Page 7 of The CEO I Hate (The Lockhart Brothers #1)

LIAM

W hen Paula returned to the conference room after break, she was holding the biggest coffee I’d ever seen.

“Is that much caffeine even legal?” I asked.

“No. Maybe if I’m lucky, it’ll induce a heart attack, and I can get a forced vacation from all this bullshit.” She shoved her pearl-encrusted cat-eye glasses up her forehead to rub at the bridge of her nose.

“I just tried to pore over what was left of Lyle’s notes again. It’s like a goddamn cryptex. My brain is mush. Please tell me we’re going to talk to someone semi-competent next?”

Jerome, one of the staff writers, walked into the room, a stack of papers in his hand.

“Got the new pile of résumés from the printer,” he said.

He was tall, wore gold studs in both his ears, and kept a pen tucked into the pocket of his T-shirt.

There were scribbled notes on the backs of both his hands that looked like tattoos.

“Anything promising?” the young woman next to me asked.

She had a choppy blonde bob dyed pink at the ends.

Her name was Kit or Kitty or maybe Kit-Kat…

I’d lost track. They looked like babies to me, but Pa ula had assured me they were fully qualified—and that it was important to have our staff writers sit-in on the interviews.

We needed to find someone who gelled with the rest of the team, and we needed to do that quickly.

“I just did a quick scan, and nothing popped out at me,” Jerome said. “We should probably do a deep dive though.” He passed the résumés along the table, spreading out the work.

“Ugh,” Paula complained. “Get rid of the ones that sound too eager. Anything with a cover letter that says it’s always been their dream to write for a mystery drama about firefighters.” She glanced at me. “No offense, but that’s no one’s childhood dream.”

“I learned not to be offended by you a long time ago,” I muttered, perusing a couple of the résumés.

I appreciated that Paula didn’t beat around the bush or spare feelings.

Hollywood was crowded with people ready to tell you whatever they thought you wanted to hear.

The ones I liked were the ones who’d give it to me straight.

“This person literally wrote they have experience starting fires! How the fuck did this even get in the pile?”

I looked over at the writer at the end of the table—Tanya.

She was so short I’d almost mistaken her for a child when I first walked into the conference room this morning.

That was until she started swearing like a sailor.

She folded the résumé into a paper plane and threw it across the room.

It hit the garbage bin, bouncing off the rim and onto the floor.

“Nice!” Kit or Kitty said, giving her a high-five.

Jerome snorted. “Yeah, we should probably send that one directly to the police.”

Paula looked at me over the top of her glasses .

I let out a heavy sigh. “I’ll have Carl filter them a little better.

” My personal secretary had already taken on the monumental task of weeding through the dozens of applications rolling in for the position.

It was impossible for one person to catch all the unqualified candidates.

“The next interview should be starting in a couple minutes.”

Right on cue, Carl knocked on the door, wordlessly announcing the candidate’s arrival. With a flick of my head, Carl let the man in, and we spent the next thirty minutes trying to get rid of him.

“My God, I thought he’d never shut up!” Jerome said once he was gone. “I was about to get up and pull the fire alarm.”

“I’m praying for the people in the next writers’ room he gets staffed in,” Tanya said.

Paula laughed humorlessly. “Oh, he’s not getting staffed anywhere. Who’s next?”

I flipped open the folder in front of me, almost afraid to look. The next candidate spoke far less, but she was also primarily a comedy writer who badly fumbled our questions about the dramatic stakes of the show, and Paula elbowed me in the side, giving a discreet head shake.

After that came a kid fresh out of film school, young and eager, with all the heart you could ever want and none of the experience. Maybe I’d be willing to take a gamble on someone this green if I had a more solidly established writers’ room, but as things stood, I just couldn’t take the risk.

The following candidate had the opposite problem. He had so much experience—and so much attitude—that he waltzed in, managed to piss off the staff writers, and offended Paula all within the first five minutes. I didn’t need another Lyle Clemmens situation on my hands .

“I don’t know if I can handle another one of those,” Tanya said. “Not without lunch.”

“I’m starving,” Jerome said. “I can literally taste the cream cheese and lox bagel.”

“Jay,” Tanya said. “You need to branch out. You can’t eat the same thing every day.”

Jerome made a disgruntled huff. “I can and I do. Why mess with a good thing?”

“We’ve got one more interview before we break for lunch,” I said.

