AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m glad you contacted me,” Janine said. “I didn’t care for where I was but was too lazy to look for another job. It never looks good on your resume when you move around too much.”
Janine had been a great paralegal and the two of them worked well together. But she’d had a bad year with her teenage son getting hurt and needing surgery and care. Then months later her father was diagnosed with cancer and she was the closest sibling and managed his care.
The firm they worked for didn’t like giving time off and terminated her, saying she was falling behind in her work when he’d seen no signs of it.
He’d been pissed and went to bat for her and all it did was get him on the shit list.
“No need to worry about that now,” he said. “I hope I’m not too horrible of a boss, as we both might be going by the skin of our teeth here.”
He’d never run his own business before. He didn’t know the first thing about a lot of that stuff.
His mother was going to do his books until he got things squared away, just like she did for Jonah when he opened his gym years ago.
Hell, even Megan offered to help and since she had more experience in what he needed than what his mother did, who worked in risk management at a bank, he might take his future sister-in-law up on that offer and figure out how to pay her for her time.
“You’re going to be great,” Janine said. “Show me around. This place is pretty big.”
“It is,” he said. “Bigger than I need, but I hope to bring on another attorney at some point and more staff.”
He was starting small, just the two of them. He had to hustle now to get clients, as he’d handed off his caseload last week when he’d walked out the door of the first job he’d been hired at out of law school.
He had enough money in the bank to get him through a year and hoped to hell work started to come and he’d be stable long before that. He wasn’t going to be fussy. He’d take any clients he could and not specialize in anything. He just wasn’t going to take frivolous things. That wasn’t him and never would be. He’d close his doors before he did that.
“Is this space mine?” Janine asked. There was a wide-open space when you walked in. A reception area. They’d been lucky that the contractors could come in and split the space down the center and add an entrance from what the previous leaseholders had.
“For now,” he said. “As we grow, we’ll get someone up here and you can have your own office.”
“Yay me,” Janine said. “But I’m good anywhere.”
They moved through the four offices, the tiny gallery kitchen, then a conference room and finally a file room. He hoped to fill this baby right up in time.
“The office furniture should be arriving soon. They said between nine and twelve. They are putting the desks together too. You and I can get everything else we need set up. Make a list of what you want or need and we’ll start ordering.”
“I can work with bare bones,” Janine said. “As long as I’ve got a computer.”
“In my car,” he said. “Laptops for both of us. The Wi-Fi is good to go. I’ve got someone I contacted coming in to set our computers up this afternoon once the desks are ready.”
“This is so exciting,” Janine said. “Will you get mad if I want to hang some artwork up?”
“No,” he said. “We need this to look welcoming and it’s not.”
“At least it’s not plain white walls,” Janine said. “I like the soft blue. It’s relaxing.”
Trent was thrilled he’d been able to pick the paint colors and went with the blues and grays. They felt neutral enough. The flooring was already put in and he was fine with it. Sturdy gray vinyl plank that looked like hardwood. It’d be easy to clean.
“I’ll give you an amount you can spend to decorate,” he said. “I’d like an area rug up here at the very least around the chairs. We need them too. As much as I want clients right away, we’ve got to get this place set up.”
“I can start browsing now while we wait,” Janine said. “I can do that on my phone.”
He laughed. “Let me go get our laptops. I’ve got the Wi-Fi password and we can do that together while we wait for the network guy.”
He left Janine to wander around the office space and take measurements. He’d pointed her to where the bathroom was on the second floor. They didn’t have a private one and he didn’t care.
When he returned, Janine was typing on her phone. “I’ve got measurements for the conference room so I know how big of a table and chairs to order. We should be able to find something basic that will let you add more chairs as we go.”
“Good idea,” he said. He knew Janine would be a huge asset and was glad he’d been able to convince her even though he most likely wasn’t paying her what she was making at her last job.
She’d said she didn’t care. This was closer to her house and she wanted a hand in building something from the ground up.
