Free Prima Donna by Laura Drewry

with them.
    “This one”—Rossick led them down the south hall to the office in question—“has the best view.”
    “The best view?” Carter repeated. “And that’s important because you’re going to spend a lot of time staring out the window?”
    “Standard shotgun rules,” Rossick laughed. “I was in sight of the room and I called it.”
    “Shotgun rules?” Jules snorted.
“Really?”
    Carter grinned at both of them. “Looks like there’s only one way to settle this.”
    He waited for Jules to argue, but she just rolled her eyes and set her right fist in her left palm.
    “Best of three.”
    Rossick won it in two.
    “Damn it.” Jules tried not to smile, but failed miserably as she turned to Carter. “Do I need to fight you for the one at the other end?”
    “It’s your building, Jules, you can do whatever you want.”
    “I know, but we’re still kind of hoping you’ll change your mind and partner up with us.” She raised a hopeful look at Rossick, who nodded.
    “It doesn’t feel right doing this without you.”
    “You’re not doing it without me,” Carter said. “You’re just doing it without my name on the mortgage.”
    The three of them stood staring at one another for a few seconds before Rossick chuckled.
    “What if I gave you this office? Would that get you to sign on permanently?”
    “Tempting,” he laughed, “but no.”
    “We’ll get you eventually,” Jules said. “But moving on to the good news/bad news, what do you want first?”
    “No brainer,” Rossick answered. “Always go with the good news first.”
    Carter was already nodding. “Always.”
    “Tracy’s all set to start Monday. She’ll come in and get herself organized, familiarize herself with the layout and what-all, so she’ll be all set when we open on Tuesday.”
    “And the bad news?”
    “Amanda quit.”
    “What? She can’t quit!” Rossick gaped. “What happened to giving us two weeks’ notice?”
    “If she’d actually started working, I guess two weeks would have been appropriate, but she wasn’t supposed to start until Monday, so…”
    “What the hell are we supposed to do now? Can Tracy do it?”
    “She’s a nurse, not a receptionist,” Jules said. “I’m sure she can help out a little, but she’s not going to have time to do much more than her own job, and we really need her focused on the patients in the office, not running around answering phones and organizing files. Besides, we need someone who can transcribe patient files into the computer, and Tracy doesn’t type.”
    “Shit.” Rossick folded his arms over his chest and slumped back against the wall. “So what do we do now?”
    “I don’t know,” Jules sighed. “I guess we’ll have to have another look at the other women we interviewed; maybe one of them is still available.”
    “Right,” he snorted. “Which one? The one who was so nervous she cried through the whole interview, the one who said she’d need Fridays off as well as all of March and half of June, or the one who just got released from Rockwood?”
    “I don’t know why you didn’t hire her to start with,” Carter chuckled. “I mean, come on, so she embezzled a couple hundred grand from her last employer…big deal.”
    “That’s not even funny, man.”
    Jules thought it was, but the second Rossick turned to look at her, she threw her hands in the air. “What else can we do? Do you want to cancel your appointments so you can run the front office? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t.”
    “I, uh…” Carter rubbed his hands over his face and sighed, regret starting to pool in his gut even before he finished his sentence. “I know someone who might be interested. At least temporarily.”
    It would give her something to show the bank and it would keep her out of a blue-vested retail job at least for a while. It could work. Or it could be a complete and total disaster; he didn’t know her well enough to be sure. Too late, he’d already opened his