Hot Boss - Anne Marsh Page 0,3
ounces of liquid are in her oversize, llama-shaped coffee cup. Not part of the killer VC image, you say? Just wait until she looks at you. Brown eyes, long lashes, perfectly applied makeup (she did mine once on a drunken college night and I looked equally good) but you can tell right away that she’s taking you in, performing a lightning-quick analysis that would make a NASA supercomputer jealous. Hazel lives for numbers. She’s blunt and fact-oriented, and the shit that comes out of her mouth would be unbelievable except that it’s also invariably true. She’s smart and funny, and early on she nominated me to be the pretty face of the office.
Her reason? People like me.
She, on the other hand, never won Prom Queen, was never picked first for kickball and never received a dozen secret valentines. Hazel can rub people the wrong way, particularly when she’s explaining why she’s right and you’re wrong. In the Hazel-verse, Hazel’s always right and she’s perfectly willing to explain at excruciating length why that’s so. Still, Hazel’s good people. If you’d told me ten years ago that she’d be my best friend and business partner, I’d have told you to lay off the pot brownies. She stormed a talk I was giving at UC Santa Cruz on statistical modeling and IPO valuation prediction, we argued about my methods (I still maintain I was right and Hazel was sadly deluded) and then we discovered unexpected common ground in a small tech company we’d both invested in. It had IPO’d while we’d been arguing, and we were both officially millionaires. She’d promptly offered to buy me a drink or a piece of cake because we were either the two smartest people in the world...or the craziest. And either way, we deserved cake.
The jury’s still out on the crazy, by the way.
Ever since that celebratory slice of red velvet goodness, however, Hazel and I have been friends and business partners. We’ve conquered mountains together and my life doesn’t work without her in it. She’s always been one of the guys, a good sport, smart, driven. She’s all the adjectives—and her amazing business abilities are the cherry on the sundae of awesomeness that is Hazel. Tact, however, is not one of her assets.
She sets down her llama mug on the coaster on her desk. “Are you taking Molly out to celebrate? Or are you just staying in and having wild monkey sex?”
They say married couples have sex ninety-eight times a year, while single people score only forty-nine times.
Jealous?
Hazel and I kept count last year. Let’s just say that she’s both single and a less-than-gracious loser.
“You bet, and you bet.”
I grab my phone and text Molly. Home soon.
Soon is a relative term, of course—traffic sucks between Menlo Park and Santa Cruz. But I don’t want to wait to share our good news. Plus, I have big, celebratory plans.
Just in case Mrs. Jack is otherwise occupied, I fire off another text:
Santa Jack has the following goodies in his bag of presents if you promise to be very, very bad:
A: Vacation home in Bora Bora.
B: Yacht.
C: Donate a building to your fave Ivy League school and then our kids are a shoo-in.
D: All of the above.
Hazel plants her butt on my desk and steals a glance at my phone. I’d like to tell you that we’re working on her sense of boundaries, but she’s a hopeless case. I’ve learned not to sext at the office, and she’s learned not to read my texts out loud. Compromise is important.
She smacks my shoulder playfully. “You don’t have kids.”
“Not yet, but we’re planning to get to work on that.”
In fact, tonight seems like the perfect time to get started. Molly and I have discussed starting a family, and our plan calls for baby-making this year, with a pregnancy by next year if Mother Nature is on board.
“A plan.” Hazel sounds dubious, although she should know just how well my plans work out. It’s no accident that she and I are billionaires.
“Babies don’t just happen.” I mean, they obviously do, but Molly and I are going to have a planned pregnancy so that Mom and her Mini-Me are as happy and healthy as possible.
Hazel shakes her head. “Even ignoring the obvious issue with your logic, I feel the need to point out there are numerous ways your plan can derail. Male fertility decreases with age. As does semen volume. I can get you percentages on that—or book a honeymoon suite.”
I gently lay a