She glanced back at the line and moved to the side, pulling Talbot with her, the solid muscle beneath the damp tweed slightly disconcerting. “But we’re holding things up.”
A man in a Burberry overcoat, five thousand dollar briefcase in hand, slapped his ID on the marble counter with an impatient huff. “I’m late for a meeting.”
The guard eyed him before turning back to Camilla. “Let me see that phone again.”
She complied and he took his time about it, staring at the screen, then at Talbot, the line getting longer and the raincoat guy’s face getting redder.
“I guess this’ll do.”
One photo of the screen and one of Talbot and they had another entrance badge.
She grinned at the guard. “I appreciate it.”
“This really your first day or you just say that to get me to help you?”
She laughed. “I would have if I had to. But no, it really is my first day.”
The guard smiled. “Good luck then.”
When they boarded the crowded elevator, everyone shaking off like wet dogs, her unorthodox boss didn’t push a button and Camilla asked, “What floor is the meeting on?”
“I have no idea.”
The elevator ascended.
“You’ve never been to your outside counsel’s?”
“I’ve been here a hundred times. I don’t pay attention.”
They stopped at sixteen to let a woman off. At seventeen somebody else.
“I’ll call Marcia,” he said.
Camilla shook her head, resolving to get a copy of the itinerary herself from now on. “I might have the firm name in my case.” She started to fumble with the latch as the elevator moved up.
“Starts with a B,” he offered. “Bingham. Bangum. Something like that.”
A guy whose elbow was unintentionally crowding her asked, “Bannum Strauss?”
Her boss nodded. “That’s it.”
“You’re in luck. You haven’t missed it. Top floor.”
The helpful guy pushed the button for them and got off to Camilla’s thanks a few floors later. For the last leg of the ascent, even though the car stopped periodically at certain floors before getting to theirs for some reason, Camilla was alone with her boss.
“Speaking of social skills,” she said, as gently as she could, “one of them is to say thanks.”
“Thanks.”
“Not to me. To the guard.”
“Why? Wasn’t that his job?”
“But he went out of his way to help us when you didn’t have the right ID.”
“Not until you smiled at him and acted all—” He stopped, as if he’d just made the connection.
“Nice? See, that’s the point. That poor guy has people complaining all day about what he has to do, and 9/11 was not his fault.”
“Someone said 9/11 was his fault?”
“No, I mean the security. Never mind. Just, you know what they say?”
“No idea.”
“A little honey, right?”
He gave her a blank look, his gaze dipping to her neck. Was there something on her collar? She glanced down to discover fingers twirling her pearls. “Nervous habit,” she said and dropped her hand to her side.
They both looked at the elevator door as they felt the car settling.
“And the good Samaritan who gave us the right floor. Wasn’t he being nice? He deserved a thank-you, too, right?”
She felt ridiculous, like a kindergarten teacher.
“He was looking down your blouse.”
“He was not!”
“Yes, he was. He was about my height. You were below us. I could tell.”
So she guessed he noticed more things than he let on.
“Well, still.”
The door opened to the floor they wanted, and he put his hand on her back to usher her out of the elevator, a politesse she wouldn’t have expected along with a jolt at the physical contact, like when she put her hand on his arm before.
The elevator closed behind them to the massive glass doors of Bannum Strauss.
When they entered the spacious two-story lobby of the law firm, a sleek brunette behind the reception desk spread her raspberry red lips in a welcoming smile. “So nice to see you again, Mr. Talbot. I’ll let Greg know you’re here.”
While she was dialing, Talbot wandered off to the floor-to-ceiling windows, hands behind his back. She didn’t follow.
“Psst.”
The receptionist crooked a finger at her, and Camilla went closer.
“You work for him?” she asked.
“As of today I do.”
The brunette gave a furtive look his way. “I think he is so hot.”
Camilla laughed. “Uh, okay.”
“Come on, you have to admit it.”
“I just work for him.”
“Lucky you. One glance from those deep blue eyes and I was, like, whoa. The way he sort of looks right through you. I pray for Greg to schedule a meeting. Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Sorry. No idea. I just met him for the first time today. But, hey, give it a shot.”
“As if. I’ve flirted as outrageously as I can, but he ignores me.”
“Yeah, it seems like he’s got a lot on his mind.”
“I could really help him with his wardrobe sense.”
“Who couldn’t?” Camilla said, and they laughed, both looking over to where Talbot was shaking hands with a plump balding man who had descended on the circular central stairway in the lobby.
The two men met her at the desk, and Greg Porter introduced himself to Camilla, then led them to a conference room, saying he would let everyone else know Mr. Talbot was there.
Camilla looked around and took a seat at a walnut table that would not look out of place in the UN headquarters where they actually might need fifty places at a table.
