But he told her the truth when he could have lied to her. She had to appreciate that. “You don’t have to pay me to be myself. I don’t know how to be anything else.” Then she shook her head, disgusted with herself for not seeing it sooner. “But you said this party is the first part. What’s the second part?”
“That depends on how the first part goes.”
Jayda didn’t like that answer. “You aren’t going to tell me?”
“Not right now, no.”
Her temper took over. “Then count me out,” she said, and began reaching for her shoulder bag.
He seemed genuinely perplexed. “What do you mean?” he asked her, only this time he was the one with distress in his voice. He didn’t want her out of his sight! “Why do you feel a need to leave?”
She frowned. “Why do you think? I’m not going to be some rich man’s experiment. I may be poor, but I’m still a human being.” She placed her shoulder bag strap across her chest. “Get another guinea pig.”
“Name your price.”
When he said those words, Jayda stopped in her tracks and turned and looked at him. “Why would you allow me to do that?”
“Because you’re the one I want,” he said in a way that sounded so loaded to Jayda that it could have meant nearly anything. “Name your price,” he said again.
She stared at him. Then she shook her head. “I don’t want your money. Not like that. That would come with too many attachments.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch, or something for nothing. That’s what I mean,” she said bluntly. “But I need a job. A good paying job. Giving me money is feeding me for a day, or even a month. Giving me a job will feed me for much longer than that. I need a job. I saw you going into the Bainbridge building. You work there?”
Did he work there? Other than owning the whole shebang, he certainly did. “Yes, I work there.”
“If you can get me a job there, and I don’t mean no job in the mailroom or waiting tables in the cafeteria. I don’t need no help to get those kinds of jobs. But if you can get me a good job there, a good-paying office job with benefits and where they won’t lay me off after just a few years, then you have a deal. I used to work in the corporate world.”
He seemed surprised. “Did you?”
“Not in any big-time position or anything like that. I was an executive assistant. It was a small company, but I did it really well and made a decent salary too.”
“Why aren’t you still there?”
“They had to cut costs and laid off a bunch of people. Mainly those of us that were hired last. They didn’t care how good your work was, they needed to untie revenue. Since I’d only been there a few years, I got axed in the first batch.”
Harrison was pleased to hear that she had experience. “I can’t promise you a high-level executive position since I don’t hire people who aren’t qualified. But I will have HR look at your resume and see what position they can offer you. I can promise to give you a position that’s at least comparable to your previous one, and triple the pay.” He extended his hand. “Deal?”
Jayda’s heart swelled in relief. A job that paid triple what she made previously? Which meant she could give up her piece of jobs and only have the one job? That would be worth being a guinea pig for a night any night of the week! “Deal,” she said as they shook hands.
Harrison placed his second hand on top of her hand. He was pleased. “Sure you don’t need it in writing?”
She studied his face. Amazingly she believed he was the kind of man that would honor his pledge. “I’m sure,” she ultimately said.
Harrison could not have been more satisfied. He needed to see her in action. He needed to see if she could handle the wolves. Because if she couldn’t, there was no way he was taking her around his father: the wolf of wolves.
He extended his arm to her. “Now may we go downstairs and greet my other guests?”
Jayda’s heart pounded at the thought of being around these uppity-muck kind of people, but she smiled and placed her arm around his arm. “I’m ready to get it over with, so yes,” she said.
He smiled again. “You’re ready for it to be over when it hasn’t started yet?”
She wasn’t going to back down. “Yes. That’s how I feel.”
Harrison smiled again. “Good. Because that’s how I feel too,” he said, which pleasantly surprised her. As they made their way downstairs.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
