I opened my mouth to fire the temp, then Finn said with a grimace, “I think you were with my brother. He likes to pretend to be one of us to avoid situations, well, like these.”
“No,” the temp said stubbornly, “youarehim. I swear it.”
“I assure you, ma’am—” Finn began.
“Stop lying!” the redhead shrieked.
Owen gave me aWhat the fuck?look.
I bit back my profanity-ladened response, plucked the USB drive from the girl, and shooed her out of the room.
“It was him.” She pouted.
“I don’t fucking care,” I snarled. “Do you not have any sense of professionalism?”
Her chin wobbled. She was about to cry.
I was unmoved. I had an excessive number of little brothers who constantly tried that shit on me, and it never worked.
“Get your things,” I ordered. “You’re fired.”
I brought back the water and coffee myself.
“Apologies,” I told Finn. “We’ve been having turnover issues. The woman has been escorted out of the office, of course.”
“Three in a day!” Walker quipped. “Must be a record for you.”
Finn laughed. But when the presentation was pulled up, he and Mark almost choked on their waters.
Tess could make a great presentation. It was one of the reasons I had overlooked more of her obnoxious and fireable qualities. However, between myself and the newly fired temp, we had somehow turned a presentation that just needed a few tweaks into an unmitigated disaster.
Owen was furious, though he was trying not to let it show.
Mark and Finn politely listened as we went through the spiel. The temp had, for some reason, converted the whole PDF into a PowerPoint and added little songs and moving clip art. Even worse was how the text kept flying around on the page.
After the presentation was over and Owen had shown the two men to the elevator, I slumped in my chair.
“That was… not great,” Walker said after a moment.
I closed my eyes.
Owen came back in, his displeasure settling over the conference room like the storm raging outside the glass windows.
“Beck.”
I sighed. “It was the temp.”
“No,” Owen said. “It wasn’t the temp. There wasn’t anything wrong with Tess, and if you hadn’t fired her on the day of a big presentation, we wouldn’t have just lost the contract.”
“We don’t know that!” Walker protested.
Owen pointed to the final slide of the PowerPoint. For some reason, the temp had animated it so that the words “the end” bounced around on the screen like an accordion. The annoying thing? The temp hadn’t even fixed the fucking typo in the name Quantum Cyber at the footer.
“We’ll go after a new contract,” I said, standing. I felt bad that I had been partially responsible—okay, mostly responsible—for the disastrous showing today.
Though I tried to remain cold and dispassionate, as someone who worked with numbers should, I still had moments of extreme rage. Aside from my looks, it was the only thing I had inherited from my horrible father.
I went back to my office, expecting my tea to be waiting for me.
