Free Steal: A Bad Boy Romance by D.G. Whiskey

charities we could contact.”
    “Ah,
well. It was a thought. You could just donate services to them if you wanted to
help them out.”
    Kat
tilted her head to the side and looked beyond me. It was her thinking face, and
I knew it well. “We could…”
    I
let her work through her thought process—it was always better to let her
finish. Otherwise, she wouldn’t hear half the words I said.
    She
looked up and put her hand on mine, the touch light but electric. “I’m sorry,
it feels like we always talk about me and my work. You must be so sick of it.”
    Your work is very much my
concern.
    “Oh,
that’s all right. Unless you want to talk about credit default swaps, then I’m
fine with talking about your work.”
    She
stared at me. “I have no idea what the hell you just said.”
    I
laughed. “Exactly. So where are these ARCANE offices? I’d love to see them
sometime.”
    “We’re
just on Fourth Street, south of Market. We don’t have many visitors coming
in; it’s a secure office. You’d have to get clearance from a third party
company we use for background checks. It’s a hassle, and honestly not worth it.
There’s nothing special about the office—like any startup ,
I imagine.”
    Not
a promising start. Undeterred, I pressed on with the questions. “How many
people work there?”
    “There
are about forty. We rent a floor in the building, so there are more
overall, but that’s it for us.”
    “People
work late? It sounds like you’re there all the time. That’s a lot of
dedication.”
    Kat
shook her head and snorted. “I’m only there so long because I’m screwed. Most
people are out of there by five, but lately I’ve been staying until eight or
nine. There’s always so much work to do and so much to catch up on. It hurts I
have to double-check everything my team does. I don’t know if they’re doing
things wrong on purpose to get me in trouble, or if they’re actually that
incompetent, but it’s a serious problem.”
    “You
should fire them.”
    Kat’s
eyes widened. “What? I’m brand new—I couldn’t do that!”
    “Look,
you’re new to management, so it might feel wrong to you, but it sounds like
your employees are just taking advantage of you. If you don’t show them you’re
a force to be reckoned with, then they’ll just keep walking over you.”
    She
nibbled on her lower lip again. It was just an unconscious move she did while
thinking, but it drove me crazy.
    “My
life would be much easier if they did everything I assigned them and
did it well… I’ll have to think about it.”
    “Do
you think you’ll be there until nine tonight?”
    She
nodded. “Maybe even later, tonight. You’ve given me stuff to think about,
and I might come up with a plan now. It’ll just take a lot of
brainstorming to figure out what exactly that will look like.”
    There’s my opportunity. She didn’t have to know that.
    If
I played it right, I could write two things off my list at the same time.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    CHAPTER 11
    ~ K AT ~

 
    Cold determination filled me
after lunch with James. His advice gave me a lot to think about, and a few
things I could take action on.
    The
longer his words stewed in the back of my mind, the clearer at least one thing became—I
needed to get control of my team and get them working for me instead of against
me.
    Firing
all three of them would be a disaster. Combined with my inexperience in the
company and limited time to produce results, hiring new employees and
training them would take too much time.
    No
matter what else I did, the ringleader had to go. She was the root of all of
the problems.
    Stealing
Nick’s rage-inducing tactic, I dialed Marcy’s office
phone.
    “Hello?”
    “Marcy,
this is Katherine. Could you please come to my office? We need to talk.”
    “I’ve
got things to do. Can’t you send it in an email?”
    Through
my office window, I could see Marcy, Sean, and Todd gathered around