Page 82 of The Player Next Door
The assembled crowd, much like Clare, didn’t seem to know how to react. There was a smattering of applause, along with a lot of hushed whispers and one loneHoly shitthat made the rest of them chuckle.
Lightness and a sense of unreality surrounded Clare as she walked back to her desk. A couple of people gave her high-fives, while a few others shot her dark looks. It wasn’t going to be a cake walk, that was clear, but the situation was at least a whole hell of a lot better than it had been ten minutes ago.
There was just one more thing to do, and Clare 2.0 would be fully launched. Now was the time, when she was feeling invincible. She pulled out her phone and scrolled to the message she was looking for. She typedWant to get a drink some time?and hit send before she could second-guess herself.
Ten seconds later, the guy from the dating app—one with a Moffat-eraDoctor Whojoke in his profile—responded.Sure thing, cutie
Thecutiemade her grimace, but she couldn’t have everything. That was just life.
Right?
Chapter Forty-two
Logan glanced at the green square on his calendar with no small amount of trepidation. Meetings with Peggy Roth were fraught for him no matter the time, and despite his success with Schneider, Logan did not feel at all confident he was going to keep his job.
He had been doing better lately, at least. He had been paying more attention to client maintenance, and while it wasn’t that unusual that he hadn’t lost a client since their previous meeting—Logan’s churn might be bad, but it wasn’tthatbad—he also hadn’t gone out searching for new clients. That had been part of his problem, he had realized when he sat down and really looked at his metrics. He had gotten so used to the churn he was constantly hunting down new leads, which didn’t leave him with much time for current clients. Settling down and paying attention to the ones he had was hardly groundbreaking, but at least he would be able to show Peggy he was meeting her expectations.
Whether or not that mattered was up to her.
The advancing line on his calendar app hit the edge of the green square, and Logan stood. Peggy’s door was open, but there was already someone in there, a short, nondescript woman in her forties he vaguely recognized as being from HR. “Ah good, Mr. Walsh, come in,” Peggy called, and his stomach sank like a rock.
He was about to be fired. That was the only explanation. He had thought Peggy might be willing to ignore the fact that he treated her niece like shit because he’d kept the Schneider account, but apparently not. Logan surreptitiously wiped his palms on his pants and sat down. He was reasonably sure Peggy and the HR rep—Linda, he thought—could hear his heart hammering.
Peggy tapped on her keyboard a few times and turned to face him, looking at him with an unreadable expression over the glasses perched low on her nose. “I’m sure you understand why I asked Linda to be here today,” she said.
Logan started to nod and then stopped himself, because honestly, if he was going to be fired, he wasn’t going to make it easy for them. “Uh, no?” he said, glancing awkwardly at Linda, who looked completely unperturbed.
“Given your personal relationship with my niece, I figured it would be better for both of our sakes if there was a neutral third party here to observe, especially with the topic at hand. Officially the company only has policies about immediate family members, but I thought this would be better for both of us.”
Oh yeah, he was totally fired.
Logan made an understanding noise. “Oh, uh, got it,” he added, when it seemed Peggy was waiting for him to say something more specific.
“First of all, good work on keeping the Schneider account. Whatever you did worked.”
Logan hated thinking about that night and everything that happened after, so he just nodded.
Peggy nodded in return. “As you are aware, we also spoke about slowing the churn in your client list. Have you made progress?”
Logan blinked. That didn’t sound like a prelude to a firing, and it took him a second to find his footing. “Yeah, um, yes, I have.” He pulled out his company-issued tablet and called up his client list, launching into his previously prepared presentation on the work he had done to prove he was someone trustworthy enough to stay at Loyalty Investments. It was the most thought he’d put into this job since he started it, and he had to admit it had made him better. He was being more deliberate and less impulsive these days, both in terms of paying attention to his clients and the choices he was making.
Peggy had a few questions as he talked, and a couple of suggestions when he finished, but otherwise the meeting was unremarkable. There was no addressing his relationship with Clare, outside that bit at the beginning, and Linda had nothing to say either. It was a completely normal, boring meeting. He wasn’t fired. He was realizing that Peggy Roth—by-the-book, strict Peggy Roth—was not talking about his personal life when she told him to demonstrate some maturity. She’d never once alluded to his sex life; that had been Schneider repeating Wimberley’s gossip. Everything she’d told him to do had been about work, not his personal life—Logan was the one who thought she would think less of him for sleeping with Clare.
In short, Logan had gone and blown up his life for no good reason. Sure, maybe he wouldn’t have been able to keep Schneider without Clare, but maybe he could have. He could have talked Sam into pretending to be his girlfriend, or maybe just poured on enough charm that Schneider would forget all about that snake Wimberley. It might not have worked, and he might have lost his job anyway, but at least his heart would be intact.
Logan sat back down at his desk, pointedly avoiding looking in the direction of the Aidens. He had overheard Brooks explaining his black eye as a basketball injury that Monday and decided to let that stand. Brooks had stopped speaking to him, and so had Aiden, but Logan didn’t give two shits about that. He opened his email to start responding to a few clients and settled back into work.
* * *
Amber Green Dress
Wyd?
Logan
I take it it didn’t work out with that guy
Amber Green Dress