Erin was not much impressed by the opulence that surrounded her as she made her way down the main hallway of the Aubade building. Seattle had a gray, misty personality that reminded her of winters in Los Angeles, and she looked out a window as she waited for someone to answer her knock. She was as indifferent to the weather as she was to the building, though no few had warned her the lack of sunshine in Seattle made Californians especially susceptible to depression; Erin had never known herself to be depressed, having very few lows to compliment her very few highs.
The impressive calf-brown heels pinched her toes, and her only thought as she awaited a meeting with her new employer was how long it would be before she would be able to step out of them. She wore complimentary brown and deep green, and the long dark hair she felt so lackluster made her look like something that had recently stepped out of a fantasy painting. Her thoughts were far away; she was thinking about her new apartment in the other, more moderate apartment building, and what kind of furniture she would buy. Deep, comfortable furniture, she thought.
Colt was starting to regret ever coming up with the fool idea to start a school, and so his mood on the day Erin arrived was less than agreeable. To be quite honest, though, Colt was seldom agreeable. He was comprised entirely of self-loathing and pain killers, and he didn’t know why the hell he decided to be a do-gooder at this stage in the game. He was 40 years old and miserable, dammit, and he had no place taking something like this on.
When the knock at the door came, he grumbled. It wasn’t loud enough for whoever was on the other side to actually hear, but it was still enough to make him annoyed when whoever was there didn’t respond to his summons to enter. The door was unlocked; the door was always unlocked. He wasn’t going to make a lumbering fool of himself by going to answer the damn thing. The doorman didn’t let anyone in the building without permission anyway.
He grumbled a second time, louder. And then, the third time, he fairly growled. “I SAID come in,” he yelled, definitely loudly enough for her to hear in the hallway, even from his chair in the living room.
The shouting made her scowl at his door, and she still wore the vestiges of a slight frown as she came through the doorway without a hint of hesitation at entering someone else’s space. She didn’t much like coming out of her little daydream of green leaves and deep cushions, especially into a meeting with a foul-tempered rich man. “Good afternoon,” she said, without actually seeing him. She looked wistfully at the welcoming mat, wishing she could shed her heels, but she kept them on, not even wobbling on the thick-weave carpet.
She had one of those briefcases that made people look incredibly successful, and one of those skirts designed to remind people that incredibly successful people could also be female. “Mr. Byron?”
The apartment, like all units in the Aubade, was a two story affair. Colt, however, lived entirely on the first floor. He’d long ago decided he couldn’t deal with servants and nurses, and he’d fired every last one. The result was that the apartment was a nightmare. He had a woman come to clean once a week, but her impact on the chaos was minimal. The blinds in the living room were pulled shut, and the fire was doused, the unit chilly (even for summer). The air felt old and stale, and it was obvious he spent most of his time in the chair he was currently scowling at her from. It was an old, leather piece, with high, comfortable arms. Beside it, he had two end tables, housing the remnants of dinner, papers, books, his phone and an extensive collection of pill bottles in a locked box (obstructed from her view). He had no cane, and there was no tangible indication of his medical condition immediately present.
His appearance, however, was another matter entirely. He had just reached forty, but there was considerable gray at his temples. His face was sallow from being indoors, and there were lines etched by pain between his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. He had a day’s worth of stubble, but it was neat, well-groomed. And despite everything, the jeans and sweater he wore were dry cleaned and fresh.
And, as mentioned, he was scowling. He’d hired her, sight unseen, from a classified. He’d expected someone older, a man, truthfully. The Academy seemed an even worse idea than it had 10 minutes earlier. “You’re a woman.”
Her eyes had been traveling around the room, and apparently it didn’t occur to her to control her expression to put something polite and non-judgmental on her face. She herself was not particularly tidy, but she didn’t live in anything on the scale of this. She thought it was the aftermath of a particularly chaotic storm, and it showed. There was nowhere she wanted to sit immediately even if there had been a clutter-free spot. She put her briefcase down an inch from her foot and brought her chin up first.
“Very observant,” she said, calmly. “I’m also your new Projects Manager.” She thought he had a sickly face, the kind of sickly face that you got with practice, like he was wallowing in being as sickly as possible so he could give her just that expression. She wasn’t the slightest bit sorry for him, and the part about no sunshine in Seattle came back to her again.
“You’re my new projects manager if I say you’re my new projects manager,” he clarified stubbornly. “Pull the blinds,” he added, immediately after. The light in the room was too low for him to get a good look at her, to see how young and incredibly wrong for the position he was certain she was. He hated the light, but he was willing to make a five minute exception to prove a point to himself. He reached for the bottle of whiskey on the end table, and he poured himself a goodly amount in a oft-used glass, and he waited for her to do as she’d been told.
