THE PRESCRIPTION PLAYBOY
By GRAYSON-REYES COLE
LYRICAL PRESS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/
To Pam Skochinski – Thanks for your help on this project.
Chapter 1
Huntington Lewis’s nerves were snapped. Snapped and crackled and popped. They were frayed. They were more than frayed they were—her eyes sprang open, and she let out a very unladylike growl of frustration.
All Hunny knew was that she was exhausted, and she was rambling in her head in a silent but aggressive mutter. Lying back as far as her office chair would allow, she flung her arms out wide and stared at the ceiling. Slowly, she shifted pressure from one foot to the other gently swinging herself in the chair. Her mouth moved to the questions in her mind. Why? How? When? That one she could answer: eight months and four days ago. That was when she had accepted the assignment to a new account.
Now she was sitting in her office all day long waiting, just waiting, for The Client to call her back. That’s what everyone at Gentry & Associates Advertising had come to call the multi-million dollar pharmaceutical company they’d been courting for some time: The Client. The biggest account she’d managed since being promoted to Strategic Account Executive—a fancy title for elevated Sales Rep—this was Huntington’s baby. Unreal. Seven months, she’d been attempting to land this account for G&A. Since then, she had completed one small project after another, changed this, modified that. She ate, slept, and drank this account to the exclusion of all else, which would have been fine… in her old job. Now she was supposed to sell, and so far she hadn’t sold a thing.
Whatever the exasperating client wanted, she produced, all with the hope of getting a long-term contract and moving on to something new. There was an entire award-winning staff chomping at the bit to get their hands on Med Solutions. They were paid well to execute Hunny’s vision. That was the way it should have happened. She should have done some mockups, landed the contract, and moved on. But oh no, this client seemed to want this project to drag out forever, and Hunny was wondering if she would ever stop feeling like a child with its head trapped between the rails on a staircase.
She was pretty sure she would be deemed clinically insane before it was all said and done. She was convinced of it. That last round of meetings to select a new logo for the company had left her boiling mad and with a stress rash on her neck. Even in her dreams, she found herself painstakingly selecting and submitting options only to have them all summarily rejected. She never wanted to see another Med Solutions emblem on a letterhead, an envelope, or a sticky note again. And, even when they had selected the emblem, there had been an entire jury elected to decide whether to emboss or not to emboss. She had thought herself a perfectionist before this company had come into her life; she didn’t think it anymore.
Hunny, at one point, told her boss she wanted him to bring in someone else to close the deal. They had at least three awesome sales reps who could do the job. That way, she could succeed at what she did best. She would gladly run around like a chicken with no head each time Med Solutions asked for something new. She would—as she always had—tailor her entire life to the beck and call of clients as long as she didn’t have to—shudder—schmooze. Why Arthur had ever thought she’d be successful at this was beyond her.
One day, while on a long torturous conference call, Huntington had taped a paper napkin to a pen and waved the white flag. Arthur had just laughed and carried on as if she weren’t in mortal danger.
Kill me now, she groaned to herself as she swayed dejectedly in her chair, her head lolling back against the headrest. It was her own fault. She’d let Arthur sucker her into thinking she needed more, she needed to progress in her career. At that point, it seemed like a good idea to put her short-waisted, wine colored blazer over her head. It was warm and smelled nice, and Hunny could pretend for a moment that she was home in bed. Why had she let the man talk her into this?
Think of the devil. Arthur Gentry knocked lightly then proceeded into Huntington’s office. Hunny lowered her blazer and watched warily as he sauntered in. Arthur was a fiftyish gentleman who had been born and raised in London, though his father had been a transplant from Zimbabwe and his mother a globe-trotting Swede. He could easily have been described as a distinguished gentleman with his deep-voiced, British eloquence. It didn’t hurt that he sported a complexion of browned cream and had dark curling hair laced with attractive silver streaks. His comforting dark gray eyes were lazy and frequently described as bedroom by other women in the firm. Huntington had often tried to see it and failed, though she could not deny he was handsome.
As usual, he was impeccably dressed in a black, tailored Italian suit. Beneath it, he wore a deep blue shirt making his eyes even more vibrant over his patrician nose and flat lips. He slipped one hand in a pant pocket, and purposefully struck a nonchalant pose like a bored model. Though he refuted the charge that he was a snooty Brit, Arthur Gentry’s main characteristic was that he was unimpressed and looked it.
“They haven’t called yet?” Even his voice, a lilting tenor with an atrociously proper British accent, seemed wholly blasé.
“Of course not,” Huntington answered dryly.
“Now, now, Ms. Lewis,” Arthur admonished. “That’s our client towards whom you’re directing those derogatory tones.”
“Arthur,” Huntington implored in a voice that sounded a whole lot like a whine. For some reason, her boss wanted everyone to call him by his first name though he called all of them by their surname. “These people are driving me crazy. The guys in Finance and Accounting are no longer taking bets on how long it’s going to take to land this account. Now it’s ‘How long before Hunny snaps?’ It’s embarrassing. I am not cut out for this, Arthur. No one takes this long to close an account. I’m still doing all the work anyway so why can’t we just forget this sales business? I’m waiting for you to come in here and fire me any day now. I can just see it now, ‘How’s it going today Ms. Lewis? Don’t you think three years is a little long to be closing a deal, Ms. Lewis? I’m sorry. I’m going to have to let you go, Ms. Lewis.’”
“Patience, Ms. Lewis,” Arthur told her. Huntington huffed and rolled her eyes. “Seven months is nothing. Perfectly respectable for an account this size. I’ve asked you to rely on the team to do most of the design and individual projects, but you’re the one who won’t let go.”
“Yeah, so don’t you think that means my heart is in the work, not the sales?”
“I know all too well where your heart is, Hunny. But I believe this business should be yours one day. If you don’t learn all aspects of it, how will you run it?”
And there it was. That’s what had brought her to Gentry and Associates, what had kept her there, and what would keep her trying to get this new position. Like a proud and attentive father, Arthur had faith in her, he supported her, and he wanted her to learn as much about the business as possible. He respected her enough to want her to follow in his footsteps, and having a man treat her that way in business had been something Hunny had not experienced before.
Arthur tried to reason with her. “Contract negotiation should go quickly since you’ve primarily lined out everything they want already. Besides, I think we’re in our final decision-making stage, and we’ve already had one red-lined copy of the agreement. Once you meet with the client on some outstanding items, it should be a piece of cake.”
“I regularly burn cakes.”
“Don’t get cheeky, Ms. Lewis,” Arthur warned. “Kevin Carter can’t say