A groan echoed around the room. “I know,” I said, as frustrated and dejected as the rest of them. “I squeezed it into the schedule. We’ll just get it out of the way quickly.”

Mia being squeezed in right before lunch meant she was up against a hangry team. Had I purposely planned her interview that way knowing they’d be eager to latch onto any fault they could if only to get her out of the room faster? That was between me, myself, and I.

Paula removed her glasses, putting them down on the table. “Who’s up now?”

“Mmm…Amelia Collins?” Jerome said, consulting the file.

Kit or Kitty rifled through the loose papers on the table. “Looks like we don’t have a résumé for her.”

I cleared my throat. “Late addition.”

Paula leaned closer to me. “Someone you know?”

I gave a little shrug. Telling Paula that Mia was my best friend’s little sister would earn me one of her patented arched-brow-eye-roll combos .

In all honesty, I was counting on this group finding something wrong with Mia the moment she walked in. Not because I thought she was a bad writer—I was man enough to admit that she was one hell of a storyteller. But working with her directly? No, I couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t just about protecting the show—it was about protecting myself.

Every argument, every late-night rewrite…

I could already envision the tension simmering beneath the surface, threatening to boil over.

I couldn’t trust myself around her, and I didn’t want to test how far that would go.

I needed the team to be awful to Mia, to tear apart her credentials so thoroughly that I could go to Jake and say, “Hey, man, I tried. It’s not my fault the creative team didn’t like her. ”

Then she’d be gone, and my job could go back to normal. Surely her inexperience, her style, or something professional about her would be enough to disqualify her. Then no one would need to know about the way my pulse quickened when she walked into a room.

Jake would be disappointed, of course, but he’d understand, and I’d get points for giving Mia the interview in the first place.

Carl knocked and popped the door open. “Mia Collins is here.”

“Send her in,” Paula said, waving like that would make everything go faster. “Let’s get this over with.”

Mia appeared, slipping past Carl through the door, looking a little sheepish.

She tucked some of her hair behind her ears, and I couldn’t help but notice that she’d styled it differently for today’s interview.

I almost missed the loose strands that would tumble down from the knot at the top of her head, especially when she got all worked up, arguing with me.

She glanced around the room, a little surprised.

Paula clicked her pen repeatedly in her hand. “Is something wrong? ”

“No,” Mia said, shaking her head. “Sorry, I just…I hadn’t expected there to be so many people in the room.”

“She does know what a writers’ room is, right?” Jerome muttered under his breath.

Tanya snorted.

“Hope she’s got more than fan theories to pitch,” Kit or Kitty whispered. She and Jerome exchanged a glance, barely bothering to suppress a smirk.

Mia walked up to the table, holding out her résumé to Paula. “I’m Mia Collins. Nice to meet you all.”

“Paula Jacobs,” Paula announced. She couldn’t possibly sound any more bored. “This is Liam, our CEO. And down the table you’ve got Jerome, Kait, and Tanya, our staff writers.”

Ah, right. Kait . That was her name. God, maybe I needed to get back on the coffee grind.

“So, tell us about you,” Paula said, launching into her next question before Mia could reply. “Looks like you’re not currently staffed anywhere? Is that correct?”

“That’s right.” Mia awkwardly slid down into the provided chair, picking at the knee of her fitted black pants. I tried not to let my thoughts slip back to that ruby-red corset she’d been poured into yesterday.

When her eyes flickered toward me, I glanced away. One look, and I was sure she’d see right through me.

“And what was the last show you worked on?” Paula continued, flipping over Mia’s résumé like she was looking for more. “Is it this one listed here?”

Mia nodded. “It was an eight-episode limited series. ”

“Oh, on what?” Jerome asked.

“It was this little psychological suspense thing.”

“And what have you been doing since then?” Paula continued. “There’s not a lot to work with here.”

“Well, I was almost staffed in a room,” Mia started, “but the show didn’t get picked up after the pilot was filmed. And then there was another room where I was hired to do rewrites, but that all turned out to be unnecessary when the show’s third season was canceled.”

“Sounds like a lot of almosts ?” Paula said.

“What do you do for work right now?” Kait asked.

“Umm…I do a lot of technical writing to pay the bills. And I have a…webcomic. That actually keeps me pretty busy.”

Kait gave Jerome a look that said yikes . This was going better than even I’d expected.