A Deal with the Bossy Devil by Kyra Parsi

3

Adrien Cloutier was standingin the doorway of his office, his dark eyes fixed on my bedazzled crime scene. He’d caught me red-handed. (Literally. My hands were literally covered in bright red glitter.)

And because I was still frozen in place, I had the pleasure of watching his expression morph from confusion to irritation, and then to pure, unadulterated fury.

The man was fucking livid.

This was probably not going to be fun. I was ninety-nine percent sure of it.

“What. The fuck,” he repeated, stepping inside. The words came out short and sort of… growly. Like he had a bunch of loose gravel churning in his throat.

He jerked his wrist and the door banged shut behind him.

“Is this your idea of a fucking joke?” Adrien barked, taking a whole bunch of angry stomps forward. He halted before he got to the glitter-covered portion of the floor, the rage rolling off him in such palpable waves that I swear I would have been able to taste it if my tongue wasn’t coated in shimmering flecks of regret.

He looks different in person.

I wasn’t sure why that was the first thought that sprinted through my head when Adrien’s sharp gaze clashed with mine, but it was.

To be fair, I’d never actually seen him up close before. Not in real life at least. I’d seen a bunch of pictures of the guy online (and entirely against my will) and had caught quick glimpses of him around the building and at random work parties, but never up close. And on Friday, I’d been too drunk and too concentrated on exacting my revenge on the pervy creep that had slapped my bum to pay attention to his face.

So, yeah, all that to say: I didn’t realize his eyes were green.

Stupid, right? I was covered head to toe in crimson glitter, I’d ruinedthe guy’s office just two days after hitting him in the dick with a cane for a crime he may or may not have committed, and all I could think about was how dark and ominously green his eyes were.

They made me think of the rainforest at night. Same color and petrifying vibe. It was the only reason my brain stalled the way it did.

“Miss Sanchez.” He said my name like it rhymed with every expletive in the English language. “I asked you a question.”

Right. Yes. He’d asked me if this was my idea of a joke.

“Um, no,” I said. It wasn’t until my tongue moved that I realized just how much glitter had actually gotten into my mouth. It was grainy and dry and… really unpleasant. “I mean, someone clearly thought it would be funny. But it wasn’t me.”

I started to dust my hands and shirt off while Adrien eyed me. He didn’t seem to believe me but that was fair. I probably wouldn’t have either.

“I’m Ria, by the way,” I said, holding out a shimmering hand.

My attempts at dusting off the sticky little flecks had been futile. Whoever had planned this reallyhated him. He was going to be finding random specks of red glitter in his office for the next decade. It was going to be sticking to his expensive suits and people were going to be pointing it out to him in the middle of important meetings, making stupid jokes about strippers and stuff.

I was trying my best not to laugh. Because maybe I’d lied—maybe this was a teeny, tiny bit hilarious.

“I know who you are,” he ground out, ignoring my outstretched hand.

“Excellent.” I nodded, spreading my lips into a small, polite smile. “And you are…”

I know I’d promised Alba I’d try to behave, but holy mother of overinflated egos, was his reaction worth it. I’d never seen someone’s entire face twitch before.

I deserved an Oscar for managing to maintain eye contact and a straight face.

“You have exactly ten seconds to explain yourself.”

Or what?

The itty-bitty voice of self-preservation in the rarely visited, cobwebbed corner of my head managed to stop me from asking that out loud, though.

“I was looking for a charger,” I said instead. “My phone died.”

Silence.

Seriously, his eyes were an absurdly intimidating shade of dark green. I was half convinced they were contacts. Or he’d surgically altered their color somehow.

“And?” he pushed, his dark brows reaching for one another.

“And I couldn’t find one sticking out of any outlets, and all your drawers were closed, so I tried the box,” I said, pointing at the torn remnants of the black box on his desk. I was careful to make sure my finger was pointing at the actual box and not the words that had popped out of it. “But then everything exploded just as you walked in.”

“You went through my drawers?”

“No. They were locked.” Was he not listening?

“You tried to go through my drawers.” He said the words slowly like he needed to make sure I understood what I’d just confessed to. “And you’re admitting to it. Out loud.”

“Yes. I needed a charger for my phone. Like I said, it died.”

He eyed me for a few seconds, trying to gauge my exact level of crazy. He landed on “batshit” pretty quickly from the looks of it. “You’re aware that’s a fireable offense. Not to mention illegal.”

His voice had taken on a new, slightly more baffled edge. As if my blatant stupidity was a curveball he hadn’t seen coming.

The man thought I was a straight-up imbecile with, like, two fully functioning brain cells max. I could see it in his face, in the slight shift of his features as skeptical confusion started to dampen his rage.

It lasted all of three seconds. Just until I opened my mouth again. “I know, right? It’s almost as bad as locking an employee in your office without their consent. I’m no lawyer but I’m pretty sure that’s alsoillegal. It might even be more illegal than rummaging through someone’s stuff. False imprisonment and all that.”

