Asking for Trouble (The Kincaids)

  Asking for Trouble

  The Kincaids, Book Three

  By Rosalind James

  Text copyright 2014 Rosalind James

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc., http://www.gobookcoverdesign.com/

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Killer Tuesday

  Rolling on the Ball

  Family Ties

  Everybody Except Alyssa

  Nothing Like a Necklace

  Moving On Up

  New City, Same Old Me

  Not a Date

  Another Second Chance

  Yes, a Date

  How the Real Men Do It

  Be It Ever So Humble

  Cliff, Lance, and Talon

  The Water’s Fine

  Oatmeal and Wheat Grass

  Hidden Dangers

  Kiss That Ball

  Electricity

  Why Not Me

  A Serious Thing

  Geek Day

  Another Bad Date

  Just Asking for Trouble

  An Unexpected Detour

  Cinderella

  Less Than Cinderella

  Not a Fight

  Forgive Us Our Trespasses

  What You Do When You’re Done

  Epilogue

  Links

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Killer Tuesday

  Alyssa Kincaid’s Tuesday started out badly. And then it got worse.

  She’d begun to hate Tuesdays anyway, the last year or so. When the past weekend was a memory, the next one four long days away. When her Sunday-evening pep talk, about how this week was going to be different, had proven fruitless yet again in the face of another meeting with her sales manager.

  “I’m seeing the calls,” Tim was saying now. “But I’m not seeing the orders for Mylexa.”

  “I’ll meet my quota,” Alyssa insisted, trying not to get rattled at the sight of the graph behind his desk showing all his reps’ numbers. Hers weren’t bad, she reminded herself. Not the best, but still right there in the middle. A solid performer. So she didn’t have the killer instinct. So what?

  “Your quota includes Mylexa. You’re supposed to be pushing it.” Tim bent his head over the contact report, giving her a great view of his new hair plugs. One hateful, pudgy, micromanaging forefinger stopped at an offending line. “Olsen’s office. Where’s his order?”

  “His order’s right there.”

  “For Mylexa. Where’s that?”

  The recklessness came over her like a rising tide. “Not there. Because I told him to stick with Zylase.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a better drug. You know it is, I know it is. And Dr. Olsen knows it too.”

  “And manufactured by the competition,” Tim said, his heavy face mottling red. For a pharmaceutical company employee, he didn’t exactly walk the walk. “Did somebody neglect to tell you that you’re supposed to be pushing our drugs?”

  “My way’s working pretty well so far, isn’t it? I have credibility. Ask any of my doctors. They know I’ll tell them the truth, and if I say it’s good, it’s because it’s good.”

  “I don’t care about credibility,” Tim snapped. “I care about numbers. Yours are down this month.”

  “Most people’s are down. It’s December.”

  “Electra’s aren’t.” His lips were drawn thin with displeasure, his face seeming to swell above the tight collar that squeezed his fat neck.

  Because Electra makes every doctor she calls on think he’s about to get lucky, Alyssa didn’t say. And half of them probably do.

  She’d been so excited when she’d been hired by Moreau Industries, into what was by far her best-paying, most prestigious job ever. But it hadn’t taken her long to realize that most pharma reps were young, female, and good-looking. Just like her. And now she knew exactly why that was.

  “I’m not going to prostitute myself for sales,” she said. “I’m not going to mislead anybody, I mean,” she added hastily. Too much honesty was not necessarily good policy, even for her.

  She didn’t fool Tim, though. “This job isn’t about saving humanity. It’s about getting sales any way you can. I don’t care if you have to give the guy a blow job in his office. Do what you have to do, just get the sale. That’s what it’s about. That’s what you’re paid for.”

  And that was it. That was what turned another bad Tuesday into the last Tuesday.

  She shoved her visitor’s chair back and stood abruptly, reaching for her wheeled sample case. She could feel her cheeks flaming, the wave of anger heart-high now and rising fast, about to push her past the point of no return. “Find somebody else for that,” she got out. “I quit.”

  Tim looked startled. He didn’t want her to leave, she realized with a mixture of astonishment and satisfaction. These were just his normal bully tactics, what he thought of as motivation. Well, they sure didn’t motivate her. Except to motivate her right out the door.

  “You’d better rethink that right now,” he said. “You’re not going to get another job that pays like this. You don’t get an attitude adjustment, you’re not going to make it anywhere, doing anything. You’re sure as hell not going to make it in sales.”

  “I’ll take that chance.” She turned, started to wheel her case out, then stopped in realization, hitched her shoulder bag up and left the case where it was, laptop, samples, and all. “Have a nice life.”

  Her indignation carried her through the long drive in the usual creep of traffic on the 10 to Santa Monica, but then the doubts started closing in. They were raging in full force by the time she pulled into the smoothly paved parking lot of the white-stuccoed garden apartments set in the midst of towering palms and landscaped grounds, grabbed her purse, and stepped out into another gorgeous Southern California day. She walked up the curving white sidewalk and through the glossy green front door of an apartment she wasn’t going to be able to afford much longer. Not unless she got a new job right away, one that paid as well as the one she’d just walked out of. Which, right now, didn’t look too likely.

