Eligible Billionaire

The red-haired cranium belonged to my best friend, Ruth Reid. She had her usual wide grin on her face as she slung her arms over the top of my wall and leaned over.
“You talking to yourself again?” she asked me.
I leaned back in my chair and smiled. “I’m always guaranteed to have an intelligent conversation.”
She set her chin on her crossed hands and furrowed her brow. “You sure you were talking to yourself?”
I studied the wall and my friend. “Are you sure you should be up there?”
Ruth grinned. “So it’s ‘no’ to both those questions?”
I rolled my eyes and slid my chair closer to the wall. I placed my palm against the wall and gave it a soft shake. “Come on, get down before you-”
“Miss Reid, what are you doing up there?” a voice barked.
I groaned and Ruth winced. She slowly slid out of view. I rolled my chair to the opening of my small prison and peeked around the corner. A wide, short man stood in her doorway with his arms crossed. He wore a blue suit that did nothing for his figure, and only seemed to accentuate his increasing baldness on the back of his head. The man was our portly supervisor, John Bulla.
He glared at my friend as she sat cowed in her chair with a nervous smile on her face. “Miss Reid, I’ve warned you time and again about climbing on the walls.”
She nodded her head like a bobble doll. “I know, Mr. Bulla, but I was just-” He held up his hand and shook his head.
“No excuses. If I catch you one more time you’re out. Do you understand?”
Ruth cringed. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Bulla turned to me and pursed his lips. “Was there something you wanted, Miss Combes?”
Combes was my last name. My other handle was Dakota.
I shook my head. “No, Mr. Bulla. If you’ll excuse me I’ll get back to work.” I pressed my heels in the thinly carpeted floor and pushed myself back into my cubicle.
Bulla’s heavy footsteps retreated from our little domains. After five minutes of typing madly away at a report I barely understood a head peeked out from the side of my cubicle entrance.
Ruth studied my typing fingers. “How can you do anything on a Friday?”
I didn’t look away from the screen. “Because I’m paid to do stuff on Friday.” She pulled herself in her computer chair into my cubicle until our arm rests bumped together. I stopped my work and glared at her. “You’re going to get us both fired.”
She leaned her cheek on my shoulder and smiled up at me. “Then we can look for new jobs together.”
I pursed my lips. “What do you want?”
She started back and dramatically pressed her splayed fingers to her chest. “Moi? Want something?”
My face fell and my eyes narrowed. “You only give me those brown eyes when you want something.”
Ruth dropped her hand and shrugged. “Well, there is a little favor I wanted-”
“He’s here!” a voice in a neighboring cubicle giggled.
“Oh my god!”
Ruth jumped to her feet and looked over my cubicle wall. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. “It’s really him!”
I raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
She clasped her hands and her eyes sparkled. Her voice resembled the squealing of tires on a hard corner. “He’s so handsome! I wonder if he’s still dating?”
This was going nowhere. I rolled my eyes and stood up. I followed her gaze and my eyes fell on a handsome man with short black hair. His face was perfectly sculpted and he wore the custom-made suit like a glove. Or a suit. Anyway, he was about six feet tall which is a head taller than me, and he had smiles for all the employees who ogled him.
This was Mr. David Dives, the billionaire playboy who owned and played with the company, and some of its employees. He stood near the elevator on the far side of the room in the hall that ran between the rows of cubicles and the wall. A gaggle of supervisors and women stood around him, many of them with starry eyes.
Several of our fellow female employees peeked over the tops of their cubicles, and their whispered conversations floated over to me.
“I heard he has a girlfriend for every day of the week.”
“I heard he has two.”
I snorted. I could just imagine him paying out to have a woman for each arm, not that he needed the money. He was handsome, to say the least.
“I heard he bought another yacht.”
“Doesn’t that make three?”
“Something like that.”
“How does he run the business and have all this fun?”
The first woman snorted and waved her hand at her friend. “He doesn’t run the business. The board does that, and all the slave drivers on the floors.”
“Then what’s he doing here?”
Her friend rolled her eyes. “Don’t you know? He always makes a yearly scouting of the place, just to pretend he’s in charge of the company he inherited.”
The other one sighed and they both looked back to their idol. “I wish I could live like that.”
Ruth tugged on my sleeve and nodded at Dives. Her voice was a ghost of a whisper. “I want you to get me a date with him.”
I rolled my eyes. “I can’t even get the time from him, much less you a date.”
Her shoulders drooped. The figure of worship was joined by Bulla, and the pair walked down the walls of cubicles and into our supervisor’s office. Ruth sighed and dropped into my spare seat close beside my desk.
“Damn. . .” she mumbled.
I slipped into my chair and shook my head. “None of us has a chance with a guy like that. We may as well be hoping to meet a mythical creature.”
A nervous smile slipped onto Ruth’s lips. “Speaking of mythical creature, I kind of have a date after work tonight.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You were just asking for-” She rolled her eyes and nodded her head.
“I know, I know, but a girl can dream for better things, can’t she? I mean, Barney can’t exactly give me a yacht, can he?”
I snorted. “You’re going out with the front desk man?”
She put her hands on her hips and wagged a finger at me. “He’s nice, and he knows how to greet a girl.”
“He knows how to greet everybody,” I quipped.
Ruth sighed and slumped back in her seat. “Anyway, he’s going to take me out for some Unicorns, but I-well, I haven’t really got my work done today.”
I frowned. “You want me to do you work so you can go out on a date?”
She gave me a wide smile and clasped her hands together. “Please? Perdy please with sugar on top?”
I pursed my lips. My eyes fell on the dwindling stack of papers beside me. They were data sheets to be typed in. The clock on my computer screen read fifteen minutes till five which was when we were all released like schoolchildren to run amok through the city for the weekend.
I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. “Let me see the paperwork.”
Ruth’s face lit up and she nodded. “Sure! Sure thing!” She hurried to her cubicle and returned with a pile twice as large as mine.
My face fell and my eyes flickered up to her face. “All right, but you owe me big, especially since we don’t get paid for overtime.”
She dropped her pile onto mine and saluted me. “I promise you won’t regret doing it.”
Oh boy was she wrong. At least at the beginning.