She smiled. “What artist could resist decorating a haunted house?”
Chapter 9
Igot in to work Monday morning and immediately went to the corner office and knocked.
“Come in!”
I opened the door to a big space filled with light from the third-floor windows that overlooked the river. Really, this place wasn’t so bad. The people were cool. The view was ace. Making video dating profiles — it could be worse, right?
“Kayla,” Rick said. “You must be psychic or something. I wanted to talk to you. Close the door. Have a seat.”
He wanted to talk to me? I wanted to talk to him about taking what little vacation I’d accrued so I could work on the house.
Rick cast his bright blue gaze around the office for a minute as if noticing his decor for the first time — a couple of surfboards hanging on the wall, a signed poster of Ron Raker surfing a big wave, a Derek Gores collage of a beautiful woman. Then he looked back at me, and I saw something in those eyes I didn’t like.
“Kayla, you’ve done awesome work for us here, and we want you to keep doing that work. But I’m afraid we’re going to have to end your employment.”
“What?” I blinked a few times, not quite getting what he said.
“What I mean to say is, if you’re willing to work for us on a freelance basis, that’s how we’d like to do it from here on out. We’re sorting through the in-studio demos. In a month or so, we’ll want to start the field shoots to show investors, and we’ll call you then.”
“You’ll what?”
Rick stood, holding out a hand, and I stood in response, a hundred percent stunned, operating totally on automatic, lifting my hand so he could grasp it and shake it with overzealous energy.
“That’s my girl. We’ll call you soon. Go ahead and take your stuff, though, OK? We need the desk.” He walked around me and opened his office door, shouting over the room full of my co-workers.Formerco-workers. “Maria! Help Kayla, would you?”
Then he gently pushed me out, smiling all the while as he closed the door behind me.
What the actual fuck?
“Kayla? You OK?” Maria had come over to me. The rest of the coders and content creators had gone back to their earphones and keyboards. “You look kind of pale.”
“He fired me. I think.”
Maria looked around, then guided me back to my desk. “He told me you’d still be doing freelance for us.”
I looked around at the oblivious dronebots. They were badly in need of a Nerf war. “Does everyone know?”
“No,” she said. “They’ll figure it out soon enough. I’m sorry. Are you going to be OK?”
“I guess I’ll have to be.” And now it was more important than ever that I make the house project work. Or that I get that job with the tourism office, if they hadn’t given it away already.
By the time I’d packed my meager belongings in a box and headed to the door, a few of my colleagues were looking up from their monitors wearing curious expressions. Tough. Maybe they’d see me again if I did some freelance for the company, but right now, it was pretty hard to imagine doing Rick’s little projects.
Except that I needed the money. I always needed the money.
Well, I got my time off. And I would be spending all of it at Milkweed Manor. Too bad Landon was working his day job right now.
Funny that he was the first person I thought of after my day imploded.
* * *
“What are you doing here?”I asked.
Landon wasn’t at his day job. Landon, who now had his own key to the house, was screwing in a new step on the staircase in the grand foyer of Milkweed Manor, his battery-powered drillzip zzziiipppingin his capable hands as his muscles flexed and those dark eyes squinted behind his safety glasses.
Screwing. Ha ha.