Talbot paced around the room, ending up in front of the picture window, gazing down at the tiny building blocks of Manhattan through sheets of water and tapping his fingers against the glass in rhythm to the rain. He tackled the coffee on the sidebar next, pouring a cup with such a rattle he finally set it down, leaving it there, and resumed his stance at the window. She glanced at the half-filled cup, more liquid on the saucer than inside the rim. Had his hands been shaking? He had them in his pockets now, so she couldn’t tell.
She hadn’t noticed any of this restless energy in the limo, where he’d been all still and Spock-like. He almost looked nervous, though that would be ridiculous. As a CEO, he must be the veteran of dozens of these kinds of meetings.
“I wonder why we’re in such a huge room,” she mused. “I doubt there’ll be more than ten people here.”
“Not if I’m supposed to be here. It’ll be a huge crew.”
Jesus, he hated these dog and pony shows, as Marcia called them in the early days. He wished he could just send an email to the deal team, saying what he would pay and when he wanted to close and that would be the end of it from his perspective. But he’d been told time and time again that wasn’t how it was done. Instead, he had to sit in on the first meeting, feeling as claustrophobic as ever by all the glad-handing, and let his lawyers posture for him and his bankers pretend they were giving him the deal of the century on the financing. There was a march to it all, and he felt distinctly out of step.
Had, ever since the very first meeting, years ago, when the company was no more than an idea on paper and a line of credit he had a slim chance of paying off without additional backers. Then, he and Marcia had cobbled together some half-ass presentations, no graphics even, and showed up in a room about as big as this, with an audience who had only given him an hour because his old professor from Caltech consulted on Wall Street and had rounded them up as a favor. In exchange he promised the prof a quarter of one percent of the company, which had eventually enabled the guy to buy a sprawling ranch in Northern California, though he hadn’t known it would at the time. Nobody believed in the idea except him and maybe Marcia.
Which reminded him, he should have Marcia send a messenger with his driver’s license out to the plane.
About to instruct Camilla, the thought went right out of his head as she smiled at him. She had been so, er, nice to the guard. Marcia was right. He probably could learn from her. She smiled an awful lot. It seemed to be her de facto facial expression. And when the odd fellow in the elevator had looked down her blouse, he was disturbed to find himself in sync with it. The swell of her breasts were just visible over the cream silk. And then the fucking pearls.
He could think of someplace else to put those. Draped over her bare breasts. Between her thighs.
He snapped his attention back to the window, trying to keep his mind off that kind of thing and on the deal at hand. Unfortunately, it didn’t make him any more comfortable. It was silly really. There was no good reason to feel so ill at ease, so jittery that he couldn’t pour a cup of coffee. He just needed to get through one more meeting.
But all it took was the memory of his first presentation, with one very memorable participant, to make his palms sweat at the prospect of sitting at a conference table. She who shall not be named. As one of his initial investors, she’d insisted on attending, poring over a pad of paper she had brought along, scribbling notes as if to correct him later on. He was probably the only wanna-be entrepreneur on Wall Street who was forced to bring his mother to his financing pitch.
When the presentation was over and the group still streaming out, she approached the podium and said as loudly as she could, “Well, that was a fiasco. Back to the drawing board I guess.”
He had never enjoyed anything so much as writing her a check the next week out of the proceeds from the 100 percent investor participation after the meeting. Nothing had tasted as sweet as buying that woman the hell out of his company.
Even now, about to sit down to a meeting, he always had in the back of his mind the fear that his disapproving mother was going to show up.
The conference room door opened, and enough people to fill the UN-sized table flooded in. A crew, just as her boss had said. And every one of them, mostly middle-aged white men in suits, crowded in on Talbot in front of the window to introduce themselves. He was lost in a sea of handshakes and a flurry of business cards.
Camilla watched the fawning for a minute, but then on impulse rose from her seat and threaded her way through the gray suits. Half a dozen men leaned into her boss, all of them talking over each other with an intensity she heard before she got there. It almost looked like a football huddle, except wasn’t the quarterback supposed to be giving the orders? Talbot stood stock-still, gaze fixed on a point just over the heads of the other men, alternated with looking at his feet.
“Mr. Talbot.” Her voice was loud enough to cut through the chatter. She didn’t know about social skills, but being in a large family had certainly taught her to project, as she’d proved in the limousine.
He raised his gaze, and though his eyes were hooded, she read relief in them. She gestured back to the table. “We’re pressed for time. We should get started.”
After holding one arm out, she shepherded her boss to his seat, putting herself between him and Porter, who talked in low tones to the man at his right.
Once everyone sat down, Porter assumed control of the meeting. “For the benefit of most of you here, and so you’ll know who you’re talking to on the next all-hands conference call, let’s go around and introduce ourselves. I’m Greg Porter, Senior Partner at Bannum Strauss in Mergers and Acquisitions, and I’m the primary outside counsel for Talbot, Inc.”
