AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Jesus,” I muttered, turning it over, scanning through it. It was lucky I still had two months left in the lease before it started its next term and started whatever they were doing trying to clear people out, but two months wasn’t going to cut it. The leasing office had been dragging their feet on renewing my lease. Now it made sense why—Leon Realty was probably leaning on them to run out the clock on as many leases as possible so they could pull this.
I tossed the letter aside, my stomach churning as I looked at where Earl was still tucked happily, blissfully ignorant, into his food.
“Ready for a move, Earl?”
He ignored me. Typical.
Now was not the time to have to figure out a new place to live. Let alone actually moving…
This whole thing stank. My bad luck streak didn’t extend far enough to explain my landlord getting taken over. I picked up the letter and glanced over it again, and I grabbed my laptop and scanned through the company’s website until I found it with that sinking feeling in my gut.
His smarmy face was right there on the About Us page, along with the CEO and executives of Leon Realty Group. Special Contributor, Miguel Sanchez.
That little skank. I was going to get my hands around his neck. Just not where María could see.
∞∞∞
Which was a cruel kind of fate, because I marched into the office not fifteen minutes later and ran immediately into Miguel and María, side-by-side at the reception, María laughing brightly at something that rat was feeling smug about. He just looked so satisfied with himself right now, but I couldn’t blow up at him in front of María.
“Back before a very late lunch, I see,” María said. “Well, I guess it’s no use staying out when your job’s done for you anyway.”
I paused. “Come again?”
“You didn’t hear?” She went wide-eyed, and she stood up straighter. “Miguel closed things with Mister Garcia. Sold him on a more expensive one than the one we’d had in mind, to boot. That’s a good seventeen million contract.”
I felt like I’d swallowed something bad. I shot Miguel a horrified look, and he gave me that smug, smarmy-ass smile. “Hey, I can’t take the credit,” he said, which was rich. “I think London must have softened him up a bit. He was pretty easygoing when I went to see him.”
That seventeen-million-dollar property was what I’d gotten him sold on. I’d spent the entire day with him, talking about his lucid dreaming explorations, and he’d eventually insisted we talk properties. I’d changed up some of the parameters based on what I’d figured out about him, and I’d called Genevieve Dupont to get a tour of her seventeen-million-dollar office space she was selling off, and we’d toured it just two hours ago. We talked about the ability to rotate the floor plan into different spaces and keep his staff sharp on fresh consciousness, and I’d even pitched one of the meeting rooms as a perfect space for a meditation and quiet room with just a few tweaks.
I knew that damn look in Miguel’s eyes. He hadn’t done a thing. He’d just walked in on Mister Garcia and been the one to put the papers down, and he’d had the snot-nosed audacity to tell María that he’d been the one to close the deal.
And I’d probably laid the groundwork playing myself up as a helpless woman who didn’t know what she was doing. A strong, confident man coming in to finish the deal wouldn’t even be unusual.
Christ, I was going to murder Miguel. Once María wasn’t looking. She adored him, and there was no use trying to call him out like this. She’d take his side. Always had.
But I didn’t take things lying down. So I put on my most subtly-venomous smile, and I said, “I don’t know about that. I didn’t make any headway. You’ve got quite a sharp eye, huh, Miguel? Picking out that property for him. What clued you in on it being the one?”
He narrowed his eyes just a touch, but he knew the hand he had. María doted on him while she thought he was the little sweetheart. Nothing openly hostile would fly in front of her. “Location, location, location,” he said. “I did some digging on his employees’ commutes and picked it out to make it most convenient for all his staff. All I had to do was sell him on the monetary value of a shorter commute, and he saw really it was like giving out even more than the price difference in raises.”
“That much?” María gave him a look, one eyebrow arched. “Where did he have people commuting in from, Jupiter?”
“Over the long run. A simple ten-year calculation model showing his price breakdown. Well, money always wins in the end, right?”
I cut in with a polite smile. “Money and good business honesty. But I know you’re nothing if not upstanding and charming with the clients, Miguel.”
It was a dirty shot that didn’t get me anything, but it did make his throat muscles bulge, and that was reward enough. Oblivious to the silent fight, María put a hand on my shoulder.
“Oh, London,” she said. “Since that’s freed up sooner than I thought, come to my office, okay? I have a job for you.”
Miguel’s eye twitched, but he leaned back against the reception desk, putting on a show of relaxing. “Oh, yeah? She gets the fancy new job? Where’s mine?”
I’m sure you’ll be trying to steal it before long. I managed to keep it on the inside. María waved him off.
“Olvídalo, hombre. You take a damn day off, you hear me?”
I couldn’t get away from him fast enough. I gave María a quick smile. “Let’s go. I’m listening.”
She was uncharacteristically quiet along the walk down the hall, up to when she sat down with a heavy sigh, folding her hands on the desk.