  She picked up the phone to call Dennis, because she needed to tell somebody, needed somebody to tell her that she hadn’t been an idiot, and that was your boyfriend’s job, right?

  Which was when her Tuesday went from bad to worse.

  “So you just quit?” he asked her incredulously. “What the hell, Alyssa! You don’t quit a job until you have another job, didn’t anybody ever tell you that? That was just unprofessional. You never, ever do that, walk off like that.”

  “What else could I do, though, after he said that?”

  “I don’t know, let it roll off you, like every other rep does with their sales manager? And started scouting other jobs?”

  Dennis repped for a software company, had been in the industry for years, moving smoothly from one position to another when he got restless or something wasn’t working out, always seeming to land in a better spot. He’d been more than a boyfriend, he’d been a mentor, too. She’d met him on a Sierra Club outing, and over the past few months, the relationship had changed from casual to something more.

  He was still talking. “What were you thinking? Why didn’t you stop and consider before you burned your bridges?”

  “I was supposed to overlook what he said? Are you serious?”

  “I’ve hear
d worse. Sales managers are all assholes. It’s part of the job description. Quitting was bad enough, but it’s December. Who hires in December? You aren’t even going to be able to start looking for a month.”

  She was getting mad now. He wasn’t even going to be outraged for her? “I don’t want to do the job any more anyway,” she said, and recognized the truth of it. “I can’t sell things I don’t believe in. It feels like . . . pimping.”

  “No.” She heard the frustrated exhalation of breath, the Alyssa screwing up again sound that she’d heard so many times in her life, and felt her temper ratcheting up higher. “It feels like sales.”

  “Helping the customer make the best decision is sales,” she insisted. She was walking up and down the black-and-white tiled floor of her little kitchen now, pacing in her agitation. “This is pimping.”

  She had to calm down, she told herself. She got too hasty when she lost her temper, the events of today being a sterling example. “Anyway, I can’t do the Utah trip, that’s for sure. I’ll have to eat the plane ticket, but you should be able to get the hotel room refunded, right, almost three weeks out?”

  They’d planned a ski vacation for before Christmas, a trip that had loomed large and promising on her horizon. Their first real vacation together, doing one of her favorite things.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t bail on me now. It’s not that pricey, just your half of the room and some meals, lift tickets for a few days. And all right, maybe I overstated. You’ll have a job within a few weeks, I’m sure.”

  She waited for him to suggest that he could help out. He could afford it, and then some. But he didn’t.

  “I need to save my money,” she said when no offer was forthcoming. “I’m sorry to spoil your vacation too, but maybe we can do something local instead.” He was bound to be disappointed, she reminded herself. And he wasn’t obligated, after all.

  He hesitated so long that she thought she’d lost the connection. “Dennis?”

  “Well, I’m sorry too. I’ll miss you, of course, but I think I’ll still go,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to it, and the snow’s great this year. Who knows when I’ll get the chance again?”

  She actually held the phone away from her ear and stared at it for a minute. “You’re going to go without me,” she was finally able to say.

  “I said I was sorry. But I’m not the one who quit my job in a huff because my boss was mean to me. It isn’t really fair of you to expect me to cancel my plans because of your—somewhat naïve, I have to say, idealism.”

  “I thought we were building a relationship here,” she said. “I guess I was wrong. I guess we’re not.”

  “What, I’m supposed to say, ‘Alyssa, right or wrong? I’ll take care of my woman?’ I respect you too much for that. We’re two independent people.”

  “I see. Not a couple. Well, all right, fine.” The temper was right back again. “That pretty much tells me everything I need to know.”

  “What, you’re going to break up with me because I won’t cancel my hard-earned vacation for you, because you had a snit fit? That’s just childish.”

  “No. I’m going to break up with you because you’re selfish. Because you don’t care that my boss insulted me so badly I had to walk out. Because you don’t support me. And that’s not my idea of how a relationship works.”

  “You’re just setting yourself up to be disappointed, then,” he said, and she could hear the anger in his voice now too. “Over and over. The world doesn’t revolve around you and what you want and how you think things ought to be.”

  “No. But my world has rules. And when you break the rules, you’re gone.” And with that, she hung up.

  Minus one boyfriend. Minus one job.

  Rolling on the Ball

  “Any luck on the job search yet, Liss?” Alec Kincaid asked his little sister.

  It was late in the evening, two days before Christmas, and Joe Hartman was sprawled in an easy chair in the living room of the Chico home belonging to Alec Kincaid’s parents, listening to two of the three Kincaid siblings catching up. Alec and his wife Rae were on the couch across from him, Alec with his stockinged feet on the coffee table, Rae with hers tucked beneath her.

