Page 36 of Ego Maniac
She smiled. “My office.”
“This tastes like turpentine.” Emerie’s entire face twisted.
I sipped. “It’s twenty-five-year-old Glenmorangie. That’s six-hundred-dollar-a-bottle paint thinner you’re drinking there.”
“For that price, they could have added some flavor.”
I chuckled. I sat in a guest chair, and Emerie was behind her desk. She must have unpacked the rest of her box because there were some new personal items on display. I lifted the glass coaster-like base that had gone with the award douchebag Dawson broke.
“You’re gonna need a new weapon.”
“Don’t think I need one with you around to threaten my clients.”
“He deserved it. I should have punched him in the face like he likes to do to his wife.”
“You should have. That guy was a real asshole. A fuckin asshole.”
She was cute working her New York accent, although it still sounded like Oklahoma doing New York.
There were two new frames on her desk, and I reached for one of them. It was a photo of an older couple.
“Help yourself,” she said with sarcasm and a smile.
I looked at her face, then the couple, then back at her. “These your parents?”
“Yep.”
“Who do you look like?”
“My mother, I’m told.”
I studied her mother’s face. They looked nothing alike. “I don’t see it.”
She reached over and slipped the photo from my hands. “I’m adopted. I look like my biological mother.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s fine. It’s not something I’m secretive about.”
I leaned back in my chair, watching her look at the photo. There was reverence on her face when she spoke again. “I may not look like my mom, but we’re a lot alike.”
“Oh yeah? So she’s a pain in the ass, too?”
She pretended to be offended. “I’m not a pain the ass.”
“I’ve known you barely a week. Day one you were stealing office space and tried to kick my ass when I caught you. A few days later you started a fight because I made an innocent comment about some bad advice you were feeding a client, and today, I almost got into a fist fight because of you.”
“My advice wasn’t bad.” She sighed. “But I guess the rest is true. I have been a pain in the ass, haven’t I?”
I finished my drink and poured two fingers more into the tumbler, then topped off Emerie’s glass. “You’re in luck. I like pains in the asses.”
We talked for a while longer. Emerie told me about her parents’ hardware store back in Oklahoma and was in the middle of some story about selling supplies to a guy who was arrested for locking his wife in an underground bunker for two weeks when my office phone rang. I went to grab it, but she reached for it first.
“Mr. Jagger’s office. How may I assist you?” She answered in a sexy, flirty voice.
The two drinks had loosened her up, made her playful. I liked it.
“May I ask who’s calling?” She picked up a ballpoint pen and paused to listen, mindlessly rubbing the top along her bottom lip.
