Nicolai Powerful

by May Ball, Alice

  There has been a buzz around the company about the rollout and the indoctrination. It could be a bigger moment for the corporation than they realize. I have a screen and projector set up, and my laptop is ready for my presentation, which I have rehearsed and honed over the last three days.

  Only, now, now, nobody is looking at the screen or thinking about anything other than a certain powerful bare torso and arms, the statuesque and imposing form of Nicolai Stravinski-Romanoff.

  Marcus Shankman hurries in and everybody is seated, apart from Nicolai, who prowls around the far end of the room. I put up the first slide presentation to introduce the topics we were going to cover.

  Immediately, Nicolai addresses the room.

  “I’m here, as you probably all know,” he looked at me, “all except the intern, of course—there is no need for you to know,” He turned back to the directors, “I’m here because on the occasion of my father’s passing, I hold a controlling interest in every corporation in our international group.

  “This is the last stop on my global tour of our businesses. I have significantly improved the performance of every division so far. I intend to do the same here. I mean for it to take me six weeks, which is how long have allotted to stay. However, if it can be done sooner, so much the better.”

  “And if it takes longer?” Hannah Martensson’s cultured and melodic tones drift across the room like a perfume.

  His eyes are hard, and his voice is direct. “It won’t.”

  From the middle of the table, James Baker, the director of operations, says, “We heard that considerable staff reductions occurred in Berlin and Paris.”

  “That’s right,” Nicolai said, “Operating costs are significantly reduced, and financial performance has risen by nearly twenty-eight percent.”

  “Do you anticipate similar resource reductions here?”

  “No,” he says, and sighs of relief slip around the room. “Here, staffing, HR, and resourcing are very inefficient. I expect much larger reductions in manpower. We are not taking enough advantage of technology.”

  Helena, the Chief Financial Officer, speaks up. Her tone is smooth and reassuring, like a patient Sunday school teacher. “Here, our business is geared around relationships with clients. Bankers, traders, all our money market people build trust with clients. Clients entrust their company’s resources, or their savings, as the case may be, into the care of our financial administration.”

  “We do the same kind of business in Paris and in Berlin and in Moscow, too.” Nicolai tells her. “And we do it more efficiently.”

  “Less profitably, though.” Helena counters.

  “Profitability is what I’m here to address.”

  He prowls around the room. As he walks behind them, directors shift uncomfortably in their chairs. His bronzed and naked torso is intimidating from a distance. Close-up it’s shudder-inducing.

  I ball my fists and my teeth clench. This is my meeting. I’ve been working up to this for days.

  I have no choice but to wait until he surrenders the floor to me, which he shows no immediate sign of doing.

  “I know that some of you, maybe all of you, are nervous for your position. Anxious that you might lose your jobs.”

  Every eye in the room hardens. I may be less worried than most. Firing this particular intern at this particular moment would be colossally stupid. And he hasn’t struck me as colossally stupid. Not about business, anyway.

  “You will all want every opportunity to make a strong and favorable impression upon me.” His voice booms, now from the far end of the room. The directors nearest to him grip the table. “I strongly advise you to do it with your performance and delivery. Don’t try to ingratiate yourself with me. I don’t mix business with sentiment.”

  He looked down at the upturned faces. “Use your time well.”

  It occurs to me that I may have blown the ‘favorable first impression’ bit. He strolls along behind the other side of the table. Now he has unsettled the nerves of every one of the Board of Directors. And he is coming back to where I’m standing.

  The overwhelming air, the approach of his hyperactive testosterone, combined with the heat from his smoldering eyes makes me tremble inside. Unconsciously, I tip my chin up a notch. Engaging his gaze directly.

  It’s like a staring contest with a cat. The cat doesn’t care, but he will never let you win. After what felt like a long, hot moment, his eyebrow tugs in a sly wrinkle. He turns back to the room.

  “I interrupted the meeting. Excuse me. I know that the intern has something important to tell us all.” He turned back to me again with his extended toward me.

  “Ms…?”

  “Branson. Laurel Branson. Sir.” Sharp intakes of breath shush like faint, cold breezes around the room. Formality like that is seen as outmoded and very much frowned upon. Even the directors are often called by their first names. ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ at most. Never, ‘sir.’

  It lit a spark in his eyes, though. And right now, although that should be the last thing on my mind, it’s all I care about.

  “Yes, well,” he says, “The intern has something very important to tell us with a lot of initials and acronyms.” He looks from me to the screen and back, “Isn’t that so?”

