asked.
Jon chuckled. “I use everything you two do as an indicator of whether or not you could make partner. And I have to tell you both, I haven’t been impressed by the way you handle workplace conflicts. Go find a tree. A nice tree. Bring it back. And don’t kill each other during the process. Is that hard?”
“No,” Kathryn and I said in unison.
Jon nodded and gave the lapels of his suit jacket a sharp and dignified tug. “Good. Finish your coffees and then get out of here.”
He left Kathryn and me alone in the break room. She sighed and brushed past me to pour herself a coffee, something she didn’t usually drink first thing in the morning. She stuck to a rigid routine. She always arrived with a cup of green tea, which she sipped on until around eleven o’clock when she had an apple and a handful of nuts.
Why I knew her routine, I had no idea.
“He’s losing his edge, I think,” I said.
“He’s wasting his resources,” Kathryn added. “We’re the go-to people. We should be in the office, not looking at Christmas trees. Where do you even get real trees anyway?”
“There’s a pop-up market down the block where they sell them.”
“Decent ones?”
“No, ugly ones. Of course, they’re decent. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to sell them.”
Kathryn rolled her eyes. “This is going to be fun. What’s the old man thinking?”
“He’s toying with us.”
“Maybe. Or maybe this really is a test.”
I sighed. “I wish I didn’t respect him so much sometimes.”
Kathryn smiled. It was a rare thing to see on her lips. “Yes, sometimes I wish the same thing.”
I sighed wearily and pinched the bridge of my nose. Going Christmas tree shopping with Kathryn Rouche certainly wasn’t the ideal way to start my week. There were plenty of other things I would rather be doing—like working on securing the deal with Sylvie and Warren O’Donnell. But we couldn’t always get what we wanted.
Jon Ravenworth? He would get what he wanted.
I could make myself right with that.
“Just be warned,” Kathryn said. “If you try to make me sing Christmas carols or drink hot cocoa with you, I’ll put you in a tree stand and hang ornaments off your ears. I pierced my best friend’s ears when I was twelve. I have enough experience.”
“Noted. No Christmas carols, festive drinks, or holiday cheer of any kind.”
Chapter 11
Kathryn
I was entirely out of my depth as I stood in the crop of trees in the square eight blocks down the street from our office tower. The Christmas tree garden was sectioned off from the sidewalk by a plastic white fence strung up with Christmas lights. The owner, a middle-aged man with a trucker hat and a denim jacket, messed around with his two sons who couldn’t have been any older than twenty, while I followed Ethan mindlessly through the maze of trees in search of the perfect one for the office.
From my perspective, they all looked the same. They were green. They were tall. They had branches to hang things from.
What was it Ethan was looking for? What made one tree better than the other?
I didn’t dare ask him. There was no part of me that wanted to indulge him in a conversation while we were forced to cooperate with each other. I was doing this for Jon and no one else.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. I was doing this so I could prove I could work with anyone if I absolutely had to. This was about making partner, nothing more.
After twenty minutes of perusing, I came to a stop beside a tree and called Ethan’s name. He’d wandered up ahead of me but turned back, his hands in the pockets of his pea coat. The jacket was such a dark shade of navy it looked almost black, and he wore it with a deep red wool scarf.
“What about this one?” I asked. “It looks healthy.”
He joined me beside the tree. “Too short.”
I frowned. “It’s six feet tall.”
“Still too short. We need something with presence. The tree Jon bought last year was seven and a half feet. I think we should aim to outdo that and go for an eight or nine foot.”
“Will that even fit in the office?”
“Of course, it will. We have twelve-foot ceilings. Don’t you pay attention?”
“To ceiling heights?” I asked flatly. “No, I don’t. I’m usually too focused on other things like my job. You know? Work?”
He shook his head. “Nope, this isn’t the tree. We’re getting close though.