I Hate, I Bake, and I Don’t Date! by Alina Jacobs

2

Beck

“Good riddance!” Tess yelled and stormed out of the office. I heard her shrill voice outside, talking with the other office assistant who sat next to her as she gathered her things and stomped to the elevator.

I sat on the edge of my desk and pinched the bridge of my nose. It had not been a good morning.

Ashley had sent a very explicit message to my younger brother, who was interning at the company, and I had to fire her. Then the presentation Tess had sent me needed changes. Usually, her presentations were fine, but I wanted to win this contract and needed perfection.

Then Tess had riled up one of our worst clients, and now, instead of concentrating on the important meeting with AstraDrone, I had to stroke that cheating asshole’s ego to keep him from suing us.

“Dude, what the hell?” my brother, Walker, said, coming into my office. “You fired two girls on the same day? That’s a lot, even for you.”

“They are grown women who were failing to fulfill their job descriptions,” I said curtly.

“I guess I should have expected it. Tess has been here three months. That’s a record for your personal assistant.”

“Because, for some reason, we only seem to hire incompetent people,” I retorted, giving him a pointed look.

“I’m not incompetent! I’m a great COO.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, “or you would have been taking care of the Ashley situation instead of me. Instead, you were where, exactly? Did you just arrive?”

“Yes, but I had an early morning meeting at Platinum Provisions,” he said, waving me away. “I’ll tell HR to find you another assistant.” Walker smirked. “Hunter said he wants to have more of our little brothers intern here. Maybe you could take one of them as an assistant and show him the ropes.”

“Not going to happen.” I adjusted my cuff links. “I already have to work with you.”

“Family is important,” Walker said and took out his phone. “Speaking of. What do you think Greg’s message was about?”

I had ignored the text from my older brother in the group chat.

“I refuse to jump every time Greg says so,” I said. “I have a company to run, and the Q3 earnings report deadline is coming soon.”

“I bet he’s going to do something crazy like buy a small country.”

“I’m not contributing any money to that,” I warned.

“Maybe he got someone pregnant!”

I glared at Walker. “Do you have anything useful to say, or are you here in my office to harass me?”

“Just being brotherly.”

Owen, the CEO, popped his head in.

“Dude,” he said, walking over and placing the back of his hand to my forehead. “Are you feeling all right?”

“He does seem a little warm,” Walker said, also coming over to try and touch me.

“Get away from me!” I batted their hands off.

“You have the whole office whipped into a froth,” Owen said. “There are rumors going around that layoffs are happening.”

“For the love of…”

“And we have that big presentation to AstraDrone, and your assistant is gone,” Owen continued.

“She’s not supposed to be at the meeting,” I said, massaging my temples.

“Did she finish the presentation before she left?” Owen asked.

Fuck.

“Your new temp is here,”Owen said, appearing back in my office. Mark Holbrook and Finn Richmond from AstraDrone would be arriving in an hour. The presentation still was not finished.

Owen peered over my shoulder at the presentation I was working on and whistled.

“If Tess made that, I see why you fired her.”

I shoved him away.

“I made it; we needed an extra slide.”

Owen bit back a snort.

“Fortunately, the temp knows all those design programs,” he said, waving in a willowy redhead.

“Hi! I’m so happy to meet you!” my new assistant gushed. “I’ve heard so much about you and your company, and I really enjoyed your TED Talk on efficiencies and—”

“This is the presentation,” I said, handing her Tess’s old laptop. “These are the changes. You need to have it done within the hour.”

She blinked at me.

“Now,” I snarled. “There is a multimillion-dollar contract on the line.”

“Of course.”

I needed my tea. Usually, I sent Tess to fetch a very specific tea order at the café in the lobby of our building. But we needed the presentation done first.

The temp settled at Tess’s desk and started slowly flipping through the pages of notes. I was really regretting firing my old assistant.

I stood over the temp’s shoulder and ensured she was making all the changes I required. The young woman seemed flustered.

“No,” I barked as she started moving images around. “I need that chart to show the growth rate projected out for four quarters, not three.”

“How do I do that?”

“You need to fix it in the Excel file.” I tried to relax my jaw. I was going to crack a tooth. “I thought Owen said you knew how to do this?”

Tess at least had known enough about finance that I could just hand her a spreadsheet and she could take care of it.

The redhead slowly opened the Excel file.

I checked my watch. We had thirty minutes. A tension headache settled in behind my eyebrows.

The temp made the changes. Slowly. So slowly.

My phone rang.

“Mark Holbrook and Finn Richmond are here,” Owen said when I answered.

Shit.

“Finish that,” I told the temp. “All of it. It better look nice. Have it up on the conference-room screen when I return.”

I met Mark and Finn at the front desk of our office.

Quantum Cyber occupied the upper half of the tower. The view of the city was spectacular, though with the rain today, the skyline was obscured.

“We appreciate you coming by,” Owen said as we led them back to the conference room. “We’re excited to show how we can make blockchain work for your business.”

“We’re interested in seeing how we could tie it into the new drone line we’re doing,” Finn said. “I saw your talk at the TechBiz conference, and it seems legit.”

I tried to remain calm. Was the presentation okay?

Shit, I didn’t remind the temp to get waters or coffee, I realized when we were in the conference room.

Tess would have remembered. She also usually ordered food.

“Do you all want anything to drink?” Owen asked, looking at the back of the conference room, where the snack array usually was.

Of course, there was nothing.

I forced myself not to grind my teeth.

“I’ll grab one of the secretaries,” I said. I opened the door and almost ran into the temp.

“I have the presentation,” she said breathlessly. “Do you boys want coffee or tea?”

I tried to keep the aggravation off my face.

“Finn, you want a coffee?” Mark Holbrook asked his cofounder.

“Oh!” the temp said, staring at him. “Oh my god, Finn?”

Oh no.

“You’re the guy I hooked up with over the weekend!” she blurted. “Why didn’t you call me?” Then she seemed to realize what she had said. “I meant… coffee or tea?”

Finn’s eyes narrowed.

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, “you are him. I swear it.”

“I assure you, ma’am—” Finn began.

“Stop lying!” the redhead shrieked.

Owen gave me a What 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.

Except it wasn’t.

Right, because I had fired my assistant.

I loosened my tie and stared out the floor-to-ceiling glass window at the storm. I needed that tea.

My employees cowered as I walked through the office to the elevator to take me to the lobby. There was a café in the middle of it that all the employees used for lunch and breaks. They had a particular tea blend that I had, I hated to admit, become addicted to.

“Hi!” the girl at the counter chirped when she saw me.

“I need my usual,” I told her.

She gave me a blank look.

“He wants the Nordic blend in freshly boiled water from the espresso maker because it gets hotter and the water is pure, with a teaspoon of freshly zested lemon, no sugar. Steep the whole thing for exactly five and half minutes then strain,” a familiar voice said.

I turned around, and Tess blew me a kiss.