  Then he strides back to the far end of the room. As he passes the views over the great city and its magnificent parks, losing the power of his presence and now having to address the board alone, I feel more naked even than he is.

  I must stop thinking about how naked he is. It’s not helping my concentration.

  “Thank you.” I gather my thoughts and stand as straight and tall as I can.

  “As you all know, this week sees the rollout of one of the most important innovations this company will ever undertake.”

  “I want an Aston Martin,” his voice booms from the back of the room into his phone. “Black DBS, Superleggera Volante. Send me one text in one hour with your best price. If your bid is accepted, I will contact you. I want it this afternoon.”

  My hands are on my hips as I stare at him. “Do you mind? I am trying to conduct an important meeting.”

  “No, it’s fine. You carry on.”

  “It’s important that you hear what I have to say, too.”

  He raises a finger as he dials the phone again. Then he looks up with a boyish, innocent smile. “That’s okay. I can hear you.” Then, into the phone, he makes exactly the same request for a car, and stipulates exactly the same terms.

  He looks back up at me and across the silent room. He makes another small smile. “Only four more to go. You go ahead.”

  “We’ll wait. I’m not going to try and talk over you.”

  He thinks about it for a moment. Then he nods. “Probably sensible.”

  He repeats the call exactly, four more times. I see redness appearing around many of the directors’ collars. All their faces and bodies remain frozen. After a speech about people losing their jobs, nobody seems to want to engage him in an argument.

  Bunch of pussies.

  I call out, “Are you done now? Are you ready to listen?”

  He shrugged. “I told you. I could have listened and made the calls at the same time.”

  I address the room, indicating the first slide on the screen. “This is the new client gateway to the company’s website.”

  “Fascinating!” He shouts from the back.

  The door beside me opens. A petite woman with tightly scraped back hair rushes down the length of the room, straight to him. She hands him a shopping bag from Macy’s.

  “Oh, thank you,” he says, “How many did you get?”

  “Just one,” she mutters.

  He shrugs. He puts the bag on the boardroom table blocking the view of the four directors at the end. He takes the box out of the bag, opens it, and takes out the shirt. From the shirt he withdraws all the pins one by one and drops them into the box in the middle of the massive crackling heap of waste paper on the boardroom table. Then he shakes out the card ba
cking and the plastic form from under the collar. He shakes the shirt and undoes the buttons one by one.

  Everybody watches.

  He shakes the shirt, making a loud snap as the air flaps. Papers on the boardroom table lift and drift, then settle slowly back. He sniffs as he pulls the sleeves on, one after the other, over his massively muscled arms. Neatly, he buttons the shirt from the top to the bottom, then looks down as he pulls at the sides.

  “A bit small,” he looks at the poor personal assistant.

  “I’m so sorry,” she almost stammers, “I was told the same size as Mr Shankman…”

  “It will suffice. Thank you.” He’s pulls his cufflinks from his pants pocket, splices each one to the doubled-up cuffs, and then gives a shake of his shoulders.

  The shirt fits him superbly. He unbuckles his heavy belt and opens his pants. A sigh from one of the women directors extends to a gasp. I’m not able to look away to see which one it was. I’m transfixed by a bulge of an enormous snake curled up under his silk boxers. As he tucks the shirt tails into his pants, he looks back up, and waves the back of his hand toward me.

  A lock of his hair falls free and, with his collar open, he looks like an aristocratic pirate.

  “Go on, Miss intern, we’ve all come for your important indoctrination. Don’t keep us waiting.”

  The PA leaves a coffee for him and puts another cup for me on the table beside me.

  I try to pull everybody’s attention to the screen. I feel like I brought a plastic spoon to a knife fight. Like I’m stepping on stage with a ukulele and no mic, following Metallica.

  I make a start, struggling to remember what I rehearsed. “The company website, as it will appear to our clients.” I tell them, “You can see how we have refreshed the appearance.”

  Urban Trading and Operations director James Baker chimes in, ”We’re not here to look at a web redesign, are we?” I’m fighting back the temptation to say, ‘well, if you just let me get more than one sentence out, you might find out.’

  “No. The redesign is purely cosmetic. It’s how we will smuggle our new platform into the clients’ workflow.”

  “Well,” Helena says, “Workflow, platform? I should be taking notes, right?”

  I had expected this to be difficult. They are all powerful personalities and none of them likes the spotlight being on anybody but them. Having Nicolai here has just turned them into a herd of cats.

