Book3:Taming Mr. Walker
Danny Walker, my big brother’s arrogant, powerful, handsome, and completely unobtainable best friend.
He’s a ruthless tech tycoon, and I take calls from angry clients who can’t reset their passwords.
He lives in a Grade II listed mansion with holiday homes worldwide, and I rent a room in a flat-share with my best friend and mice.
Our worlds couldn’t be further apart.
Falling for him is not an option.
Eight years ago, I made the mistake of flirting with him only to be rejected…hard.
To this day, he won’t acknowledge me as anything more than his best friend’s silly little sister. Which is fine because I can’t stand to be around that emotionless CEO.
Regardless of him being the hottest man I’ve ever met.
Now I find out he’s bought the company I work for, making him my boss’s boss’s boss.
And he wants to get rid of me.
Danny Walker is not a man to be messed with.
But perhaps there’s more behind his cold, detached stares than I thought.
Stone-faced ruthless CEOs don’t fall for scatty girls like me. Or do they?
———————————————
Charlie
Where the hell are you? Mike’s on the warpath.
You’re the target, by the way.
Thanks, Stevie.
I fire the phone back into my bag and barge through the glass doors of Dunley Tech, doused in the perfume of the London underground.
Jackie, our darling receptionist, looks up from whatever influencer’s Instagram she’s trying to imitate this week. She has packed so much powder on her face she looks like a cake.
“Morning,” I nod curtly.
“Wow” She drags her eyes from the screen. “Your skin looks really….” I raise my eyebrows, waiting.
“Grey.” She went on. “Were you boozing last night?”
“Thanks, Jackie,” I replied, fumbling to find my security pass in my bag. “That’s almost as nice as when you asked me if I had washed my hair in conditioner. I was up until 3am sorting out the server outage if you must know. ”
“Fascinating.” She turns back to Instagram. “They have started without you. Mike’s raging. He says you better be ill or dead to be this late.”
Damn.
I look at my watch. It’s 10. 20 already.
Mike Chambers is our Head of IT., has been since the company started a decade ago.
An absolute dinosaur in the workplace. He hates change and any ideas that don’t come from him.
Greasy, uptight, and in desperate need of a good seeing to. We are sure he’s a 50-year-old virgin.
I brace myself and push the doors of the boardroom open. It’s our weekly management meeting where the team sits through Mike’s dick swinging with a slideshow in the background. He rants and stomps his feet for an hour while the rest of us patiently wait for the peacocking show to draw final curtains.
Everyone has strategically chosen seats far from Mike. I walk to the only remaining seat right beside him.
Great. I haven’t even had my own coffee yet; now I have to smell his rancid breath.
“Sorry, Mike, I’m running late this morning.”
He leans over, breathing right in my face. If he comes any closer, I’m going to dry retch.
“I can see that. We are discussing why the India office was offline for two and half hours last night. That meant thirty staff members were unable to do any work at all. Not one line of code written!”
“I understand your frustration Mike -” I start.
“That means horse shit, Charlie.” He slams his fist down on the table, making the room wince.
“Can you explain what happened here? Can you explain to the board why our most critical software release won’t be out in time?”
He leans over the table, jutting his finger in my face. “Can you explain what the fuck went wrong?”
I draw in a sharp breath and refrain from vomiting profanities at him. “It was a problem with the network again. As soon as I established the problem, we had a severity 1 call out. This was the fastest they would do it in.”
“The fastest?” He scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous. Who fucked up here? I. NEED. ANSWERS.”
With every word, he jabs his finger on the table. He likes using his fingers for effect; we suspect he’s read it in a management for dummies or control your workforce book.
“Contractually, they can take up to three hours for these types of problems. Those are our SLAs.”
He blinks furiously. “How the fuck are you going to make sure it won’t happen again?”
“We can’t,” I reply through gritted teeth. “Unless you let me move us to a cloud solution, we’ll never have the resilience you want.”
“Bullshit!” He howls. “We are not creating a bloody cloud, Charlie!”
I open my mouth and close it again. I have drawn Mike basic diagrams, but the understanding wasn’t going in.
“No, we don’t create the cloud,” I say slowly. “Amazon has already done that for us.”
Mike was Head of IT but didn’t understand IT. To him, the software and hardware of a company should run by pressing a large red button with ‘Go’ on it. He couldn’t understand why the button sometimes stopped working, and because of that, he got very mad. Very mad indeed.
If there was a bug found in the Operating System, it was my fault. If the payroll software had bugs in its latest version, it was my fault. His printer running out of paper, my fault, his mate sending him an email that has a virus attached, my fault, and the company firewalls blocking his porn sites were all my fault. The last one was my fault.
She looks sensational, but that’s because she uses the reception as a salon.
Mike nods at her to continue.
“It’s from your sister. She says it’s an emergency, and you must contact her immediately”.
Oh god. My stomach heaves.
This is bad.
Someone’s dead.
Dad’s dead.
There’s been news from Ireland that he’s had a heart attack… or he finally overdosed on drink? No, Mum’s dead. Someone crashed into her when she was driving too slow.
Both of them are dead.
“That’s fine.” Mike waves his hand to dismiss me.
I stand up shakily…be strong, Charlie. You must be strong for Callie.
Although why does Callie know before me? Surely it should be the older sibling that delivers bad news? Why isn’t Tristan calling? Is there something wrong with Tristan?
I follow Jackie out to reception, getting out my phone. Sure enough, there are 10 missed calls from Callie. Shit!
“Did she say who it was about? Is it Dad?”I ask in a high pitch. She shrugs. “Not in my job description to ask.” Bitch.
I grab the phone.
“Callie?” I stammer. “What is it?”
“Charlie!” She shouts over the noise of traffic. It sounds like she’s on a really busy road. I was right; Mum’s been in a car accident.
“Yes?” I shriek. “What is it? What’s going on?”