Chapter 4 FUCKED OUT

ALICE'S POV

I woke up to a sunny friday morning, and fear was still sleeping on the other side of my bed. Ever since the visit to Seth Black's office on Monday afternoon, I'd been nothing but a big, crumpled ball of nerves.

The man was assigning me to one of his top-of-the-line projects, and that alone was frightening. Seth Black was the real estate tycoon, crowned king of this business. Anything he did was incontestable, turned to gold. He topped it all. Didn't do normal. Didn't do typical.

Every tower loft, high-rise, gated community he built stood out from the rest, his signature recognized. This project he assigned to me was what we considered one of his 'success projects'-sold out long before construction even began, because buildings such as those were constructed for a certain set of people: politicians, movie stars, celebrities, etcetera.

Other normal projects were what designers like me usually got contracted on. Projects affordable to the middle-class. We're required to be innovative and unique so that work done by RRR employees stood out from others, but we did so without the constant pressure to go all-out extraordinary, make-it-to-the-magazines crazy.

To make it worse, I hated working on residential contracts. Commercial was where I shined. All commercial contracts came directly to me, because everyone else in the design department at RRR shied away from them.

The Royals' Realty was a rather large company with all things real estate under one roof, ranging from interior designers to development and construction. Being an interior designer, I worked in the design department (DD) under my boss, Gilles Chad. Mr. Chad's boss's boss was Seth Black. Therefore, employees like myself almost never got to meet face to face with the head man.

Aside from business news, business magazines or Internet blasts, I'd never before yesterday seen the man in person. So one must imagine the utter shock and confusion I was in when I was summoned to his office.

Right up to the 39th floor. Before then, I'd never been past the 5th floor. Then, when I entered his imposing office, the way he stared at me sent my nerves into overdrive. His blue gaze was searing, raking me over from head to toe. Whether he was leering or glaring is still in question.

Seth Black carried a hard, intimidating demeanor with a hint of wickedness. One could look scrutinizingly at him and detect, beneath that sophisticated suit of his, a barrel load of danger. Full-on danger. The kind of danger that'll leave a girl traumatized, with PTSD, with a leaking, porous heart.

Seth Black himself resembled danger. But that wasn't for me to care about. A job I wasn't too ecstatic about was still waiting for me to start. That's what I should care about. It's not as if I'd never done houses before. I had.

It was the weight and pressure and high expectations that came along with working on projects like Riverview that scared the bejesus out of me. Meeting those assumptions would be damn hard.

Those contracts were for the bigger heads, like Monica Regens. In fact, Monica Regens had been working on all the major projects for the last couple of years.

Now, out of the blue, I was picked to work on a project she should was working on? That's where I was baffled.

My theory is they were running behind schedule and just needed the next available designer. There was no other reason I could come up with for why I was chosen when I haven't accepted a house project in two years. And now, if I didn't deliver, I risked losing my job.

"Oh, God," I mumbled as I rolled out of bed.

Trundling to the bathroom to freshen up, I raked my fingers through my choppy blonde hair and noted the bangs were growing a bit too long. Kayla would be receiving a visit from me real soon to shape them up and add some highlights.

My hair used to be eighteen inches of near-white blondness, but it was too thin and wouldn't hold curls. When I added extensions, they only rendered me an itchy scalp with dandruff galore.

Fed up one day, I just sat in Kayla's salon chair and ordered her to chop it all off. Everyone fell in love with the short haircut, and since then it's been my signature look. Sometimes I let it grow out and go all pixy girl for a while, and sometimes I cut it extremely low and bleach it platinum blonde.

In addition, I had full, plump lips that were abnormally red, so whenever I went platinum-blonde, the look rocked.

After freshening up, I headed downstairs, praying that Jaime was up and preparing breakfast and not busy cutting an early morning round with his bimbo of the moment. I couldn't cook to save my life, so I relied on him to feed me.

A satisfying smile pulled at my lips when I entered his kitchen and found him flipping pancakes.

"Morning," I sang as I took up residence on a stool at the breakfast bar.

Jaime glanced over his shoulder and flashed me his signature crooked grin. "Morning, bad girl. Just pancakes and eggs. Feeling too lazy for anything healthier."

"Lazy or fucked-out, whore?"

He chuckled. "It's because I'm fucked-out why I'm feeling lazy."

Jaime Roberts was my brother. Well, kind of. Because I could only think of him as my brother in my head, otherwise I'd earn a cold stare and an "I'm not your fucking brother!" barked at me.

However, on paper, we were brother and sister.