I tried to wipe the sticky glitter off my skin again, but it really wasn’t going anywhere. Kind of a bummer. I hated the feeling of sand or chalk or anything grainy and dry between my fingers. It felt like how nails on a chalkboard sounded, and it made me want to scrunch my shoulders to my ears and dip my hands in water.

“You weren’t forcibly detained, Miss Sanchez,” Adrien claimed in that molten voice of his.

What was up with the whole Miss Sanchez thing? What century were we in?

“You could have fooled me,” I retorted, crossing my shiny arms. “The door was locked and no one was answering me from the other end. Which, by the way, is a pretty reckless thing to do. What if there’d been a fire?”

“I had security outside. You’d have been let out the second the alarm went off.”

“How would I have known that?”

He took another two steps forward, apparently no longer concerned about stepping on the red unicorn vomit. “You think that excuses you going through my things and wreaking havoc on my office? Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take to get all this cleaned up?”

Not my fucking problem. “How the hell was I supposed to know the box on your desk contained a glitter bomb of all things? What did you do, piss off a Care Bear?”

I didn’t actually know if Care Bears blasted glitter out of their chests, but it was the best I could come up with. My brain still felt a little fuzzy after the whole explosion thing.

Adrien took another three steps forward, and—

Wait, why was I keeping track of how many steps he was taking? That wasn’t something I normally did, was it?

“That’s none of your business,” he said. “You shouldn’t have been touching it in the first place. You were given perfectly clear instructions to sit on the couch and wait.”

“Yeah, and I was told you’d be here shortly,” I retorted. My voice came out a little snappier than I’d intended, and I realized my fists were clenched against my ribs. “That was two hours ago, Mr. Cloutier.”

I didn’t know why I said his name like that, with so much sarcastic venom. Or why I was suddenly so irritated. It wasn’t going to help my case.

“I had other matters to attend to first.” Step.

Four more of those and we’d be nose-to-nose. Not that I was still counting.

“And how was I supposed to know you’d actually show up? Or when? How much longer did you expect me to sit around and wait?”

A little muscle in his cheek ticked unhappily. “Watch your tone with me, Miss Sanchez. I’ve spent the last two days cleaning up the mess you made for me on Halloween, and now this. I don’t know what your fucking problem is, but I’m in no fucking mood to put up with any more of your bullshit.”

And I spent last Tuesday comforting my six-year-old niece because you wouldn’t give her mom one lousy evening off to celebrate her birthday! That’s my fucking problem, you selfish prick!

My eyes thinned into a glare, my shoulders coiling.

Okay, so maybe I did know why I was so irritated. Maybe it wasn’t all that sudden or out of the blue. Because maybe I was sick of sitting back and allowing him to treat my sister like shit. And having to comfort her while she vented, overwhelmed by her workload and Adrien’s ridiculous expectations.

Maybe I resented watching the strain all the extra hours had put on Alba’s marriage. Of how many holidays and birthdays she’d been late to—or missed entirely—because “Adrien needs me to stay just one more hour, two tops,” or “a meeting’s come up last minute and Adrien needs me to attend. I can’t make it to dinner. I’m so, so sorry. Give Olive a kiss for me and tell Ben I’ll make it up to him. I promise.”

I wasn’t sorry. Not about Halloween or the stupid glitter or my disrespectful tone.

I’d spent four years listening to Alba’s stories about this man, starting from when he was still on the operations team, before his daddy handed him the position of CEO on a silver fucking platter. I knew who he was, and I wasn’t sorry about any of it.

“It was you, right?” Adrien said, taking yet another step toward me. He was close enough now that I had to lift my chin to maintain eye contact. “On Halloween. It was you.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A part of me knew there was no point in denying it, but a bigger, much more stubborn part wanted to make this as difficult as possible for him.

He plucked his phone out of his pocket, unlocked it, and practically shoved it into my face.

Unsurprisingly, it was a picture of me dressed as Waldo. The angle was up higher than anything I’d seen floating around the internet—like it had maybe been taken by a security camera—and was zoomed into my screaming face, right before I’d swung my cane.

I had to bite the inside of my bottom lip to stop the laugh from escaping. I failed.

“You think this is funny?” Adrien growled, the tips of his cheeks tinting a bruised pink. He chucked his phone onto his desk and took one final step forward, right into my personal space. “Do you have any idea what you did? What your little cry for attention fucking cost me?”

My what? “Excuse me?”

“Seven hundred million.”

That wiped the smirk right off my face. I blinked. “Wait… what?”

“Seven. Hundred. Million. Dollars.” He said it slowly, stretching each individual word out into its very own sentence so that I’d have an easier time understanding. “You know those men I’d been talking to before you marched into the lobby and hit me? Investors. From Japan.”

Oh.

Oh, yeah, that I didn’t know.