He went on to list the last five deals he’d done with Talbot, Inc. in some detail. When the lawyer finally finished and signaled they would go along the table counter-clockwise, she said, “I’m Camilla Anderson, inside counsel for Talbot, Inc.”
She hoped with the one sentence to set the tone for brevity.
Everyone turned to Talbot, who was reading a few of the business cards he had been handed. There was an awkward silence. “Mr. Talbot,” she said quietly. She could feel fifty pairs of eyes focusing on him.
One of the younger men in an expensive suit on the opposite side of the table broke into a tight, closed lip smile and whispered something into the ear of the clone next to him, who suppressed a chuckle.
“Oh, sorry.” He scrunched his eyes, consulted the ceiling, fluorescent lights far above them, as if trying to remember. “Mason Talbot,” he said, and then he was back to the business cards, stacking them in tidy piles.
The man to the left of him did not carry on. In fact, everybody still zeroed in on the CEO, fascinated by the oddity of one of the rare species not taking the floor in a burst of exuberant confidence, all of them waiting to see what he would do next.
Remembering the spilled coffee on the saucer, Camilla jumped into the void. “You know,” she joked, “the guy who’ll be paying most of your bills?”
Polite laughter as she caught the eye of the man to the left of Talbot and prompted, “And you are?”
She didn’t notice the rest of the names and bios so much as Talbot next to her reading those cards and scribbling on the back of each one, doodles when she looked closer, constantly adjusting and readjusting his position in his chair, jiggling his foot. Occasionally, he consulted the ceiling again.
A half hour later, as they were discussing the timetable, Talbot offered his first comment, to no one in particular, his eyes still on the cards. “This is wrong. I said I want to be done in a month. Not three.”
Rustling of papers along the table and she took a quick look at the schedule for the deal on the handout they’d all been given. The timing did appear to be about a month too fat, if not more. “What is this long span in the middle for?” she asked the other participants. “It just says diligence. Why would it take four weeks to go through a data room?”
Porter responded to her in low tones. “We need to inspect the factories overseas. Standard procedure. What firm did you say you trained at?”
“Where are the factories? The moon?” she whispered back.
Turning the pages of the handout, she said, louder, “No really. All kidding aside, where are the operations? It doesn’t say.”
Another gray suit down the table answered. “Eastern Europe mostly. But we’re also hitting some investor meetings while we’re over there. Western Europe primarily for those. Paris, Rome, London. Maybe Prague.”
In other words, a boondoggle on Talbot’s dime while he waited for his deal to close.
There was some uncomfortable shifting along the table as she left a long pause that indicated she knew it.
“I think we can whittle those four weeks down to one,” she said with a smile. “Don’t you?”
Talbot’s phone rang, and after listening for a minute, he leaned over to whisper to her, his breath tickling her ear as she fought down the slight twinge of pleasure from the simple gesture. “We have to get out of here. Weather. Can you make the excuses?”
She nodded and he was out the door.
It took her another five minutes to make her exit, but when she got back to the limousine and climbed in, Talbot wasn’t there. “Oh? Where is he?” she asked the driver.
“Didn’t he leave with you?”
“Before me.”
“No problem, miss. He must have turned the wrong way when he exited
the building. He does that a lot. I’ll look for him.”
It was pouring outside, and Talbot didn’t have an umbrella. About to hand the driver the one he’d given her, she said instead, “No, I’ll go. I’m already damp. You stay here.”
Umbrella hoisted to cover as much of her first-day best suit as possible, she walked back to the entrance and then rounded a corner of the building, catching sight of him half a block away, crouched down, his back to her. Hurrying along, wondering if he dropped something, she realized he was having a conversation—completely oblivious to the rain, forearms perched on his knees—with a homeless man sitting under a cardboard construction. Her billionaire boss who couldn’t be bothered with an umbrella was drenched, and the man in the weathered army green jacket and scraggly beard was completely dry in his makeshift shelter. It must be cold for the poor man sitting on the wet ground, though. She wanted to give a donation, but then remembered she’d left her wallet in the car. Was that what Talbot was doing? She didn’t see a container for money. Not even the usual sign. Army Vet or Will work for food.
The homeless situation in New York was so sad. She knew there were problems all over the nation, she and her sisters had always volunteered in soup kitchens in Detroit, but nowhere was the issue more visible than in the Big Apple, where people with more money than they knew what to do with stepped over others who didn’t have any. Case in point with her new boss. Only he wasn’t stepping over this man. He was talking to him.
“Mr. Talbot,” she said when she reached him, trying to hold the umbrella over them both as he felt around inside his jacket, then in his outside pocket for something.
“Oh, here you go. Wait.” He pulled back the business card he had just extracted to read it and then handed it to the guy. “No, it’s mine. I have so many cards in there I wanted to make sure I wasn’t giving you the number of a banker.”
Tempting the New Boss Page 2