  Alyssa, of course, wasn’t doing anything nearly so decorous. No, she was sitting on a big, bright green exercise ball, rocking in circles, her hands behind her head, which made the front view a whole lot too interesting. And twisting her pelvis in ways that Joe was having a hard time not watching, although he was doing his best not to. As usual.

  “No,” she sighed mid-rock. “Because I think my heart isn’t in it. I got the unemployment, though,” she added. “Thanks for coaching me on that, Rae.”

  “What unemployment?” Joe asked. “What job search?” This was the first he’d heard of it.

  Alyssa swiveled her hips again, a grimace on her pretty face, her shiny dark hair swinging around her shoulders. “I quit my job a few weeks ago. A little unexpectedly.”

  “Because her boss made some comments that were beyond the pale,” Rae explained. “Alec didn’t tell you about this? What do guys talk about?”

  “Hey,” Alec objected. “We talk about work. Which is important. And sports, and . . . cars. Lots of things. Joe’s not exactly the best conversationalist either. Not my fault.”

  Rae ignored that, turned back to Alyssa again. “But the unemployment came through?”

  “Yeah,” Alyssa said. “Because I was able to show a pattern, like you said. Like how he started off telling me to wear my skirts short. That I should show some cleavage, lean forward when I talked to my doctors. All that. And then that thing he said at the end.”

  “What thing?” Joe asked, already feeling his blood pressure rising.

  Alyssa didn’t look at him. Instead, she swung around so her stomach was on the ball and rolled forward, walking on her hands all the way until her slim brown toes were the last thing balancing, then walking back again. In her tight jeans, which stretched over her curvy body. Which Joe really didn’t need to be looking at right now, with her brother looking at him.

  “He said,” she said through the curtain of hair swinging over her face as she made it back onto her stomach again and prepared to take off once more, “that I should give the guys a blow job if I had to, to get the sale. Which turned out to be for the best, because it was bad enough to get me unemployment.”

  “Though it would have been a whole lot better,” Alec said, while Joe was fighting the urge to hunt the bastard down and strangle him, “if you’d taken that up the chain at the time instead of quitting on the spot like that. Who knows, you might have even got him fired, got a better manager. It’s a good thing the company decided just to take the unemployment hit and make it go away, because you really didn’t have a case.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Alyssa sat up again, her face red, whether from embarrassment or her exertions, Joe couldn’t tell. “I know that. I got mad. What would you have done if he’d said that to you? Or if he’d said it to Rae?”

  “Yeah, well,” Alec admitted. “Punched his teeth in, probably.”

  “Don’t think that didn’t occur to me too. And I didn’t. I think I was quite restrained, all in all.”

  “But seriously. You need to learn to handle things that come up,” Alec pressed. “That’s a big company. All right, walk out of the meeting, fine. But then you should have written it up, given Moreau the chance to make it right. You’d have had documentation too, then, even if they hadn’t come through. Maybe a settlement as well as the unemployment, who knows?”

  Joe could see Alyssa getting mad, and Rae could obviously see it too, because she jumped in. “Well, live and learn. Glad the unemployment worked out. Any leads? I can probably connect you with some tech outfits, if you want to stay in sales.”

  Alyssa shrugged and started the stomach thing again. “I don’t want to sell software, or drugs either,” she said from her face-down position. “I want to do something that mat
ters, that’s going to make a real difference in people’s lives.”

  “Hey,” Alec objected. “We’re making a difference. That’s the whole point, that the software we create makes people’s lives easier. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have anything to sell.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said as she made it back to her ball again. “A real difference.”

  “Maybe you should have majored in social work, then, instead of business.”

  “Wait, now,” Rae said. “That’s not fair. Every kind of organization needs people who can think in a businesslike way, and who can persuade. Alyssa doesn’t have to be a social worker to contribute.”

  “I hope not,” Alyssa said, “because I don’t have the patience. But, yeah. Something that matters. I thought this was it, but it’s clearly not. But I don’t know what would be.”

  “Something that matters isn’t going to pay much,” Alec pointed out.

  “So?” She balanced with her knees on the ball, her palms on the floor, looked up at him with a frown.

  Joe was listening, honestly he was, but he was also noticing that her position, and the scoop-necked, stretchy top, gave him a view of some major cleavage.

  “So you don’t exactly have a track record,” Alec answered with the bluntness that could only come from a big brother. “You like to play too much. And you never stay and work it out when things don’t go your way. Never. You just quit.”

  She rolled off, got to her feet in one neat motion, picked up her ball and cradled it in her arms. “Well, yeah. I quit. I admit it. You heard why. And that was this time. I was doing well, before. Pretty well, for almost two years. Two long years. And maybe I’m changing. I’m thirty, or did you forget? And I want to do something. I want to get somewhere. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “And now you’re going to stomp off,” Alec sighed. “This is exactly what I mean.”

  She didn’t answer. She just stalked out of the room, and then spoiled her big exit completely when she hit the doorway hard, jolted to a stop against her big green ball and bounced off it. She gave it another huge shove that did the trick, popping through the door after it like a cork shot out of a champagne bottle.