shook his head. “I came over to ask for a favor. I could use your organizational skills.” He looked back over the table and the frown continued to mar his forehead. “Actually Mad Rob needs your skills. We’re setting up the office and need to hire someone to run it, but right now, the entire office is a mess and the three of us are useless when it comes to organizing something like that. But we can’t have the whole office in disarray for interviewing or else no one would want to work for us. I was wondering if maybe you could help.”
Relief surged. Organization, the perfect diversion. “Sure, is the office at the airport?”
Chris nodded.
“When would you like me to do it?”
He gave a sheepish shrug. “As soon as possible? Maybe?”
She gave a light giggle, mainly in relief that they’d managed to move on to a different subject. She couldn’t imagine how overwhelmed the guys had to be when faced with organizing a whole office from scratch. This was definitely more her area of expertise than theirs. “What about tonight? I don’t have anything going on besides organizing some more self-defense classes.”
“Tonight would actually be perfect. Thank you so much, Julie. Have you eaten yet?”
“Um, no.” She’d forgotten to do that again when she got home, she’d been so caught up with organizing additional Krav Maga classes.
Chris pressed his lips together as he glanced down at her loose clothes. She knew she’d lost some weight lately and she didn’t need him questioning her anymore, so she beat him to the punch. “How about we pick up some barbeque to take with us? I’ll let you treat since I’m your slave labor for the evening.”
He gave her a wide smile. “Okay, that sounds right. Are you ready? We can take my truck.”
“Sure.”
* * *
Chris groaned as he turned on the lights to their new office space. It looked even worse tonight than it had this afternoon when he’d been here with Colton and Jake. How were they going to transform this into a working office so that they could interview by Friday or Monday at the latest? It was already Wednesday.
The office space was divided into three separate spaces: a reception area with glassed windows that looked out over their hangar and the Mad Rob planes, a large office with room for two desks, and a conference room. The only items in any of the rooms that were distinguishable were the conference table and three desks, two for the office and one for reception. There was also a chest-high reception counter. Everything else including chairs, shelves, electronics and office supplies were in the multitude of boxes spread throughout the rooms.
The guys had spent the last couple of days painting the rooms to match the paint job on the De Havilland, their main plane. The lower half of the walls were white, the upper half painted red, and the two halves were divided by a narrow black stripe that zigzagged like lightening partway across the room. It was a very cool effect and gave the once sterile-looking office an edgy look.
Julie immediately noticed the new paint. She cooed appropriately. “I like it. It matches the plane, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “Yeah, we’re trying to create an overall branding to our look and that color scheme is the first thing everyone sees. We want them to connect the look with Mad Rob.”
“Are you all working with a marketing company?”
“No.” He shook his head ruefully. “This is all Colton. He has very definite ideas about how he wants the company to look. Luckily, at least so far, Jake and I agree and like what he’s come up with.” It was just a matter of time before Colton and he disagreed and butted heads over something, but for right now he was just enjoying the peace. He realized a lot of Colton’s bliss was because of his relationship with Penelope.
Julie inspected the rooms and the mess of boxes. “So where would you like me to start?”
“Let’s start in the conference room. It has that big table in there where we can open up things and spread out as we need to. I’ll start putting together shelves and chairs and you can start unpacking the office supplies if that will work for you. I know there’s a box somewhere, maybe the office, of wire items like ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays. You may want to start there so you have a place to put stuff as you