Read The Billionaire Game for Free Online

he was harassing me and
he had it coming—”
    Sarah cut me off with a wave of her
hand, and hemmed before finally beginning to speak.
    “As you know, we regularly
monitor company internet use—”
    “What?” I blurted, too
startled to keep from interrupting her. “I didn’t know
that!”
    Sarah heaved a sigh, and settled back
into her chair, seeming more comfortable. Ah, the familiar old ground
of having to explain something to me. “It was in your
employment contract.”
    “Oh. Right.” So sue me, I
hadn’t read the employment contract. Yeah, yeah, I knew that
wasn’t smart, but give me a break, the thing was as thick as
seven Bibles and didn’t have half the human interest. I’d
figured I could pick up most of it as I went along, and so far, I’d
been right.
    “As I was saying, we monitor
company internet use, and, well. There’s no easy way to say
this.” Sarah took a deep breath like she was about to plunge
into a deep and roiling ocean. “Kate,” she said in the
kind of portentous tone used by mystical prophets in cheesy movies
with bad CGI, “we know .” She took another deep
breath. “We know about the porn.”
    What?
    “Oh good,” I snarked, “I
was worried I was going to have to explain the birds and the bees to
you, and believe me, that is not a conversation I would be comfortable
having with my boss.” Then something about her previous
sentence jangled wrong in my brain.
    Sarah said primly, and a touch
frostily, “I was referring to a specific instance of
pornography, or rather several specific instances, namely those that
you have been viewing on your computer.”
    “What?” I exclaimed
indignantly. “I have never watched porn in my life!”
    “Oh, no?” Sarah said,
fingering one of the pieces of paper in front of her.
    “No ma’am,” I said.
“Cross my heart and hope to die. I read my porn, like a
classy person.”
    “Well, I’m afraid the
evidence says otherwise,” Sarah said. She slapped several
pieces of paper down in front of me. “What do you call this?”
    “Uh, I call this ‘research,’”
I said. “For my lingerie company? That I run on the side?”
    Because that’s what it was. Sarah
must have done her internet monitoring when I was working on my plus
size line designs, because the pictures in front of me showed larger
women of all races and a variety of weight distributions, each
modeling sporty, frilly, or sexy underwear. Man, looking at all these
brought it back. I could see now where I’d been making my
mistake—I’d been trying to use the underwear to convey a
look of slimness, when for this range I should have instead been
emphasizing the curves. Oh, man, as soon as I got out of this meeting
I was going to grab my design notebook and—
    Oh right, this meeting. Where I still
had to convince my superiors that even if I was wasting company time,
I wasn’t doing it to look at porn. And that I definitely
wouldn’t ever do it again, at least not in a way where they
could catch me.
    “I’m sorry, am I supposed
to be getting off on this?” I said, trying to laugh it off.
“Because there’s nothing sexy about an inaccurately sized
shoulder strap.”
    “They are scantily clad,”
Sarah hissed in the shocked tone of voice most people would reserve
for they are having a blood orgy and worshipping the devil while
listening to Nickelback CDs.
    “Yeah, scantily clad ladies ,”
I said. “Like, what, am I supposed to be imagining the dudes in
these pictures?”
    Sarah opened her mouth to say
something, checked herself, glanced backwards at the silent HR golems
for support, and then tried again. “Devlin Media Corp prides
itself on being an open, supportive, and tolerant workplace. We do
not discriminate based on race, class, gender, or…other
things. Nonetheless, we cannot tolerate use of company time and
resources for your own titillation. This has nothing to do with
your…proclivities, or preferences, but—”
    And then the penny dropped.
    And I