A thud sounded, as if something had slammed onto the desk.
“That promotion is not going to happen. That’s final.”
“Aww, too bad, Lexi.”
Lexi’s heart sank with every word as she realized she was the subject of the angry conversation. Jade seemed pleased as she walked over and poured herself a cup of coffee as Vincent continued his ranting.
“I know it was unprofessional. I’m dealing with it, I assure you.”
“See, I told you he was pissed at you for trying to mess with my career,” Jade said with a sneer.
Lexi desperately tried to hold herself together, but the emotionless tone that was creeping into Vincent’s voice nearly brought her to tears. Jade kept a close watch on her, probably watching for anything she could use to launch into her next attack.
“This conversation’s not over,” Vincent growled.
After the distinct sound of the phone slamming down onto the cradle, an eerie silence fell over the office. Vincent’s door flew open, and Lexi simply stood there and stared at him, unable to move.
“G-good morning, Vincent,” she stammered, trying to settle her pounding heart.
Vincent looked from Lexi to Jade and back again. “What’s going on out here?”
“Nothing, baby. Just a little girl talk.” Jade slithered over to Vincent and wrapped her arms around his waist, her eyes locked on Lexi. Vincent hardly acknowledged Jade was touching him.
“Well, I have a lot to catch up on.” Lexi tucked her purse in her drawer, sat down at her desk, and began taking inventory of the folders that had piled up, ignoring the couple wrapped in an embrace only three feet away.
“Jade, I need to talk to Lexi. Will you excuse us?”
The temperature dropped a few degrees as an icy chill settled on the room. Jade unwrapped her arms from around Vincent, furious, but remaining in control. “So sorry if I’m in the way. I didn’t mean to inconvenience you and Lexi.” Her name hung in the air, and Jade’s unusual calm made the hairs on Lexi’s arm stand on end.
“Jade,” Vincent finally turned away from Lexi.
Throwing her hand into his face, Jade cut him off. “Save it, Vincent. You and your dear Lexi talk about whatever it is you need to discuss. I have a phone call I need to make. I need to talk to my agent.” On her way out of the room, Jade cast a dirty look in Lexi’s direction, letting her know she wasn’t finished.
Once Jade left, Lexi tried to keep it causal. “How’d the Walker meeting go yesterday?”
“He hired that buffoon, Reid. But you would’ve known that, had you answered your phone,” Vincent snapped.
“About that, I’m sor—”
Vincent stepped closer and took the top file off her desk and began looking through it, dismissing her comment with a wave of his hand. “You were sick, whatever.” He started walking away, and Lexi thought the conversation was over, but she was mistaken. “My office, please.” Vincent paused outside the door, ushering her in.
Lexi’s heart flew up into her throat as she stood up and followed him, and her hands trembled as she clutched a pen and pad of paper. She had grabbed them at the last second hoping the conversation was going to be about work and not about what had happened between them at Anna’s.
“Have a seat.” The air rushed out of her lungs as soon as her butt hit the plush cushion of the seat. “We need to talk.”
If Vincent spoke in one more clipped sentence, Lexi was going to scream. Annoyed, she snapped, “Fine, Mr. Drake, what do you need?”
“Cut the Mr. Drake crap, Miss White, unless you want to have this conversation as employer and employee. Of course, you know what tends to happen when my assistants piss me off. I thought we could talk as friends.”
Friends. The word stung as it spilled from his lips. Were they even really friends? Did friends torpedo a friend’s promotions? Did friends take out their anger out on each other? Did friends accuse one another? No, they trusted each other, and Lexi seriously questioned whether Vincent was even capable of trusting her at this point. Her mind kept replaying the snippets of his phone conversation in which he’d undermined her abilities, and in that moment she realized that she didn’t know if she could trust Vincent.
Never in her life had Lexi wanted to slap someone so badly. “So talk, friend. You obviously have something to say.”
“Actually, I was hoping you could explain when you were going to tell me about your little phone call with Jade?”
If she wasn’t angry before, she was now. “I tried to tell you, Vincent. At your sister’s house, I said I had to talk to you about something, and you said if it was going to put you in a bad mood to wait. Obviously, I was right about the bad mood part, so I did what you asked and waited.”
“And you couldn’t tell me any of this before you ran out of there that night? Do you have any idea the shit storm I walked into with Jade because of that?”
“Wait a minute, let me get this straight—did you know she was going to call Julian? Did you want her talking to him minutes before we walked in there to present to him? In your expert opinion, was that actually a good idea?”
Vincent raked his hand through his hair and sank back into his chair. “I had no idea she had any contact with Stone at all. And yes, it was a horrible idea. You and I both know that. But when my girlfriend calls a client in the middle of a presentation and you take the call and get in the middle of everything, telling her to take a hike … it wasn’t your place to interrupt that call.”
“It might not have been my place, but it was my job. And more importantly, it was the right thing to do.” Lexi crossed her arms and jutted her chin out defiantly.
“Jade’s fit to be tied.”
A muzzle sounds good to me, Lexi thought to herself before responding to Vincent. “Gee, I hadn’t noticed. I thought all the nasty things she said to me out there were her way of saying hello.”
“Cut her some slack.” When Lexi rose to her feet in protest, he blurted, “She thinks you and I are having an affair.”
“Cut her some slack? You’ve got to be kidding. She was wrong to call. I don’t care what the reason, the timing sucked. And she most definitely is wrong about us having an af-aff,” Lexi paled, her fury replaced quickly with mortification. “Why does she think that? Wait. Y-you didn’t tell her about th-the …”
“About what?”