Three glass offices ringed the outside of the space. Two of them were open and bright, showcasing the people inside. One was the finance office, and the other was the marketing office. And the last one, with the curtains around the window for privacy, must have been Rhett’s.
“Can I help you?” A pretty blonde agent looked up at me and smiled, twirling a pen around her red acrylic covered fingernails.
“I’m looking for Rhett Thompson,” I replied.
The look she gave me could not have been more devilish if she’d tried. Her blue eyes widened in anger, and she pursed her Restylane filled lips as she looked me up and down, making a quick assessment based on my outfit, hair, and makeup.
I knew that look. I’d dealt with plenty of women like her, the ones who thought every female needed to look and act a certain way in order to be accepted into society.
“He’s—”
But before she could finish her sentence, the office doors to the curtained off room burst open, and Rhett came swaggering out, that charming smile plastered on his face as usual.
“So, you decided to come after all,” he grinned at me.
“I thought I’d see if it was worth my while,” I shrugged, forcing myself to ignore the somewhat tension-filled flirtation going on between us.
This was a job interview. I needed to be professional.
Which was slightly hard considering the only reason I was even here was because I was pretty sure I had a crush on him.
Rhett came to a stop right in front of me, hands on his hips, and a strangely calm expression on his face.
“Francesca, hi,” he said, but he didn’t even bother to glance to the woman on his right.
Francesca, though, didn’t seem to mind, because she smiled at him like he was the only guy in the entire world.
“Hi, Rhett,” she purred. “This woman claims she’s here for an interview with you.”
Rhett just turned and looked at her for a split second before he shrugged.
“She doesn’t claim anything,” he replied as if that was meant to be some sort of defense of me, and then spun around on his heel and started to walk around the office.
Instinctively, I followed him, trying to figure out just what was going on. This whole thing had knocked me off completely, and I felt like I no longer had any idea what was happening here.
But maybe that was a good thing.
“So, just so you know, there are doors here,” he announced, pointing to the three glass offices and flashing a grin in my direction. “So, don’t run into them or anything.”
“Gee, thanks,” I replied, rolling my eyes even though I felt myself start to smile.
He was a jokester. I could be a jokester, too. I was funny.
Rhett disappeared into his office, and I followed him, fully expecting him to offer me a seat and start to dig into the real questions, the one every employer wanted to ask. Things about my experience and my success in the previous jobs I’d held. At which point, I was sure he’d realize that he actually didn’t want to hire me, and there were others out there who were far better equipped for the job then I was. Then, this whole thing would be nothing more than a drop in the bucket filled with strange life experiences that I’d had. I’d be able to move on and forward, jetting off to a foreign country and following through on my plans.
Hopefully.
I was still getting a little flutter in my heartbeat every time he glanced at me with those warm brown eyes.
“I want you to take this and read it,” he announced suddenly, walking over to his desk and grabbing a massive binder from it, which he then proceeded to shove into my arms.
“You want me to… what?” I asked, glancing down at it.
The front of the binder had a beautifully designed insert with the Thompson Real Estate and Development logo on it. The first letters of each of the words intertwined to form a sort of rope, and there was a picture of a house in the background, one of the big, fancy ones with sleek edges and an infinity pool.
I’d love to live in a house like that someday.
“Read it,” Rhett replied. “It’s all about the company, our history, our mission. I know it’s a little bit much. Obviously, it’s extremely thick, but I started this company hoping that everyone I brought on board would end up feeling like family, so I figured the best way to initiate people was to hand them a novel full of our morals and motivations and how I like things to go.”
Rhett was already moving behind his desk, clicking open his computer as if the fact that he’d handed me an entire college textbook and expected me to read it before I’d even decided to take the job wasn’t completely strange.
But then again, I was starting to get the understanding that Rhett did a lot of things that were strange. It was cute in an awkward way. I supposed I’d never thought that a playboy billionaire with rapper friends and a booming business could ever be quite this awkward.
“Rhett, you know I don’t have the job yet,” I replied, raising an eyebrow. “You haven’t offered, and I definitely haven’t accepted.”
His head snapped up in shock like that thought hadn’t even occurred to him, but then he just nodded.
“Sure,” he replied. “Next thing I want you to do is to take this mockup and decide if you like the design.”
He spun his computer around to face me, and I saw one of the most breathtakingly beautiful structures displayed on it. It was still a beginning stage design, and not the fully built structure yet, of course, but what Rhett was showing me still managed to make my jaw drop down to the floor.
It was a house, situated high up on a hill, with a massive balcony out front that overlooked everything, and beautiful, massive windows all over, affording the occupants a view of the outdoors at all hours of the day.
“That’s gorgeous,” I murmured before I could even think to ask why he wanted to know my opinion. After all, I wasn’t an architect or a designer at all.
“Glad you think so,” he responded with a grin. “It’s going to be one of my development projects this season on “Rhett Thompson takes San Francisco.” It’s really important to me that my assistant has an eye for this sort of thing.”
“I thought I was interviewing to be your newest accountant,” I said suspiciously.
“I need someone who can do it all,” he shrugged, although I caught the slight hint of a blush in his cheeks.
I could not, for the life of me, figure this guy out. But, I had nothing better to do today, so I figured, why the hell not? My entire plan for this new chapter in my life was to be spontaneous and to take things as they came, which, up until this point, had been an awfully difficult thing for me to do.
But a girl’s got to start somewhere.
So, I sat down in one of the soft white chairs in Rhett’s office and opened the binder, ready to get to reading the thousand and one pages of his company’s mission statement.
I only got about three words in, though, before Rhett jumped up.
“Let’s go,” he said, walking swiftly toward the door like he was James Bond on a super-secret mission.
“Go?” I asked. “Go where?”
“To the meeting,” he replied as if that was obvious.
And then he just disappeared out the door.
“Oh, yeah, the meeting,” I mumbled to myself. “Because that was completely obvious.”