“You know what happened afteryour little stunt? They fucking pulled out. I’d spent months working on this deal. They were there to sign the papers. It was fucking done!”

I thought Adrien had looked angry before, but it was nothing compared to the fury rolling off him now. His eyes were entire forests lit on scorching fire.

A part of me wanted to point out that correlation wasn’t necessarily causation and ask if he was sure they hadn’t pulled out because of something else. But this was probably a good time to keep my mouth shut, so that’s exactly what I did.

“I’ve spent the entire fucking weekend dealing with the repercussions of losing the investment, trying to keep the media coverage somewhat under control, and putting out all the other fires you started. And you have the nerve to go through my shit, make a mess of my office, and give me lip instead of an apology? To laugh like any of this is even remotely fucking funny? What the fuck is your problem?”

I gulped. To be honest, it was slightly less funny when he put it all like that.

He cocked his head. “What’s all this about? What do you want?” I could smell a subtle hint of a warm, spicy cologne on him as he moved closer. It was nothing like the violating stench of the guy from Halloween. “Money? Attention? Was this whole thing just an elaborate scheme to get yourself in the same room as me?”

Wait… wait, what?

“Is that why you were going through my shit? Trying to find something to blackmail me with? Or are you one of the stalkery ones who thinks they’re in love with me?”

My jaw fell open.

Because what?! “No, what? What type of mental gymnastics do you have to—”

“Don’t fucking lie to me, Sanchez.”

Okay, so we were done with the “Miss” thing then, I guess.

“Dude, I was looking for a charger. I swear I’m not… in love with you.”

Holy shit. I couldn’t believe I even had to say that out loud.

Was he, like, okay?

I took a step back, trying to put a little distance between us, but he followed me.

“What the fuck is it then?” he snapped, matching every step I took until my back hit the wall. Then he was just towering over me, all heated rage and taut muscles.

Maybe Alba hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he was going to kill me and make her bury my idiot body, because he was glaring at me like he wanted nothing more than to strangle me right then and there.

“Okay, listen,” I said, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible as my shiny palms came up in a surrendering gesture. “I swear that none of this was done in an attempt to… get you to notice me or whatever. Halloween was just a misunderstanding, I think.”

At this point, I was pretty sure he hadn’t been the one to smack my ass that night.

His voice was a lot deeper, he smelled a hell of a lot better, and he looked… broader than the other dude. I know I only saw the guy’s back and everything, but I definitely didn’t remember his shoulders being so wide.

Adrien’s frame was almost as intimidating as his eyes.

“The picture you have on your phone is from a security camera, right?” I asked. “So I’m assuming you saw where I was before I came into the lobby. You saw what happened.”

A muscle in his cheek jolted, but he didn’t say anything. I went ahead and took that as a “yes.”

“Was it you?” I asked. “Because I thought it was, and—”

“No.” The word sniped out of his mouth, short and firm.

“Okay, well, he was dressed exactly like you… from what I remember. He had dark hair and everything, and I only saw him from the back. So… if it wasn’t you, then it was just a misunderstanding.”

Adrien remained silent like he was waiting for something else. An apology, maybe.

“And I really was looking for a charger,” I said instead, fishing my phone out of my back pocket. “It’s dead. See? I’m not lying.”

“And what? You couldn’t go five fucking minutes without your phone?”

Two hours. You made me wait for two hours, not five minutes, you goon!

But I bit my tongue because he had crazy-eyes and I’d promised Olive I’d take her to Six Flags if she got an A on her math test next month. So, at the very least, I had to stay alive for that.

“Anything else?” he pushed. “Any other bullshit excuses you want to get out of your system or are you all out of ideas?”

I blinked to keep my eyes from rolling to the back of my head. “No other excuses,” I assured him. “Just those two.”

Then I braced myself. Because this was the part where he was going to tell me that he was pressing charges. And that his lawyers were waiting just outside the door, wanting to talk to me.

This was the part where Adrien Cloutier was going to specify exactly how he planned to ruin my life. And then he’d demand an apology before serving me the papers.

“You’re fired. Get out.”

It took me a second to register that he wasn’t going to add anything else.

“Wait… that’s it?” I said stupidly.

Because that couldn’t have been it. Surely there were more repercussions lined up.

A muscle wormed through his jaw before he replied, almost like it was protesting his answer. “That’s it.”

Wait. I’d assaulted the guy, lost him seven hundred million investment dollars, snooped through his stuff, ruined his office, created a mess for him in the media, refused to apologize for it, and… that was it? I was fired?

Something didn’t add up.

Adrien Cloutier was a cutthroat, ruthless shark who ruined lives for a hobby (I assumed), and two plus two didn’t equal pie.

“Wh—”

“Get. Out.”

I bit back the million questions itching at the tip of my tongue and slipped past him, half expecting a swarm of lawyers to be waiting for me outside his office, lawsuits in hand.

There wasn’t. It was just Frankie holding an empty cardboard box.

Huh.