“Fine by me,” she replied, with a slight air of the playground, all petty arguments. “The early termination in the contract is six months pay.” She stepped evenly away from her briefcase. Even in the heels she was a short, wiry woman, with the kind of limbs that made her look breakable even in business-wear. She moved with practice on the heels, though they were definitely not her first choice. It was obvious since she didn’t bother with the come-hither hip sway that would have been easy to add into her stride.
She pulled the blinds--briskly, all at once--and observed the effect on the room dispassionately. “You shouldn’t close them, it only makes it gloomier.” She came back toward him, stopping to one side of his desk rather than returning to her briefcase. She looked at the bottle.
She was pretty, damn her hide. If she had to be a woman, she could at least be an unattractive one. She wasn’t conventional, and she was small, but there was something about her. “Close the blinds,” he ordered a moment later, his voice betraying a unique combination of deep south with foreign inflections. Easier to be mean to her when he couldn’t see her face and wonder about the vulnerability of the little girl in the grown-up woman’s heels.
Her gaze on the bottle went unaddressed, because there wasn’t anything in the contract about glowering looks toward his drinks of choice. “The contract gives me an out if you can’t do the job,” he reminded her. Honestly, if he could afford to buy an entirely profitless school, why did she think six months pay was going to make a difference to him? “You’re a woman, you’re young, and you don’t look particularly qualified,” he told her, lifting the drink to his lips.
She didn’t take that personally. Erin had skin like silk on water, practically translucent even in the dull light, but her metaphorical skin might as well have been elephant hide. There were very few things this man could say to her that would truly hurt her. She didn’t flinch. “You don’t look particularly rich, but I’m taking a chance you can afford me,” she returned. “I don’t advise firing me on the first two grounds unless you’re fond of lawsuits, and as for the last one...” she paused (for effect), licked her lips thoughtfully, then continued, “I suppose you’ll just have to see how I do.”
Her eyes met his over the glass. She hadn’t closed the blinds again.
He cleared his throat, and he leaned forward, clasping his hands lightly between his spread legs. “I asked you to close the blinds,” he repeated. Just that, nothing more.
“You did,” she agreed. “But it’s already gloomy enough. You can go back to being gloomy after I leave.” She looked at the bottle again, and then at his face. She liked him a little better when he leaned forward. It looked like he cared enough about something to do it. “What exactly do you need a Projects Manager for, Mr. Byron?”
“Let’s get something straight, Miss,” he said, a hint of old south in the manners, if not the inflection, “I employ you, not the other way around. If you think I can’t fire you for performance issues, you haven’t read your law books enough. I asked you to shut my blinds, and then you and I can have a chat.”
She looked at him, but did not smile at his charming little speech. Instead she looked suddenly at him as if he was a new creature entirely at a foreign zoo. “You don’t need a Projects Manager to close your blinds, Mr. Byron,” she said, quietly, as if to herself. She stepped away from his desk, now, almost distracted, and picked her way back across the room toward her briefcase.
“You opened them,” he reminded her. He absolutely refused to get out of the chair in front of her, not to close the damn blinds. “I’m asking you to close them. If you aren’t willing to do that, what do you want this job for in the first place?”
“Opening them,” she said, bending down for her briefcase, “was a Project. I don’t have to work, and I do it because it occupies my mind and my time. Right now all you are doing is making boring demands and wasting my time, which, I’m told, is rather limited now that I’m not in Musings any more.” She straightened, again, chin-first, long neck stretched arrogantly as she turned her head.
“You do understand the concept of having an employer?” he asked, sitting back in the chair and steepling his fingers in front of himself. He sounded like he was stuck between entertainment at her unbelievable pride, anger at her refusal, and a touch of respect. “Close the damn blinds and let’s talk money already.”
She smiled for the first time. It was a rather wispy, sad little thing, but it was there, and that saying about small blessings came to mind. “Employers work within job descriptions.” She didn’t ask if he minded, she just started clearing off a chair, stacking things on other surfaces--or in most cases, on other heaps of discarded belongings. She was not particularly fastidious about her person, and once she had her chair she seemed as much at home in it as she had been in the middle of the room.
She was going to be a pain in the ass. He pressed one of his fingers to his temple, and he considered the reality that to keep her around, he was going to have to hire a damn butler to close the blinds on a regular basis. Still, she might be worth the expense. She was certainly stubborn enough to deal with students.
