The security guard poised in front of the building didn’t stop him, so she had to believe that the gorgeous dark man was living in the same building.
And here he was again this morning. Looking at something beyond her.
The valet beeped to get her attention. Michelle felt like she was coming out of a trance as she tipped the valet and got in her car. She decided to forget the dark man. He must be hopelessly obnoxious and haughtily arrogant because he had inherited the DNA that makes male gorgeousness. He was probably self-obsessive, narcissistic and a snooty jerk to boot. Probably held women in contempt when they fell all over him, slavering for attention.
Or possibly he was gay. Which would explain why he had seemed to look through her rather than at her. Absolute zero interest in the opposite gender. It made sense. Every man she had ever known who was totally gorgeous had also been gay.
She passed several of her office buildings on the way to work. There was a euphoric, proprietary feeling of pure luck that she had happened upon such a splendid job, Property Manager for Heroshi Corporation.
The feeling of happy serendipity about her wonderful position dissolved when she got to the office.
Susan, the office receptionist, handed her a bundle of yellow messages torn from her pad and said, “Telephone book.” Their code for lots of complaints. She winked in sympathy.
“Good grief,” Michelle muttered as she took them and started sorting through the thick pile.
“Crying wolf?” Susan asked.
“No. These actually look pretty serious. Am I late or something?”
Susan shook her head. “They all came in in the last fifteen minutes.”
“Can you take my calls for a few minutes? I have to get started on these...” Michelle said, frowning down at the pile of messages.
“Shall I tell them you’re in a meeting?”
Michelle shook her head and smiled. “No. They’ll just think I’m trying to avoid them. Tell them I’m on the phone and I’ll get back as fast as I can.”
Michelle hurried to her office and began making calls.
The air-conditioning had mysteriously quit in the Lanai office building (an outrage in a tropical climate where all buildings were aggressively cooled to almost freezing) and she had ten furious messages from the tenants about their suffocating environment. Michelle sat at her desk and cursed the inanimate mechanical systems that went down for no apparent reason.
She started organizing the messages for each of the buildings she managed, calling repair crews and maintenance men before she even started returning messages from irate tenants. A whole sewer system had backed up. A palm tree fell, breaking several windows in another building. That was odd because although their root systems were not deep, there hadn’t been any abnormal wind phenomena, and they seldom fell over. Sprinkler systems seemed to be off timer in another building and had flooded a garage. And the lights in another building were blinking, indicating a malfunctioning electrical system.
When an elevator in her own building quit there was nothing to panic about. Elevators and air conditioners were the bane of her existence. Mechanical failures happened all the time. But a woman trapped in the elevator did panic, and when she was finally freed she was unconscious, having fainted. The engineer who pried the elevator door open took one look and thought she was dead. Paramedics were called. Michelle spent an hour with the woman, apologizing on the management’s behalf, in the hope that Heroshi wouldn’t be sued.
A few minutes later there was an emergency call from another building. A lawyer had stripped all the wall paper off in his entire hallway. Michelle hurried to her car and drove over to the building on Kalakaua. Drywall plaster shards and sheets of wallpaper debris littered an entire hallway, causing ugly chaos and hazard to anyone walking through.
Tenants in the hallway besieged her, outraged by the mess. The lawyer who had caused the mess, sauntered over languidly and said the decorators she had arranged to renovate the building were too slow. He wanted compensation for his own wallpaper, a hideous orange with brown flecks, which would clash terribly with the interior design of the entire remodeling. Michelle clenched her teeth. The lawyer made her feel like squeaking obscenities and running away. Instead, she smiled at the shyster and spent a half hour trying to rectify the situation, pointing out that the hallway was a building ‘common area’ and he had no right to change it. Of course he had to know that, as a lawyer. What was his problem? she wondered. Temporary insanity?
Later, back in her own office, Julio, her maintenance manager ran into her office. He was soaked, dripping water from his hair and all his clothing.
“My God, what happened,” Michelle asked, startled to see him dripping all over the carpet.
“Broken water main. You come.”
Michelle trotted after him to the elevator and they watched the flashing floor numbers until they reached the 22nd floor. She just had time to pull off her shoes as water gushed inside when the doors parted. They waded in. The burst water main came from the Men’s Room. It had rapidly turned into a flood that ran like a tidal wave down the hall of offices, ruining the carpeting in the hallway and several offices on that floor.
As they hurried toward the Men’s Room, there was a sudden piercing, undulating shrieking sound.
They both stopped. “That’s the fire alarm,” Julio shouted over the noisy assault.
“Damn,” Michelle said, after a moment. She realized the water had proceeded down through the ceiling, and into the smoke alarms, setting them off. Tenants started sloshing past them to evacuate into the streets.
Several tenants greeted her, and Michelle had to tell them that since the fire alarm was sounding, they’d have to take the stairs. All the elevators automatically went to the ground floor level and locked when the fire
