She whirled around and ran, not even sure where she was going. She ran out the side door, all the way to her car, and then remembered her tote, and ran back inside to grab it.
“Carly!” Gordon had donned a dressing gown and was striding across the kitchen toward her.
She grabbed her tote. “I am so sorry, Gordon,” she said, pressing a hand to her heart. “I am so, so, sorry, but the door was open and your cars were here and I thought something had happened and I am . . . I am mortified and I can’t apologize enough.”
“Come into my office,” he said, gesturing her forward. “Come on. It’s just a body, for fuck’s sake. Stop acting like you’ve seen the devil himself.”
Carly had seen the devil himself. She did not want to go inside. She did not want to go to his office. She did not want to look at him. But Gordon gestured impatiently again, so she clutched her tote to her chest and followed him through the living room and to his office.
On their way, Alvira passed them. She did not make eye contact with Carly, but her hair was standing almost straight up and her sweater was on inside out. Carly’s breath caught in her throat. That was a pairing she would never have guessed. Damn it, even sour-faced Alvira was seeing someone.
In his office, Gordon stomped around to his big leather chair, picked up a cigar that appeared to be still lit (what, had the mood struck them and they’d started ripping clothes off?). He sat heavily, then propped one bare foot on the edge of his desk. Carly had to keep her head down, lest his robe fall open and she was treated to that indelible image again.
“So, Carly—”
“I’m so sorry.”
He waved her off with a thick hand. “Listen, let me put this to you straight. I hired you because no one else really wanted the job. But I want sales. I don’t want this blog business—”
“I hear you, Gordon. That was one idea. If you don’t like it, we’ll do something else.”
“I think you’ve got this all wrong. You need to get out there and hustle for me.”
“I do hustle for you. I have a call into the Woodworker’s Journal—”
“No, I mean something like setting up a booth at the Pecan Street Festival,” he suggested.
Carly stared at him. He wanted her to attend one of Austin’s longest-running art festivals and hawk his stupid circles?
“There’s probably something like it in San Antonio, too. You need to check into that.”
“You mean you want me to put in the paperwork so you can go.”
He looked at her like she was crazy. “I’m not going to go. You need to do that.”
Carly needed this job. She really did. But she had her limits. She was in public relations—not sales. And who the hell did he think he was to know her job better than she did? “Gordon, I—”
“Wait, I’m not finished. That’s what you need to do. But it seems to me you don’t have that kind of drive.”
Her mouth fell open. Well, now he’d gone and pissed her off.
He suddenly sat up and planted his arms on his desk. “I’m going to give you a piece of friendly advice, Carly. People who succeed work their asses off. They do everything it takes to make a project work. You have to have the burn in your gut—you know what I mean? You’ve got to want it.”
Something snapped in Carly. Maybe it was the accumulation of stress over the last several months. Maybe it was the realization that no matter how hard she tried, no matter how hard she worked, there would always be men like Gordon Romero. Maybe it was something as simple as her day had really, really sucked so far. Whatever, she slowly stood. She thought about her rent increase. She thought about her résumé. She thought about all those job applications that were not being answered. She thought about being a good girl and letting him tell her what she needed to do. The client was always right, after all. But what she said was, “I think you should find someone else.” She hitched her tote bag onto her shoulder. “And for the record, I do work my ass off. But sometimes, you get a client who thinks he knows everything, and maybe he knows a lot, but then you figure out that the one thing he doesn’t know is that