4
ALEXANDRA
A lex was still holding her empty snarling bear coffee cup, and she nearly smashed it when she put it down on Sandra’s desk. “I’d rather punch him in the nose than get stuck in a truck with him for eight hundred miles.”
“You’re doing fine,” Sandra assured her. “You just have to charm him. It’s going to be perfect! This is exactly what we want!”
Alex tugged at her skirt. “I feel like a floozy and giggle like an underpaid clown. How is this in any way exactly what we want?”
“This is your chance to get close to him! A long road trip, lonely hotels together…”
Alex stared at Sandra. “Do you want me to seduce him?!”
“If you want to, sure—I mean, the guy is hotter than butter sizzling on a griddle! But I meant you should find his weaknesses and maybe figure out how to blackmail him into keeping you on. If that means sleeping with him, I’m sure that wouldn’t be so bad.” She fanned herself suggestively.
Alex usually trusted Sandra’s advice. They had come up in the company together, taking dispatcher jobs within a few weeks of each other, and she’d always been a loyal and steadfast friend.
But this was too much!
It wasn’t that it wouldn’t be fun to seduce him—whatever flaws Orson Davison had, he was sex on a stick and it would not be a hardship to peel his clothing off and see him naked—but Alex had standards! Standards that didn’t involve sleeping with her new boss for leverage. “This is already way, way out of my wheelhouse, Sandra. I feel like I should just be…competent and do my best.”
“Oh, honey,” Sandra said pityingly.
Was her best that terrible?
“When you do your best, you make everyone around you look bad,” Sandra reminded her. “And Orson Davison is not the kind of guy who wants to look bad. So if you don’t want him to fire you and undo all the work you’ve done for this place, keep smiling like you have been today, and let him call the shots.”
“What if he calls dumb shots?” Alex wasn’t sure Orson was an idiot, but he’d said maybe a dozen words all day that weren’t snorts or grumbles. It could have been arrogance or annoyance, but there was just as much of a chance that it was stupidity.
“Then you quietly fix them and let him save face,” Sandra suggested practically.
Alex knew how to kick ass in five fighting styles and could balance the books and get stuff done, but she wasn’t really that great at making friends. She should trust Sandra on this. Maybe, as Orson settled in a little, Alex would find a new place in the company that she liked.
Would it be so bad to have a figurehead that wasn’t her?
Alex didn’t want to have to follow him around wiping his butt and cleaning up his messes, but there was a lot to the day-to-day running of a security company that she would happily have delegated to someone who could handle it. Sandra didn’t have a head for figures or the drive to get things done that she did, or Alex would have promoted her long ago. She wouldn’t mind having days off again, and it would be nice to use the vacation time she’d been accruing. Maybe even date, which was something Alex hadn’t done in years.
Alex accidentally thought about Orson’s hot body and Sandra’s seduction suggestion.
“I’m not wearing heels on a road trip up the haul road,” she said. “I barely made it through our tour without twisting an ankle.”
“Tight jeans will work,” Sandra assured her. “And do something with your hair.”
“I did do something with my hair!” Alex protested. “I brushed it!”
Sandra gave a suffering sigh.
“Forget my hair,” Alex said. “Did you find anything about that missing detonator?” They had a small selection of training devices for disarming bombs, and one had fallen off the inventory list.
Sandra shook her head. “I’m sure it got used in a demonstration and someone didn’t cancel it from the stock list correctly.” She didn’t seem bothered by the discrepancy, but the last thing Alex needed was any minor inconsistency while their records were being scrutinized.
“Keep looking for it,” Alex commanded. “I’ll go make sure Mr. Davison doesn’t hook something up to the network that shouldn’t be on it. The last thing we need is some porno site virus crashing our system.”
It would complicate things too much to have an affair with her new boss, Alex decided reluctantly. She’d have to come up with other ways to ensure her employment.