He watched her settle into the chair as if she’d brought the damn thing with her, and then he reached for his drink again, taking another sip (just to annoy her, yes). “What makes you think you can do what I’m asking?”
“I don’t think you have enough imagination to come up with something I can’t,” she said, seriously, opening her briefcase by the handles.
“Quit messing with the briefcase and look at me,” he said, tone crotchety, “since you insist on the blinds being open.”
She obeyed, but because she wished to, and didn’t altogether mind looking at him. He wasn’t foul-looking, after all, just sour. Erin had very deep dark eyes, of the kind that she found wanting in comparison to her mother’s sea greens, and generally if she stared at something long enough people became uncomfortable.
He stared right the hell back. “See, Miss, I’m starting a school, and I need someone to keep the thing running. I’m not interested in being involved, holding anyone’s hand, checking on the students. All I’m interested in is handing over money, and making sure my vision gets carried out.” He put down his glass, and he leaned forward again, more passion behind the words. “I’ve been here going on thirty-six years, and every day more of us cross over. No one teaches these kids how to use what abilities they have, and no one teaches them how to control them. I’m interested in fixing that, but without any damn fanfare or recognition.”
Surprise rounded out the solemn old woman’s gaze, and her arms came down on top of her briefcase, which slid flat on her lap. She stared at him a moment longer, unblinking. “I underestimated you,” she said, still quite surprised at the concept of underestimating anyone. “You want to teach a bunch of spoiled newly-mortal children how to use abilities that set them apart?” She thought he was mad, stuffed here in his cramped, cluttered, gloomy apartment, thinking about schools when he clearly had no idea how to learn from a person, much less teach.
“Automatically assuming everyone who comes over here is spoiled? That’s broad. And I’m thinking high school and college age. Old enough to keep them off the streets and from using these powers to screw everything the hell up, including their own lives.” He looked at her then, wondering what her ability was, but he didn’t ask. It didn’t matter, in the grand scheme. “I need you to get teachers, handle admissions, take donations. Do everything that needs doing, and all without bothering me, unless you can’t manage to verify if a student has abilities on your own.”
It was a different kind of spoiled. She said it in her mind rather than out loud, but she knew it was true. Different kind of spoiled. College age. Her eyes closed and she shook her head. College dorms, with abilities. “What’s going to make people think we’re qualified to run a school? You want to house these people?” She didn’t think to ask why she would need him to verify a student; there were too many other questions just then.
“You’re going to make people think we’re qualified to run a school,” he said plainly, grinning for the first time in the conversation. “Because I don’t have enough imagination to come up with something you can’t handle.” He shifted in the chair, grimacing slightly. “Damned blinds,” he muttered. “I don’t want them to live there, no. It makes insurance too pricey. They have homes; they can stay in them.”
The grin made her stare further. He didn’t look like the same man. “Are you going to charge tuition?” Unable to prevent herself, she glanced at the blinds, then back. At least he was sensible enough to realize there would need to be insurance. Legal representation. Premises. Construction. Transportation. Employees--who was qualified to teach someone how to handle abilities? When each was different?
“No, but I’ll take donations,” he said, expecting her reaction to be entirely entertaining; such a practical little thing. He might like her, even if she was going to be a pain in his ass.
“The cost is going to be astronomic,” she said, bluntly. “In the tens of millions. Just in start-up.”
“I already bought an estate, just north of here, and my lawyer’s already working on insurance and licencing. Can you handle it, or am I being too imaginative?” he asked, the lines around his mouth deepening as he shifted in the chair again.
“I’m going to need to hire a business manager and a head of school, and then get an academic advisory committee together that knows the difference between a telekinetic and a telepath, but yes, I can do it.” She paused, tapped her fingers on the briefcase, and frowned into his face. “Why are you starting a school if you don’t want to be involved with the education?”
“I’m interested in the end product, which is keeping these kids alive,” he said with utter honesty. “I spent the past five years as the head of academic services for the Army; I know what the right kind of training can do for a confused kid,” he said, and it was that simple, really. It had nothing to do with anything else, and that was all the honesty he had to give on the matter. “I’m a bankroll, and nothing more. No fanfare, and if my name ends up on even one piece of paper, I’ll pull the plug on the whole damn thing. Informally, fine, I’m involved. But no press, understood?” The last thing he wanted was someone who knew his father to find out about this and make it front page news.
