Page 4 of Irresistible

“I-I, uh…” Richard started. “The p-presentation should be fine. Thanks. Anyone else? Great. I’ll see you all at noon,” he concluded hurriedly before retreating once more to the office.

“Still have something in your throat?” Cody said with a chuckle. Nothing got past him.

“Clearly,” Richard said with a slick smile as he rushed into the office.

Richard whipped out his phone and called Dr. Kim again. $450 an hour clearly allowed for numerous calls during a twenty-minute period, or so Richard told himself.

“Hi, Dr. Kim, sorry to bother you again. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure. Just one second,” Dr. Kim said quietly. Richard could hear her trying to placate another client in the background. He felt bad before he remembered how much money he had paid Dr. Kim in the past year.

“Go ahead, Richard.”

“I just went back out to give a speech to my employees, and the same thing happened again as soon as the young woman raised her hand. What do I do?”

“How long have you known this person, Richard?”

“I literally just met her twenty minutes ago, right before I called you,” he replied.

“Richard, I’m going to tell you to do something that I’ve never asked you to do before. You have a need to control these situations. You crave power and the ability to dictate your own responses to external stimuli. You have to go out there and do just that. Own your relationship with this person and do exactly what you want to do with it. Think through things critically and do what Richard Grant wants to do. That’s it. Nothing else,” Dr. Kim explained.

Richard quickly agreed and hurried off the phone as Dr. Kim explained that she needed to get back to her other patient. He told himself that he could handle this. Who was Scarlet, anyway? Why did she deserve to have any sort of power over him? He reassured himself of his accomplishments and his ability to control his own destiny. He rattled off a few business-like platitudes under his breath before sitting down in his chair to get started with work for the day. After all, he still had a bank to run.

Richard began as he always did, by answering the most pressing emails in his inbox. These were always messages from lower-ranking executives about some issue that wasn’t nearly as bad as they made it out to be. The executives always prided themselves on figuring out the problem and posing a solution in their message to the CEO. Of course, they usually did this in the hopes that Richard wouldn’t discover that they caused the problem in the first place, which they did more often than not.

The work flew by, and Richard found himself working on autopilot for most of the next three hours. He could not get those two brief interactions with Scarlet out of his mind. She was stuck in his brain, and he could not come up with a way to get her out. He wasn’t even entirely sure he wanted to. After all, thoughts never hurt anyone, right? Her long, wavy, black hair strewn about her narrow shoulders tantalized him endlessly. She had the curves of his dream girl, a fit hourglass physique honed by regular exercise and a good diet. Her pencil skirt revealed just enough of her toned and sexy thighs to keep him fixated on the image of her stunning physique between earnings spreadsheets. Beyond her breathtaking figure, he found himself returning to the image of her smoky, green eyes. Richard had made the mistake of making eye contact with her upon their initial introduction, as he did with every employee he met. Eye contact ensures at least some sort of bond that cements the interaction in the mind of both parties. But this time, that backfired on him.

Her gaze entranced him. She simultaneously seemed vulnerable and supremely confident. Scarlet knew what she was about, and Richard had no need to guess at her true nature. Even having said only a few sentences to her in three hours, he knew that she was not the type to hide her real self. Every few minutes, he shook his head and tried to rid himself of these thoughts. But the time between each futile attempt grew greater and greater, and he eventually just abandoned the effort. This was just going to be a part of his time here. He had to handle this his own way, just like Dr. Kim told him. His way would be to embrace it, and take control of it. He gave himself every rationalization he could to allow himself to keep fantasizing about Scarlet.

There was a knock at the door.

“Mr. Grant?”, Cody said, opening the door slightly.

“Yes, Cody?” Richard replied, snapped out of his reverie.

“It’s 11:45. Everyone is on their way to the conference room. I just wanted to let you know,” Cody said plainly.

“Thanks. Let them know I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Have them get the first presentation set up and ready to go by the time I get there. Thanks,” Richard replied.

Cody nodded and exited the room. Richard wondered where the time went. It seemed like he had just sat down in his chair after his speech. He tried to pull himself together as he finished up the last few tasks he had queued up for himself before the presentation. He was a very organized person, even when lusting after a young woman. Business was always business. After another ten minutes of work, he closed his laptop and tucked it under his arm before leaving his office for the conference room. Cody waited outside the door for him, as always, and ushered him across the branch lobby to the other side of the bank.

The conference room, just as sterile as the rest of the bank, had a projector set up on a cart in the back. This was starting to feel familiar to Richard again. These meetings always took largely the same form. There were three or four presentations by nervous bank employees who had no experience speaking in public, and who were incredibly scared that their data was somehow going to get them fired. That thought could not have been further from Richard’s mind. He was simply attempting to get out of the meeting with his dignity intact.

“Mr. Grant, I believe you’re next on the agenda,” Jim said sheepishly.

“Right, thank you, Jim. I just wanted to take a moment first to thank you for all the excellent work you have done for Local Citizens Bank over the years. Our bank is only as strong as our branches. Next, I wanted to fill you in on some strategy emerging from the C-suite that will affect you all on a day-to-day basis.”

Richard proceeded in his presentation for the next half-hour. The words came to him effortlessly, as he was simply giving the same speech that he had been giving at branches all along the East Coast for the last year. HE was in his element, and the reactions of his employees demonstrated the command he had over the room. The next thirty minutes flew by. Before anyone knew it, it was time to break for lunch.