I wasn’t this man’s son, but it was cute he’d decided to put that out there. I did have to call him mister, uncle, or other various forms of male superiority when it came to myself growing up, so it really must chap his lily-white ass how things were now. How he had to answer to me. Call me boss.
My lips tipped slow, actually doing very important research on my end surrounding a certain professor. I’d decided to stalk Brielle’s social media profiles, a dead end since the one she had was locked and her pictures the same. I’d just wanted to find out more about her, figure her out and give me some indicator into why she was so closed off. The venture had turned up empty for the most part, and after a flick of my fingers to minimize her page, I swiveled the laptop around to show Duncan and the rest of the board.
“I’d like your opinion on something actually.” Nosy bastard. I directed a finger to what I now had on the screen, a catering menu. “Yellow or brown.”
“Yellow or... brown?” His eyebrow lifted slow, and he angled a look in the direction of my Mac. Pretty much everyone did, which was fucking funny as hell. About a dozen suited professionals, men and women completely disrupted since this man decided to call me out on the carpet. Duncan shook his head. “I don’t under—”
“Yellow or brown, Duncan. Mustard?” Chuckling, I lounged back in my executive chair. “It’s getting close to lunch, and I find myself simply plagued by this decision. Yellow or brown mustard on my pastrami on rye. I’d really love your opinion since you appear to be so concerned about me, what I do?”
There was more than one chuckle in my direction and a rose-colored tint to Duncan’s aged cheeks. He’d attempted to put me out there, but only ended up embarrassing himself for causing a completely unnecessary disruption to today’s meeting. I may have been bored as hell, but I hadn’t needed him to call me out on that.
He pressed a hand down a chunky tie his grandkids probably got him for Christmas. It was boring and humdrum just as himself, but his grandchildren couldn’t be faulted for that. They were probably just giving the old coot what he wanted. His throat cleared. “I’d advise brown myself. Typically, can’t go wrong there.”
I had to fight my smile now as he managed to make that actually sound serious, like it really fucking mattered and was a huge decision. I placed out a hand, and he took that as direction to continue, good man.
I fell back into the discussions of figures and projections, nothing over my head but dull, nonetheless. The board typically met once a month to discuss all this shit, and since I was the new guy around here, the new boss, I unfortunately had to be here for all of it. I tried to be since they had gone out of their way to reschedule things for me. They gave me their respect with that, knowing my frantic schedule with school and its combination with work, so I did give them the rest of my attention before the clock summoned its end, and I got to finally leave and go through things in the privacy of my own office. I really didn’t need these guys telling me every little thing, the hand-holding like I couldn’t read an email or open a file folder. I was a class or two away from getting my BBA, and even without my education, I already knew how my father’s company worked. I’d been born and bred for this shit since I came out the womb, always known this was what I’d be doing and where I was going to be. There were pictures of me in this very downtown office in diapers, sitting on my dad’s desk while he made phone calls and made powerful decisions.
I made that office my own now, on the top floor of a glass-enclosed fortress known as Mallick Enterprises. This was the man hub of my father’s real estate and development company, its location in downtown Maywood Heights, and I hoped, now that I was here and running things, to bleed some of the negativity and arrogance out of it. My father had been a piss-poor human being, which just so happened to make for an excellent businessman. He’d brought quite a few people lots of money through the years, but I was a firm believer that money could still be made without being a dick and making people feel inferior. That may be foreign to this office and the company he used to keep, but that’s what I was bringing around here. All I needed to do now was get familiar with things since I had been gone for the last few years. I’d had my father’s people keep me abreast of things, sending me those same figures and projections in the form of spreadsheets while I’d been in business school at Brown. They thought it funny I actually wanted it all since I was in school, but I didn’t want these people to forget about me, who I was. I was coming back, and they shouldn’t get too comfortable.
And they especially shouldn’t expect my father.
In the comfort of what was now my office, I opened my laptop and got right back to work, only occasionally trying to stalk Bri between emails and phone calls. That final conversation we’d had didn’t sit well, and I had a feeling this woman and I shared more in common than she’d readily admit. I may be twenty-two and she may be thirty-five, but she was right, we both had shit going on and we both obviously opted to deal with it in a certain way that night we met—together. She may have been completely off base with some of the things she’d said, things surrounding December and me. We were just friends, and though some of those old wounds from the past were still there, I’d accepted that long ago and the relationship we had now—just friends. Bri hadn’t been entirely wrong about maybe a few walls I had up, but I wasn’t unavailable and had a feeling we both may deal with sudden conflicts that arose in our lives in similar ways. Brielle seemed like a runner, just like me, and conversations definitely should probably be had between us.
I probably should address these things with her in person, not stalk her on the internet like well, a stalker, but at this point, I felt like a man obsessed. It was like I needed to know about her, everything I could find out, but as I clicked around on the net behind the close doors of my office, I, again, came up empty.
Who wasn’t on social media?
She had that one profile freaking under lock and key, and I wasn’t bold enough to try to friend or follower her, not with me being her student now and all that. Frustrated, I slammed my laptop shut right as I got a call from up front.
“Mr. Salsbury wants to speak to you, Ramses,” my secretary, Leann, said on the other line.
Fucking perfect.
“Send him in,” I told her, noticing he made all staff call him Mr. Salsbury when he had known all these people for years. I didn’t even do that shit, and I was his boss, and what would I look like doing that anyway? These people had known me since I was in diapers.
My eyes were on my laptop when Duncan came in.
I admit I pretended to be at work, but fuck me, if I didn’t still have Brielle’s Facebook page up. She had a profile picture of her in a football jersey, a New York team with black grease paint under her eyes and a sexy as all hell grin on her lips. I’d basically been pathetically salivating over the thing for the better part of an hour but I forced my gaze up to the world’s most well-dressed stick in the mud. Good ole Duncan loved to spend his money and had pretty much been me for all intents and purposes while I’d been away at school and my father had been in prison. Mallick Enterprises wasn’t just a family company, others had shares such as himself, but I held the majority. This effectively made me this man’s boss, but he was still basically family since I’d known him all my life.