to get under his skin and no one got an automatic place on Xavier’s list of people he trusted.
Hopefully she liked hard work and thrived on opportunities to prove herself. Xavier was going to give her both.
When Laurel Dixon had decided to go undercover at the LeBlanc Charities food pantry to investigate claims of fraud, she maybe should have picked a different position than services manager. Who would have thought they’d actually hire her, though?
They were supposed to admire her enthusiasm and give her a lesser position. One that gave her plenty of access to the people she needed to interview on the down low and plenty of time to do it. Instead, she’d been handed the keys to the kingdom—which should have put her in a great place to dig into LBC’s books. Donors needed to know that LBC wasn’t on the up-and-up, that they were only pretending to help people in need while the thieves lined their own pockets.
Except thus far she’d had zero time to even think about how to expose the charity’s fraudulent practices.
Of course, a lot of that had to do with one infuriating man named Xavier LeBlanc.
Just because he arrived at LBC at the ungodly hour of 6:00 a.m. and worked through lunch didn’t mean the rest of the world had to do the same. But they’d all done it, Laurel included, though she didn’t suffer from the same sense of anxiety the other staffers seemed to feel around their interim boss.
But what was she supposed to do, stroll in at nine and draw attention to herself? She’d taken this job under false pretenses. And she couldn’t back out now.
Ugh.
