Inez and Adrienne

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Adrienne and Inez have a bit of a performance review.



Adrienne was happy to enter her New York office building, which clearly illustrated how awful India had been since she hated her New York office building. Maybe it was the codeine making her loopy. She approached her top floor office unannounced, and half expected to see the place looking like a bomb had gone off outside, at Inez's desk. But the space looked tidy and well-organized. The psychometrist stepped past the assistant's desk and poked her head into her office, which also looked tidy. That was rare. But where was the girl? The phone on the assistant's desk began to ring, and Adrienne turned in the doorway, wondering what to do with it.

The last thing Adrienne probably expected to see was her assistant walking casually across the floor, holding an entire banker's box in one hand as if it weighed no more than a lunchbox, before setting it down and picking up the phone. "Sixty-four Square, this is Inez, how can I help you? ... No, Ms. Frost is currently out of the office... I'm not able to say, sir... I certainly will... thank you and have a wonderful day."

Inez hung up the phone and turned around, nearly jumping out of her shoes when she saw Adrienne. "Ms. Frost!" she chirped, blinking rapidly before self-consciously picking up the banker's box. "I didn't expect you in, I was going to look through these annual reports... how was India?"

Adrienne's eyes darted down to the sling that held her arm in place against her chest so her broken collarbone could heal properly. "It was pretty terrible," she replied with a raised eyebrow. "But at least I didn't have to worry about the office while I was gone. From the look of the place I'd say you have things well in hand, Temp." Temple, temporary assistant... the name had just seemed to fit. Adrienne told herself she should probably stop calling Inez 'Temp' now, though. "Can you come into my office for a minute?"

"Sure..." Inez said slowly, trying to keep the wariness out of her voice. There was an entire folder full of meetings that had been rescheduled and postponed due to Adrienne's absence, and Inez had no idea how quickly her boss was going to want to get back to them. Then again, she didn't have any idea how her boss was standing upright, so maybe she was about to learn something.

Closing the door behind them, Adrienne took a seat at her desk and motioned for Inez to sit in one of the client chairs opposite. "First, I trust no cars found their way into rivers while I was away?" she asked with a smirk.

Inez sat down and blew a lock of hair out of her eyes with an exasperated expression. "No, I was good. I got all my frustrations out by hauling around chunks of wrecked jet plane instead of doing property damage. I did throw a big rock almost all the way across the pond behind the mansion, but that was just because Marko's a jackass."

"Well, that's fine with me if you want to chuck rocks into the pond instead of peoples' cars into the river," Adrienne replied. "No one gave you an overly hard time about rescheduling meetings? Which also reminds me, I'm going to need my schedule for the rest of the week, unless there's nothing on the books. I realize I didn't give you any notice as to when I was coming back," she said almost apologetically.

Inez nodded and turned one of the folders on the desk around to face Adrienne. "Here's all your previous meetings, rescheduled starting tomorrow. And now that you're back, I'll call everyone who called this past week to... um, you're actually okay with people seeing you all..." She motioned to her shoulder.

"I'm fine," Adrienne said quickly, touched and taken aback by the concern. "If anything I'm hoping it'll make me look even more dedicated to my work than usual, coming in with a broken collarbone and all," she smirked again. "It's all a ploy. Plus if anyone asks what happened I get to say I did it fighting nuclear terrorism in India." She picked up the folder with a nod. "Thanks for this." Green eyes scanned it quickly and then looked up at Inez again. "So... Ivie came back on Saturday from her trip. Because of where I was I gave her another week off, but we need to talk about next week."

Inez just nodded. She'd heard enough of "Where's Ivie?" on the phone from people that she'd debated asking Forge if he had any inventions that would let her punch people through a phone line.

It wasn't often that Adrienne had held a conversation with Inez when the girl hadn't given her some sort of reply, more often than not something smart and sassy that always made her smile. Her silence threw the older woman off for a considerable amount of time. "Umm... so anyway, I spoke to Ivie this morning," she began, somewhat nervous.Usually she had her personnel director do these sortsof things. "I'm opening a new office in Miami next month, where her family lives now, and I've offered her the management of it. She's too valuable to be my assistant forever. She's accepted, so she'll be flying down there tomorrow to settle in and start training for it. If it suits you, I'd like you to stay on for the rest of the summer. In the fall, when you return to school, I'd find you something part time, maybe even in another department, like International or..." she thought back to the box of reports the girl had been planning to read, "Accounting... If you're interested in learning more about the business, that is."

Inez just blinked some more. This wasn't at all what she'd expected. "I do! I mean, I will! I want to - I would like that very much, yes ma'am." She tried to keep the smile of glee off her face. What would her stuffed-shirt uncle say if he could see her being offered a full-time job, she wondered.

Adrienne smiled broadly. "Excellent. I couldn't in good conscience let someone as smart and dedicated as you go. But Temp? Don't practice my signature, alright? It makes me nervous. Unless I get roped into another one of Mr. Kane's insane investigations and mess up my writing arm."

Inez smirked. "I'll keep that in mind, ma'am."