"You need to work faster. Everyone at my company strives for a high level of excellence. Except you."
That man was so enraging. I gritted my teeth and reminded myself that I needed this job. "I will have this done by tomorrow," I promised.
His eyes narrowed. "I need you to work on something else first." He came around to my desk and leaned over me, grabbing the computer mouse, and navigated to a folder on the server.
Being that close to him, I could feel the heat radiating off him, and his masculine scent enveloped me. I started wondering what it would be like if he did stick his hand in my candy jar.
"Are you even listening?" he asked.
"Yes," I lied, forcing my attention back to what was displayed on the screen.
Mace made a disgusted noise. "I have the quarterly presentation to the entire firm. It's broadcast live to all of our offices. You need to polish my script. I already wrote it, and I have the slides done. Just read through all the reports in this folder, and make sure the information is correct. The presentation is tomorrow morning. Be here early because I want to review your work."
I looked through the material after he left. It was dry and boring, and his presentation deck was basically his script copy-pasted onto each slide, with tiny blurry pictures.
"Gross. We're just going to delete all of this," I said. Clicking through the server, I found some older presentation recordings. Mace came off as stilted and uninspired. I felt sleepy by the first minute. His voice was professional, but he talked in a convoluted manner. It was worse, though, when he tried to tell a joke.
"You're like a sad little robot," I said, tapping the image of him on my screen. "Don't worry. We're going to punch up your script. What you have here is not going to work." I bet Tara had had something to do with the presentation. You would think the PharmaTech marketing director would know better, but you would be wrong.
I loved developing marketing material. The creativity, the graphic design, the wordsmithing to make sure the text was informative, entertaining, and a little funny—it was what I excelled at.
I worked on Mace's presentation for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.
"You're still here?" Mace asked, sticking his head through the door that connected our two offices. He seemed surprised. "It's notthatdifficult."
"I just want to make sure everything is perfect," I chirped. "Remember I'm going to prove to you that I am an invaluable assistant!"
I unwrapped a piece of taffy and put it in my mouth. "One for the road?" I asked, holding out another piece to him.
"No, thank you," he said as he shrugged on his coat.
"My candy jar is always open!" I called after him. Was I mistaken, or did I see the barest hint of a smile? Not that it mattered—I would be here all night.
Fortunately my tiny house was on the premises. I made a thermos of instant coffee, took it back to the office, and set to work. PharmaTech had some nice-looking images, but they were buried on the servers. I pulled together the best photos into a presentation, edited together a little background video from some footage I had found, and chose a nice sans serif font to add headers and punctuate key points in the presentation. It was masculine but not aggressively so. I rewrote Mace's text to seem friendlier and more conversational without sacrificing the content that he was trying to deliver.
It was five in the morning by the time I was satisfied. I ran through the presentation myself out loud to make sure the pacing felt right.
"Perfect!" I crowed.
When Mace arrived at the office at his usual time, I had changed, put on fresh makeup, and was perched on his desk, waiting for him with coffee and a breakfast rice cake I had snagged from one of the breakrooms that wasn't wrapped in caution tape.
14
Mace
My morning started poorly. Henry did not want to go to daycare, and it took a while to disentangle him from me. When I finally brought him in, Donna didn't look all that pleased to see him either.
"Are we going to have a good day today, Henry?" she asked as Henry fought me while I tried to help him out of his coat.
"No!" he shrieked. "No!"
"You're late," Garrett remarked when I walked by his office. "Did you prep at all for the presentation? It's in thirty minutes."
"Has the room been arranged?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "I thought your assistant was fixing it up."
"So nothing's been done."
