Temping is Hell Read Online Free Page A

getting paid well? At this job of yours?”
    “Decent,” she said.
    “Decent for you,” he asked, “or, like, a normal person wage?”
    She bristled. “They’re definitely the richest company I’ve ever seen, and I’m getting paid a little higher on the scale than usual temps.”
    Her dad sighed. “You know that we were okay with you moving back as long as you got a job,” he rumbled. “But you also knew that it wasn’t going to be permanent.”
    “Trust me, I have no plans on staying permanently,” Kate said before she could stop herself.
    Her father glared a little. “You’re not a kid. And we don’t want to make a habit of bailing you out.”
    “Do you want me to leave?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral, mostly from the numbness she was feeling.
    “No, no,” he said. “But I think that it would be best if you paid rent.”
    Pride had her chest lifting up, her chin jutting out. “I have no problem paying rent.” It would mean that much longer before she could save up to move out, which stung. Still—if she paid rent, maybe she could actually be more like a tenant and less like the fuck-up teenager they seemed to still believe she was. “I’ll write you a check in the morning.”
    “Fine.” He nodded at her. “Good night.”
    She took a deep breath. “I love you,” she said. It wasn’t particularly graceful, but she meant it.
    He sighed, weary. “Love you, too, Katie,” he said, then lumbered off toward the bedroom.
    She went to her own room, turning on the light. It had been her bedroom in junior high and high school. She’d moved out once she got into college, even though Berkeley was only twenty-five minutes away. But the bedroom still had traces of that adolescence. A poster of Lord of the Rings on the wall. Dog-eared paperbacks crammed haphazardly into a white bookshelf. A signed CD from some high school band. Framed pictures of her with her brother, Tim, when he graduated from the police academy.
    She still remembered when the family had moved here after the disaster in Southern California. The way they blamed her for needing to move back up here.
    In too many ways, this place had never really felt like home. Now, fourteen years after she’d moved out the first time, it felt like a time capsule of failure and shame.
    She had to get out. She’d pay rent. She’d take on a second job if she had to.
    And if it meant catering to a psychotic prom queen in one of the lowest rings of corporate hell, then so be it.

Chapter Two
    At seven the next morning, Thomas sat at his new desk, in his new office on the top floor. The morning sky was still a pale salmon gray. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, he had a view of Oakland’s Lake Merritt and the Bay Bridge beyond, with San Francisco’s skyline in the distance. The office itself was luxuriously appointed—he did, after all, have appearances to maintain. Everything screamed sophistication, money, and an almost sinful decadence.
    He could have been sitting in a cafeteria, for all he cared. His focus was entirely on the old man sitting in the red leather chair across from his desk.
    “When I brought you on board two years ago, Al,” Thomas said, his voice mild despite the anger simmering in his blood. “I frankly thought the process would be a lot further along by now.”
    The little man snorted derisively, the sound dry as old paper. “Talk to your consultant over there. It’s not my fault you didn’t have my home ready on time.”
    Thomas glanced over his shoulder at Yagi, his “consultant.” The guy looked like Yakuza—impeccably dressed in a three-piece pinstripe suit—yet that sense of badass Asian hovered around him.
    Of course, the Yakuza would probably pee their pants if they ever met a guy like Yagi.
    His face was placid, but Thomas had worked with the man long enough to recognize the irritation in his dark eyes.
    They’d both had enough of Al. Too damned bad they still needed him.
    “Building an