One for Me

Chapter Fourteen

ON MY DESK IN TWO HOURS.

Violet read the six lettered email from Grant and furrowed a brow. She clicked the attachments and found that the real estate sector of Bass Enterprises needed a financial review. There were pages and pages of logs, receipts, accounts payable and receivable, property lists...Violet kept scrolling, not knowing where to begin.

In any case, she was already working on an assignment. After successfully closing Donahue Holdings, she was back to her small accounts, the ones she was in charge of managing on behalf of her clients.

Violet typed a reply, letting him know the two hour deadline was tight but she would try her best. She even put a smiley face at the end, though she wasn't smiling. At all.

Plus, didn't they have their own in-house accountant? A very good one, at that. What did they need her for?

She had been in bliss, her old accounts were muscle memory at this point so she'd been half paying attention, half reliving this past weekend.  That came to an abrupt halt with the email she'd received. And in all caps? Who was he yelling at? Violet wanted to reply as such but knew it wouldn't be appropriate, no matter who she kissed on the weekends.

BROWN GRAD CAN'T MULTITASK?
ARE YOU ACTUALLY WORTH YOUR SALT OR JUST A FAVORITE?

4 PM, NOT A MINUTE LATER.

Ignoring his dig, and deciding not to give herself a headache trying to make anything of it, Violet opened all the files. She could imagine his keyboard was stuck that way. She had half a mind to ask him if he'd taken his blood pressure medication he so obviously needed. She had no clue if he were truly on any but she was willing to bet her life that he was. There was no way being so angry all the time didn't affect him in some capacity.

Violet had half a mind to go to Lincoln and pout like a child. She knew it would get her way, but, it wouldn't be right, and she didn't want to take advantage of him...yet. What would be the point in dating the CEO if she never got her way a time or two? Not even for workplace advancement, but to get out of unwanted assignments, like this one. She was happy working her spreadsheets without the extra intern-level work.

Sighing, Violet put a pause on her work and started the new assignment. "Michael could do this with his eyes closed." Violet muttered to herself. And that was no disrespect to Michael, he just wasn't the ripest apple on the tree.

"This fucker." She mumbled, realizing she had to organize all the files by date before she could even attempt to make sense of them. While part of her hoped Grant wouldn't be that big of an asshole, she didn't put it past him one bit.

Violet spent the next hour and a half auditing the files. She annotated, highlighted and organized the biggest red and orange flags. The yellow flags she let fly. Under her given time constraints, it just wasn't possible to dig as deep as she could.

At 3:37 PM, Violet sent the annotated files back to Grant. When she would get these types of assignments from Brenda, she would always thank her for the opportunity to sharpen her skills because Brenda's assignments always came with an acknowledgement of Violet's already heavy workload, a please and a thank you. Grant didn't get that courtesy from Violet's because he gave none.

Violet pushed away from her desk, slipped her heels on and grabbed her coffee cup. She went to the break room to refill her cup and then, in a moment of impulsivity, granola bar in hand, she went to stop by Lincoln's office. She told herself it was to ask about the success of the Donahue merger but she knew that wasn't it. Not at all. Thankfully, Sharon wasn't at her own desk. She just needed one more stroke of luck.

He'd been in off-site meetings all day and had a tour of an industrial plant Bass Enterprises was buying for a textile company they'd merged with. She knew her chances of catching him there were slim to nil, but because it was so late in the afternoon, she was hopeful.