Now she was practically goggling at him. “How in the world are you going to prevent the press from finding out you’re the bankroll? Following the money--which is legally viable and absolutely necessary to move anything anywhere--is the easiest part of a reporter’s job. What are you going to do, launder it?”
“You realize we’re setting out to teach people to use super powers? People from Musings? We aren’t teaching human algebra, sweetheart. Ever heard of flying under the radar?” he asked bluntly.
Her expression said that she had never done such a thing in her life.
He almost laughed, almost. “My imagination is pretty robust.”
She scowled at him. “We’re going to have to say something. You can’t just call it a members-only club for a bunch of kids that may well include legal minors!”
“Why not?” Simple.
Erin took a very deep breath and spoke as if to a small child that wanted to know why jumping off a roof was a bad tactic for flight simulation. “The authorities will show up, eventually. Human authorities. It’s going to look like we’re training an army or something. Or worse, some kind of sick cult.”
“No, it isn’t, because we’re going to find loopholes to make it happen. These aren’t human children, and we can’t go on pretending this is a human problem.” He sighed, and he looked as tired as he felt in that moment, and he rubbed his eyes. “There’s a desk in the study,” he said. “The plans and pictures of the estate are there. Bring them here,” he ordered, and he swore to himself that this turned into a fight like the blinds, he was going to throw something at her.
Her objections to menial tasks really didn’t have anything to do with job descriptions or principles; she simply wouldn’t do it if she didn’t think it worth doing. She wanted it light, so she wouldn’t close the blinds. She wanted to see the estate, so she went and got the plans. As she entered the door he indicated she realized she’d left her heels behind, but she made up her mind not to care.
The study was as dark as the living room had been. The doors had long since been removed from their hinges, replaced by an arch that gave a false sense of aesthetics as the goal in the removal. It was sparsely furnished, with only a large, mahogany desk in the center and high-back leather chair. Beside it, there was a large, standing globe of the world, and atop the desk there was a folder, which contained all pertinent information about the estate. The room was cold, with no fire in the grate and the air conditioning controls too far out of reach to be used with any regularity. There was nothing hanging on the walls, no diplomas or pictures or any indication of the man who owned the room.
Her sensibilities being what they were, Erin moved around the room as if exploring a new hotel room she would be living in, and after gently rotating the globe from its position showing the east coast to feature Seattle, she moved across a dull-colored rug to reach the temperature controls. She turned them on because she felt it was rather chilly in the place, and with no other thought, chose a nice median temperature of seventy degrees. Then she took the file and returned to the living room. “You’re going to need a hell of a cleaning staff,” she said, flipping through the pictures. “I hope you’re not expecting more than a hundred students a year, if that. We’ll have to build that kind of trust.”
He was just locking the box on the end table when she returned, the whiskey glass filled beside him once more. “I want to make sure we accept the right people, ma’am. I’m not going for critical mass here. I’m not going to make a profit; we both know that. So doing it right is what matters.” He settled back in his chair, all with the look of someone who’d been wealthy enough his entire life not to worry about the expenditures of a cleaning staff. “What I am supposed to call you?” he added at the end, but the question implied that he might not go by whatever she suggested.
“I don’t know anyone that doesn’t just use my name,” she retorted, not looking up from the file and pretending she was not at all interested in whatever was in that locked box. “Didn’t you read my resume? Never mind,” she added a moment later, guessing that he had not. “‘Erin’ is fine. I assume you’re giving me a line of credit and a budget for this?”
“Erin,” he said, very intentionally using her name, as if it was his choice and gave him power to bestow it on her. “I’ll give you anything you damn well need, if I see one iota of success on your features. Can you do it?” Because that was it, wasn’t it? He had dreamed up this stupidly altruistic idea, and he was damn well going to succeed. If she needed to bend the rules a little, he expected her to. No matter how much they all tried to play human, they weren’t human.
She returned to her chair, altogether ignoring his little power play in favor of the business at hand. He could call her whatever he wanted, because whatever it was she’d probably been called worse. “Of course,” she said, frowning not with concern but with concentration. “I said it would be difficult, not impossible. Easier if you’re not expecting a profit.” If he was looking for someone to bend the rules, he had the wrong woman. Erin didn’t bend rules; she either didn’t notice they were there or found her way around them entirely, as naturally as breathing. He’d know that if he knew what her ability was. She didn’t plan on telling him.
He was quiet, staring at her (because dammit she’d insisted on the blinds, and he could at least make her squirm). His gaze dropped to the discarded big-girl heels, and he chuckled under his breath. He looked back up at her, and he smiled, the expression looking wrong on his face, as if he didn’t do it very often these days. “Fine. Then I won’t fire you yet.”
