What Happens After Dark by Jasmine Haynes Page A

invoices, then customer invoices and cash receipts for both wire transfers and checks. Rachel filed everything, then filled out the deposit slip for the physical checks that had to go to the bank. Rachel usually did the bank runs anyway.
    “Wow,” she said, sitting back and smiling. “I didn’t make too many mistakes.”
    “It’s a piece of cake once you get used to the system.” It was all mindless work that Bree liked to do late in the afternoon when she was tired. “It’s only a problem when a customer or vendor doesn’t reference the PO or the part number or they don’t put what invoices they’re paying on a check, crap like that.”
    “And you do all this stuff yourself?”
    Bree gave her a look. “Yeah.”
    “But you’re an accountant. This is all clerical.”
    “I’m just a bookkeeper really.” It wasn’t like DKG had money to throw around. Erin did grunt work, too; they all did.
    “But you have a degree in accounting.” Rachel wasn’t letting up, staring at Bree wide-eyed. “You shouldn’t be wasting your time on clerical duties.”
    She made it sound like Bree devalued herself. Or was Rachel buttering her up?
    Rachel’s eyes suddenly lit with enthusiasm. “I bet Erin has tons of important stuff she needs you to do instead of inputting invoices. I do all her filing. And Yvonne’s, too.” Yvonne Colbert was their inside sales manager. “Sometimes Erin has me input purchase orders, too. Let me talk to her and see if I can take over some of this stuff for you on a regular basis.”
    For a moment, Bree felt a stab of terror, as if giving away even her simplest tasks made her less valuable, less needed. Yet she could hear her father’s voice. “I spent all that money on a college education just so you could be a peon at some two-bit company run by a couple of flakes who don’t know they’re asses from a hole in the ground? You don’t have a hope in hell of ever making a hundred K.”
    Bree swallowed with difficulty. Erin and Dominic weren’t flakes. They’d built DKG from nothing; now their gross revenue was over five million. But Bree’s father was right; she hadn’t done much with her career. She wasn’t a controller. She wasn’t even a supervisor. She was a peon.
    Something must have shown on her face because Rachel jumped in. “Only if you want me to help out, Bree. I just remember that sometimes you stay late or come in on the weekends.”
    Or she worked from home. She was salaried and didn’t get paid for extra hours. Not that Erin made her do a lot of overtime. But with the IRS audit coming up, she didn’t know how she’d get everything done.
    “Besides,” Rachel went on as if she were making a sales pitch, “I can add accounts payable and accounts receivable experience to my resume. You’d be doing me a favor.” Rachel was so eager about everything; she got an idea and she ran with it, like she was fearless. Bree always had to think, weigh the consequences, make sure she wasn’t making a mistake. Except about sex. But then a person was never careful when it came to addictions.
    “Then you’d be overloaded,” Bree said, cutting off that last thought. Maybe handing off the matching to Rachel was a good idea. There was other stuff that needed doing, like reviewing the fixed assets, especially with the IRS looking at everything. The tax books were complicated, different from regular reporting with all the asset classes, lives, conventions, and depreciation methods like MACRS and AMT.
    “On occasion, I have to ask Erin to search for things for me to do,” Rachel continued the pitch. “Besides, I get paid for overtime if she authorizes it.”
    Rachel wanted the experience. What would be wrong with that? It wasn’t like Bree would be taking advantage. She was always so worried about paying people back for what they did for her; well, here was a way to give something back to Rachel.
    What if Rachel did a better job—and at cheaper pay—and Erin didn’t need Bree