Beginner's Luck. Kate Clayborn

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СКАЧАТЬ drive the fifty miles I needed to go to pick up all this slate and bring it back here. It’s almost funny—thirty-one years old, and I’m home to take care of him, but my dad still bosses me around this yard like I’m his fifty-dollars-per-week employee.

      Strangely, though, I don’t feel like laughing.

      I hear the muffled sound of my phone ringing from my back pocket, and I already know it’s Jasper, because he’s called three times since yesterday, and I haven’t picked up once. It’s hot as hell out here already, only ten a.m., and my arms are tired from all the lifting.

      Might as well get this over with, I decide, and yank off my gloves, tossing them on the truck bed before yanking out my phone. Just to make sure, I check the screen before saying, “Jasper, you are an asshole.”

      “That’s some greeting for your best friend, Tucker.”

      “It’s what you deserve. I’m fucking pissed, Jas.” I resist the urge to kick at the pallet beside me. Though I’ve been keeping it together in front of my dad, being back here seems to rouse all my adolescent instincts.

      “I’m guessing it didn’t go well with Averin.”

      “You’re guessing right.”

      “Goddammit. Global Chem got to him first,” Jasper says, his voice frustrated. Global Chem is our biggest competitor, and we’re always chasing down the same talent.

      I snort a sarcastic laugh. That would maybe be easier. I could play good cop if I was up against Global Chem. But what happened yesterday—there’d be no way E.R. Averin was ever going to see me as a good anything. “She’s not a him,” I snap. “I mean, she’s—Ms. Averin, she’s a she.” I sound ridiculous.

      “Oh,” Jasper says, and I’m surprised to feel annoyed on her behalf. I’ve been annoyed with myself since yesterday, having blown it so thoroughly with her, but Jasper can take most of the blame on this one, as far as I’m concerned.

      “You should have done your research,” I say to him.

      “That’s your area.”

      “Not right fucking now, it’s not. I told you, I needed a couple months here to deal with my dad. You call me, you want me to deal with a recruit that’s in town, fine. But you needed to do the legwork.”

      I exhale a frustrated breath, hunch my shoulder to hold the phone against my ear so I can tug on one of my gloves. I’m too mad to be standing here doing nothing. What I said to Jasper, it’s only partially true. I am on family leave while Dad recovers, and Jasper was asking me to do a special favor in going out on the job while I’m here. But I’d agreed before I left to stay in the loop, to telecommute as much as possible, and if I’d agreed to go out on a job, I should have been as careful as I usually am when I approach a new recruit. All I had before going to see Averin was what Jasper told me—master’s degree in materials science, working as a full-time lab tech at the university, impressive publication record in the area Beaumont was after, high tensile strength metal alloys, the kind of stuff we could use in our building materials division in particular—and the small additional amount I’d scared up through some Google searching an hour before I went in. I should have known something was off there. Everything online about her had been calculated to avoid anything personal—no pictures, no social media accounts, and on her university staff profile page, there’d only been a “No Picture Available” box, and underneath a list of publications so long that I’d had to scroll down twice.

      The fact that I’d not taken the time to read a single one was bad enough. But worse was the fact that I’d jumped to conclusions—I’d thought Averin had to be at least forty-something to have that publication record.

      And I’d thought Averin was a man.

      She was neither forty-something nor a man. I’d thought she was a grad student, honestly. A gorgeous one too. When I’d first seen her, my mouth had gone dry, the tips of my fingers had twitched. It was such a dick move, such a massive error of assumptions that I still got a hot, embarrassed feeling when I thought about it. I may have played it cool when I was standing in front of her—I was terrific at playing that game—but I’d known I had fucked it up, and for some reason, it had felt uniquely awful to fuck it up with her.

      “How’s he doing?” asks Jasper, and he sounds genuinely concerned.

      “He’s a stubborn cuss, and he’s got me working like a dog. Which I guess means he’s doing all right. Doesn’t quite have his color back yet, but he’s a little better every day.”

      “You brought him home yet?”

      “Yeah. On Thursday.” I let that sit, enjoying Jasper’s silence. Thursday, the day Jasper called to insist I see Averin as soon as possible, I was helping get my seriously injured father discharged from the hospital, settling him into a house I’d spent the last three days preparing for his arrival, moving furniture and setting up ramps and installing grip bars for his tub and toilet.

      Fucking Jasper.

      “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really am.”

      Anyone else would probably hear this as lukewarm, barely a gesture. But Jasper hardly ever apologizes, so if he’s said it, I know he means it. And I can forgive Jasper for not getting it, I guess—the guy’s got no family of his own, and pretty much all he does is work. He laughs off the jokes people make at the office about his being robotic, a machine, but I know that shit gets to him. I know he tries.

      “Averin,” I say, shifting the focus back to where he’ll feel more comfortable. “She doesn’t want anything to do with Beaumont.”

      “Try again,” he says, and I have to laugh at how fast he’s returned to form.

      “I’m serious, Jas. Aside from the fact that I was shit in the meeting, I don’t think she’s interested at all in what we do.” I have a memory of the way she waved a hand over me, where I stood in the doorway. Your suit, she said. Your face.

      “So she’s a tough case. But that doesn’t mean she’s impossible. You’ve handled lots of cases like this.”

      I had, actually. In fact, usually, tough cases are my specialty. Two months ago, I closed a guy who’d had his name on four medical patents that Beaumont wanted to develop. He’d been tenured faculty at his university for fifteen years, making good money, his wife and his kids happy and settled in their town. He had a top-of-the-line lab on campus and grad students that worked hard for him. There was really no reason for him to move on.

      Until I convinced him otherwise.

      Most people think recruiting comes down to one or two major things—money, usually, is the first one, or location—if you can convince someone that they’re going to be moving to a better place, one with more opportunities, or a better climate, whatever. But it’s more complicated than that. A good recruiter gets to know as much as he can about his target’s life, looks at that life in all its tangled, sometimes piecemeal, and always personal complexity. A good recruiter knows that people might move for money or location, but they stay for all kinds of different reasons—politics, partners, the sports scene, dog parks, whether there’s a good local bookstore. Beaumont has branches in seventeen states, and I know them all inside and out. I know the offices and the people who work in them; I know the surrounding areas and the shopping districts and the best places to go to school. I know everything that might turn a recruit on, that might scare them off.

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