Free One Less Problem Without You by Beth Harbison Page B

happen. Not one cell in his body had any interest in having a close and loving family around him.
    And, presumably, that family he did have didn’t want to know the truth about him, or they would have seen it long before Elisa was haplessly trying to convey it to them while getting the bum’s rush out of the house and her job.
    Which left her with her own problems to worry about. Like figuring out how she was going to pay her rent next month when she had only three weeks of work with the Tiesmans behind her and unemployment took forever to process.
    Oh, yeah, and how she was going to eat?
    She really, really didn’t want to go back to exotic dancing. She’d sworn she never would. It was demeaning; it went against everything that she believed in. She’d sworn it was only a temporary way to fund college, but the money had been so good she’d let it go on a few months after college while she looked for the perfect position.
    So to speak.
    That was what she thought she’d found in the Tiesman household.
    Not so.
    Now, thanks to her previous career, she had about one month’s worth of expenses saved up. But that wasn’t going to get her very far if she didn’t find more work tomorrow.
    Or more like yesterday.
    The entire thing was so maddening. How dare that punk risk her livelihood and career, just to save his own spoiled, mean-spirited ass?
    Someday he’d pay for this, and, if he kept going on the path he was on, probably a whole lot more.
    Karma was a bitch.

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Prinny
    â€œShould I do it in an Irish accent ? ”
    â€œIrish?” Prinny reeled in her patience. “Why? Why an Irish accent? Why?”
    Chelsea straightened her spine and, clearly, her resolve. Her acting chops were chomping. “Because, Prinny,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “the Irish were among the first to get into this, you know, Celtic Druid woo-woo stuff. People look for that here, just like they’re always looking for Enya music in our record selection. So.” She shrugged, as if she’d left Prinny in checkmate. “It just makes sense.”
    â€œSo maybe you should just record the message in Gaelic?” Prinny asked, feigning innocence. “Let everyone assume that if they don’t understand, it’s their shortcoming, not ours?”
    Chelsea’s eyes lit up, and she raised an index finger. “You think you’re kidding, and I did not miss your sarcasm there, but you may be right! You said you wanted to set us apart from the rest. Why not do something radical? Just let me see if anyone else is doing it.” She took out her phone and started tapping on the screen.
    Prinny sighed. It was the end of the day, and she didn’t have the energy to be exasperated. “Stop. Look, let’s just do it in the neutral newscaster sort of voice we agreed on. It’s a phone system, not a Meryl Streep movie. Do it like we talked about.”
    â€œWe just talked about cultivating business. How are you going to do that by being generic?”
    â€œIt’s a way to statistically track the percentages of calls for each given topic,” she said. “We can tell what people want by which number they hit, and when we know what people want from us, we can grow the business in the right direction.”
    â€œThey will only opt for what we offer them, and as we already discussed, we’re not offering that much.”
    â€œSo we offer a few things that maybe we’re not doing so much of, to see if there’s a market for them.”
    â€œIs this one of Alex’s ideas?”
    Prinny was embarrassed to admit that, yes, it was. It was a way to validate the business aspect of the store and ward off the never-ending threats of her stepbrother, Leif, who wanted to take control of every asset their father had left them.
    But Prinny was hard-pressed to admit all of that. So instead she simply said, “It’s one of