She reached out a toe and pulled a heel back toward her, though she tried not to be self-conscious. She gave him a rather withering look and said, “I don’t know what’s funny about it.” He didn’t smile very often, she noted. She felt it improved him, and was less scowl-y than she might have otherwise been.
Damn woman, doing things that were endearing. The move with the heel was entirely female, and Colt was still alive enough to recognize that. It was enough to make him immediately irritable, because six years earlier, he would have done something about the damn heels and how entirely discomfited she looked behind those walls she had built up. But now? Now he couldn’t even move from the damn chair, and the whole thing made him scowl into the unlit fireplace. “First thing in the morning, you hire me a butler. Someone who answers to me, not you.”
She stared at him. “What in the world do you need a butler for?” He kept on changing so quickly that she couldn’t keep up with him, and she could hardly fathom his apparently random demands and his rather imperious way of ordering her around. She found it annoying, though not so much that it affected what she would do if she was not so very annoyed.
He looked over at the blinds, and then he looked back at her, and he grinned. He might need an army to keep her in line, but he suspected that trait would serve her will with a bunch of kids that could levitate her off the ground, set her on fire, or transport her to a neighboring realm; he’d swallow the cost of the butler.
Yep. Definitely mad. As a hatter. She shook her head. (She also had absolutely no intention of doing any teaching herself, and of hiring the educator sort that was more suited to that kind of thing. If she was anything, Erin was an adult, and she liked the company of adults far more than than that of children.) “Any particular specifications or should I just hire the first person that applies?”
“Ask him if he’ll listen to you, or to me. If he says me, hire him,” he said bluntly. “When you leave here, go look at the property. I haven’t been there yet. I’m told it’s furnished and we shouldn’t have to do much of anything, unless you’re going to insist we get it zoned commercial.” She just might too.
“You don’t want to go?” It was an innocent, curious question. It suited her more than the sour look she sometimes wore when he said something annoying, and even better than the distant pale look when she was thinking about something far away.
He didn’t answer, even though he would have encouraged that curiosity once upon a time, just to see that look on her face. But it wouldn’t do to have her thinking they were friends, or to have her nosing around his life. Here, now, she didn’t realize what he was, but he didn’t have the slightest doubt her gaze would turn from regularly annoyed to pitying if she saw him moving around. No, better not to encourage her. “Call me once you get there.” It was an order.
Well, the annoyed look was back. She took out a little red Blackberry that didn’t match her earth business colors and prodded at it. “What number? Do you have a cell phone or do you just want me to leave annoying messages?”
He glanced over at the iPhone on the end table pointedly, and then back at her. There, the annoyed look he could deal with. It didn’t make him regret a million things. “That’s called a cellphone. Take it. Keep it on. When it rings, answer it. It has my number programmed in.”
“I have my own.” She poked at it again.
“Take the phone.”
“I have my own,” she repeated. She was still pushing buttons. It was a complicated thing and she hadn’t put a new number in it for a long time. Most people for business just called her, she didn’t bother putting them in there.
“All my contacts have the number already. Take the damn phone, you stubborn woman,” he growled, his voice raising. If he could have reached her and that red menace of a phone, he would have. In fact, he was still considering it.
“If you’d--oh, never mind.” She reached over the desk, took the iPhone, tapped at it, and then scrolled through the numbers. She started punching them into her phone. Tap tap tap.
Dammit, the woman was going to be the death of him. He leaned forward, trying to contain a groan of pain as he reached for the damned red phone, grabbing it from her.
She caught the movement right before he lunged and she held onto her phone out of total instinct. “Hey!”
He tugged harder. “I said that my contacts knew the number in the damn iPhone. Quit being stubborn and take the damn thing with you.” He paused, but he didn’t let go of the phone. “Woman, you have to give in sometimes.”
“Fine, but my contacts have that number! Give it back!”
He poked at the buttons for a moment, but then he held the phone back out to her, as if he was being entirely kind in doing so, bestowing her with the phone. “Two phones will fit just fine in that briefcase you’ve got there,” he said, sitting back with a sound of pleasure that he couldn’t hide at the movement. “I want you here every morning at 9.”
She wasn’t changing color--if anything, she was getting more pale. She snatched her phone back, dropped it and the second one in the briefcase, and jammed her feet in her heels. “I can’t wait.” She got to her feet and didn’t bother with goodbye, turning.
“I’ll be waiting on your call,” he called out, and he tried to hide the smile in his voice. Damn spitfire. He liked her already.