  I press on, “What clients see is something a little more slick and polished than they’re used to.”

  “So, forgive me,” Marcus Shankman thinks it’s time we all heard his voice, “What is all this fuss about?”

  I take a breath, smile at him and go on. “Behind the scenes is a completely transformed web platform. Although each client will see the same thing at first, as they use the site, it quickly adapts to their personal tastes and needs. It will show what they need, and it will anticipate them.”

  “You mean, like a, ‘you bought this, so you might like this,’? That kind of thing?” Jim Baker shows everyone that he knows how a website works.

  “To the user, it could look that way but what we’re doing is a lot more intensively driven by AI.”

  Shankman says, “Thing is, Laurel,” he is a charming old fox, “On the securities and investments desk, our clients know exactly what they want. The fact that they bought security futures bond X yesterday doesn’t mean that they going to want bond Y today.”

  “No, Mr Shankman. That’s absolutely right. What the algorithm does is watch the client’s habits and behavior. It predicts what they are going to want in real-time. Using live, deep dive market data.”

  He sits up straight. “I’ll tell you what, quite honestly, I don’t know whether to think you’re doing a snow job on me, or if you’ve really got the Holy Grail in your algorithms.”

  They are beginning to glimpse the importance. Even though I finally have their attention, one pair of eyes at the back of the room still makes my knees weak.

  “Trust me,” I tell Shankman and all of them, “When you’ve seen it operate, you will know. This is the Holy Grail. This gets customers to much more of what they want and faster. If figures their preferences and works out their needs, personally, before they even know themselves. More important, by anticipating them, it gives them unexpected dopamine hits. Small background stimulation and reward. That makes them want to use the platform more. Selling and trading conversions and completions will rocket.”

  Helena smiles and says, “If you’ve got this ‘Holy Grail’ and you’re bringing it to us here, now, why hasn’t everybody else got it?”

  “This is what algorithm wizards at all the top universities are cooking up in basements and sorcerer’s kitchens. Right now.”

  “So how come you have it, Ms. Branson?”

  “The sorcerer’s kitchen is where I come from, Ms. Martenssen.” I pause and make a smile for her. Then, to the room, “Everybody else will have it. And soon. That’s why we’re pushing an early client launch this week.”

  From the back of the room, he claps, loudly. His voice carries across the heads of the directors.

  “Excellent. Well done, Ms. Intern. Bring your laptop to my office, and we’ll work out the rollout.”

  “I was about to run through the rollout.”

  “Good. Then it shouldn’t take you long to walk me through it. I’ll decide how we proceed from there.”

  After disrupting my meeting from the start, he’s now upended it. It’s like he’s come here for the sole purpose of ruining my life. He raises a hand to the door. It’s my instruction to leave.

  Chapter Four

  Him

  THE HUGE OFFICE SUITE has been unoccupied for months, waiting for me. It’s mostly bare. Apart from some empty bookcases, there is only one big chair behind an oversize mahogany desk.

  Laurel insists I take the chair. She stands beside me and leans over the desk and across me to operate the computer.

  She shows me over the structure of the website, but I don’t pay much attention to it.

  I’m powerfully aroused by her being so near. I’m completely distracted by her soft curves and the heady scent of her. Under her floral cologne is a darker, animal fragrance of her own. It’s amplified by a sweet waft of chocolate, vanilla and coffee from her cup and mine.

  In that tight black dress, her round, supple curves set me on fire. As she leans over the desk, all I can think of is her ass in the air and her beautiful tits squeezed against the desk top. She looks over her shoulder and back at me as she explains something on the screen. I nod, feeling like a dumb schoolboy.

  The firm, round ripeness of her curvy ass makes me salivate. Under the desk I spread my thighs to accommodate and ease the tension growing inside my pants. My cock uncurls, stretches out, pressing up against the tightening fabric, transforming from a fat, lazy, coiled cobra into a hot, rigid battering ram.

  The scent of her juicy muffin is making me lose concentration and forget whatever it is that I’m supposed to be thinking about. She’s telling me something.

  “This is the customer’s entry point, where they first move into the inner portions of the site.” Her eyes gleam, sparkling. “Once they’re inside, the system senses every selection and each twitch of the mouse. All of their micro-responses. It sees how long they take, moving from one place to another. It senses what they’re most interested in and excited by. It builds up a very rapid picture of their personality, and their wants and their needs.”