Should’ve Known It’s You (Not You Again #7)

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

AUSTIN

A fter wrapping up lunch and putting in a couple of more hours on my report, I went to grab another coffee from the breakroom. I was definitely a bit of an addict, drinking the stuff black and strong—and constantly.

While I was filling up my cup, I heard raised voices coming from down the hall and I frowned, pausing for a beat as I tried to figure out if I was imagining things. But nope. Someone was definitely upset.

Poking my head out, I realized that everyone else in the office was hearing it too, and we all shared questioning looks as we wondered what the heck was going on. Eyebrows were raised and brows were furrowed. It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so confusing.

“Is that coming from Donovan’s office?” someone asked.

“Sounds like it,” the guy next to him replied. “I wonder what he said this time.”

I rolled my eyes. Leave it to Tate to piss someone off so badly that they get into a screaming match in his office.

Doubling back for my coffee, I decided to get back to my own office as soon as I could. I was hoping to avoid the conflict entirely, since being Tate’s damage control wasn’t my problem, and yet, far too often, I got dragged into it anyway.

As I left the breakroom, his office door swung open right ahead of me and a red-faced, furious young woman backed out of it. Her face was obscured by her loose hair, but her fury was clear from her voice, her rigid posture, and the way her hand shook as she pointed a scolding finger at him. Lighting him up with colorful language, she seemed to be refusing to leave even though he was obviously trying to get her away from him.

“You seem to suffer from delusions of adequacy, Mr. Donovan, but you’re as useless as tits on a bull and you’ve got all the tact of a bowling ball to go along with it. Thanks for nothing, you jerk. May your life be as pleasant as you are.”

I couldn’t help it. I stopped walking and enjoyed the show, sipping my coffee and completely forgetting that I’d meant to disappear before I could get dragged into it. This woman was hilarious, and it was definitely worth the risk to watch his face turn redder and redder as she kept going.

But then she spun around, presumably to storm away, and we locked eyes. Recognition flared through me and I sputtered into my mug in surprise. “Kenny?”

Her blue eyes narrowed. “Were you the one who canceled our meeting?”

“What?” I frowned, still struggling to comprehend that the furious, creatively insulting young woman was Kennedy Sweet.

Her hands tightened into fists at her sides and she marched over to me, getting in my face before she poked me hard in the chest. I spilled some coffee on my suit and I cursed under my breath, but Kenny didn’t even seem to realize it.

She wasn’t through with me, and right then, I doubted she would care about the state I was in unless I spontaneously caught fire—and even then, she’d probably only douse it so she could keep yelling at me before she lit me on fire again once she was done.

“How. Dare. You?” she seethed, her tone scolding and her voice loud and heated. “I had that meeting booked for over a month. I didn’t know you were the investor I was going to talk to, but what happened? Did you see my name in your schedule and decide to bail because you didn’t want to cross a line? We had sex. So what? I hardly think that’s a conflict of interest.”

The entire office had heard her. That much, I was sure of.

My mouth fell open as I finally did the math, realizing that she must’ve been the client whose appointment I’d had Mindy cancel this morning.

Fuck balls.

Kenny’s cheeks were glowing with fury. Her nostrils flared and her hand trembled as she poked me again. “You’re a jerk for not even giving me the time of day, Austin Merrick. You know how important this business is to me. We?—”

I grabbed her hand and dragged her to my office, spilling even more coffee, but that was hardly a concern right then. I’d officially crossed into whiskey territory anyway.

“Good luck with her,” Tate yelled after us. “Let me know if I should call the cops, man! She’s feral and I’m pretty sure she’s having a psychotic break.”

Kenny wrenched her arm out of my grasp to go and continue her verbal attack on him, but while it had been wildly entertaining before I’d realized who she was, I wouldn’t put it past him to call the cops on her for real.

She went to step around me to get back to him, and I caught her wrist and yanked her into my office. Closing the door behind us, I stayed between her and it just in case.

“What the hell was that?” I snarled.

She scoffed and folded her arms across her chest as she faced off with me. “You want to go at it? Fine, let’s go at it. That turd in fancy shoes out there told me that it was time to accept my business is never going to get off the ground.”

I lifted my chin. “And that gives you an excuse to go off on him in front of the entire firm? Shit, Kennedy. That’s not going to help your case. If anything, it’s going to make it harder to get an investor. He knows everyone in this business and you can be damn sure he’s going to be telling them about it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have had to go off on him if you hadn’t canceled our meeting in the first place,” she shot back without skipping a beat. “You dismissed me without even bothering to take five fucking minutes to hear my pitch. The least you could’ve done was to take the damn meeting and then to say no to my face like a man, but I guess you were too much of a coward for that.”

“First, I had no idea you were the client I canceled with. I have a big report due and I’m on a deadline, so I canceled. Second, I know Mindy well enough to know she would’ve offered to reschedule, so I don’t know how you ended up in Tate’s office, but that’s not on me.”

“I ended up in that idiot’s office because I couldn’t wait another month for a meeting with one of you superior ass-wipes,” she snapped, her chest heaving. She narrowed her eyes at me again. “Also, I don’t believe that you didn’t know it was me. My name had to have been on your calendar, so don’t insult me, Austin Merrick. You’ve already done that enough for one day.”

“I’m not trying to insult you and I’m not lying,” I insisted, finally stepping away from the door and crossing my office to set my now cold coffee down on the desk. “As it happens, I have a personal assistant who handles my calendar. She doesn’t give me the names of new clients unless I ask for them, and I didn’t ask.”

“So, what then? You think you’re so important that you won’t even look at your own calendar?” Her eyebrows shot up. “If you expect me to believe that in this day and age, when everyone’s got a calendar on their phones, their computers at work, their laptops, and God only knows where else, that you didn’t know you were meeting with me, then you’re more of a jerk than I thought. Just admit it already. You saw my name and you didn’t want to meet with me.”

“I didn’t know the fucking meeting was with you,” I said emphatically and slowly, enunciating every word in the hopes of getting through to her.

This didn’t seem like the Kennedy Sweet I knew at all. To be fair, it wasn’t like I had ever known her very well and I certainly couldn’t say that spending a couple of hours with her at Jess’s wedding had made me an expert on all things Kenny, but she seemed irrationally worked up.

Her eyes were so wide that she looked wild, her body still trembled with rage, and her muscles were so tense that she was practically vibrating. At about five and a half feet, she was nearly a head shorter than I was, but her anger seemed to be making her taller, like her spine was stretched to its maximum limit.

The frustration that was bubbling out of her was also so real that it seemed palpable, filling the air in my office until it was so fraught with it that even my own heart started beating faster. When I’d known her as a kid, she’d always been fiery and she’d never been one to back down or bow out, but this seemed to be more than just anger about a canceled appointment.

If I didn’t know any better, I would have said she was triggered or something, but one canceled appointment couldn’t really be to blame for something like that. Regardless of how long it’d been on the books for.

In a pair of fitted black slacks, a black suit jacket, and a light blue shirt underneath, she looked like she’d started the day pretty positively. Put together. But something had obviously changed between then and now, and while I knew better than most how infuriating Tate Donovan could be, I doubted it was just him.

As I stared at her, relentless in her accusations and anger, I finally pulled out the chair across from my desk and waved her into it. “Pitch me.”

She blinked, suddenly silent as she glanced at the chair. “Excuse me?”

“Can you pitch me your business like a professional?” I asked, daring her to test me again as I walked around my desk and took my seat. “Or are you going to blow your chances once and for all by continuing to have your tantrum?”