by Lisa Plumley
All but offering up his palm for a high five, Estes looked around the table with a grin. Am I right? his face asked. Am I?
“Mr. Estes, that kind of talk is inappropriate. Frankly, it borders on actionable.” Mary Sue pinned him with a stern look. “I’d suggest you keep your puerile observations to yourself.”
“We were all thinking it!” Tony nudged his tablemates.
They sat stonily, rightly not agreeing with him.
“I’m just glad someone had the good sense to pixelate Bethany’s image.” Jason angled his head toward the digitally blurred portions of her anatomy. The pixelation, while leaving the scandalous situation clear, managed to preserve about as much modesty as a bikini would have. “She would have appreciated that.” Which made him wonder . . . “Where did you get this, anyway?”
“I did that! I did the pixelation,” the admin, Amber, piped up before he could pursue his latest line of thinking. “That was me.” She aimed a chastising glance at her boss, Chip. “Mr. Larsen said we should present the photo ‘undoctored’ at the meeting today, for the sake of ‘veracity,’ but I disagreed. I mean, at some point, it just crosses the line, doesn’t it?”
“Good call, Amber.” Jason flashed her a smile. “Nice job.”
She flushed, looking pleased. “Thanks very much.”
“No problem. Now let’s get back to clarifying things.” Confidently, Jason got up to pace the room. He wanted to engage everyone. “This image is out there now. It can’t be taken back. It can’t be changed. But I can assure you that this is a misunderstanding. In fact, an instant later, after this photo was taken, I looked away from Bethany. Politely. Considerately.”
A few skeptical sounds wafted toward him from his board members. Undaunted, Jason veered toward the doubting Thomases.
“Not long after that, I held her drink so she could get dressed again. We talked for quite a while. It wasn’t indecent—”
“If you expect us to believe that, you’re dreaming,” Chip interrupted hotly. “Whatever you want to pretend happened—”
“It happened,” Jason said tightly, “exactly the way I said it did.” He hated being doubted. His integrity was rock solid.
Maybe it hadn’t always been rock solid, but it was now. He’d be damned if anyone would doubt his integrity and not get called on it. He’d earned the right to be taken at his word.
Especially with this group of reactionary corporate stiffs.
“—it looks like you’re a drunk degenerate preying on young college students!” Chip argued. “Did Walt Disney scam on his nubile twenty-something animation artists back in the day?”
“‘Nubile’ is beside the point, Chip. And anyway, I doubt they were farsighted enough to hire very many female animators during the golden age of cartoons.” Jason’s own board of directors was reasonably assembled of five women and three men. Why shouldn’t it be? They were all qualified—even if they were a pain in his ass most of the time. “It’s too bad, really. Who knows what kinds of stories we might have gotten if they’d been more visionary?”
Chip fumed. “Does Barney the dinosaur peddle tricycles while—while—while ogling Miss Piggy next door on Sesame Street?”
There were so many things wrong with that idea.
Jason wasn’t sure where to start.
“Miss Piggy is a Muppet, sir,” Amber said.
“Right. Also, Barney isn’t selling anything.” Jason had viewed two lifetimes’ worth of that big purple dinosaur while babysitting his younger siblings. “Except maybe friendship, cooperation, and learning to tie your shoes. Neither is Sesame Street. Or the Muppets. They’re licensed characters, but they aren’t damning examples of corporate leadership corrupting their innocent customers.” With a deliberate frown of fake puzzlement, Jason added, “That is what you’re trying to do, right, Chip? Draw a parallel between me and a misbehaving kiddie figure?”
Chip turned purple. “Fine. Does Ronald McDonald show up in a raincoat and flash kids on the playground?”
Jason shuddered at the very idea. So did several others.
Curly red hair . . . all over? Only one thing needed to be said.
“You’re getting out of hand, Chip.”
“Not at all! This is serious. Our social media tells the story.” With anticipatory triumph, Chip wielded his mousing finger. Using it like a weapon, he clicked. “Just look at this!”
Squinting, Jason eyed the screenshot his chairman put up. It depicted a torrent of irate, mostly unintelligible messages.
“Well, you’ve all been telling me you’re desperate for social media traffic,” Jason observed, cracking a grin. “You keep saying you want more customer engagement on the Web. There it is! That looks like bona fide customer engagement to me.”
“That is not,” Chip huffed, “what we’re after.”
“Well, I’m not the king of good grammar,” Jason admitted cheerfully. “Maybe ‘fuk you and your scum toyz’ is correct?”
Chip aimed a quelling look at him. “You’re not taking this seriously enough.” He gave a theatrical sigh. “As usual.”
That was nothing new. Chip was always riding him. He never missed an opportunity to suggest “a change in leadership”—code for installing one of his old-school cronies at Moosby’s. But to Jason’s annoyance, this time a few board members nodded in agreement. He looked around for allies. Even Mary Sue glanced pointedly away. Evidently, they were all serious about this.
For a heartbeat, Jason actually felt . . . betrayed?
He recovered quickly, though. He had to. It didn’t pay to show weakness. Not when it came to leading his company.
“You have all got to be kidding me. It’s one photo. At a party.” Jason shot an exasperated look at the screen as Chip clicked back to that condemning image. “What else can I do?”
Tony smirked. “You can try not partying with coeds.”
“I wasn’t partying with coeds.”
Meaningfully, everyone stared at the photo.
“Fine. It looks as if I was partying with coeds.” Briefly, Jason felt nostalgic for that simpler, happier time when he wasn’t tussling with his pedantic board members. “But I wasn’t. I already explained.” He decided to leave out the Internet meme that had spawned the original photo series. It would be way too much for this crew to grapple with. “I can’t help it if Bethany decided to take off her top. I’m innocent of any wrongdoing.”
He waited for the inevitable apologies to roll in.
They did not.
“‘Mothers on Responsible Toys’ have already organized an online petition. There was a protest yesterday.” Chip’s voice tightened, then lowered ominously. “There’s talk of boycotts.”
His hushed tone conveyed far more dread than the situation called for. Jason knew that. “No one will boycott. Not even MORT,” he admonished. He knew the toy business. He’d built his company from the ground up, store by store. “You’re all overreacting to the social media stuff. It’s officially the Christmas shopping season! This will blow over by next week.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Mary Sue prodded.
“We can’t take that chance,” Barbara Ellington put in.
“I think we’re going to have to take that chance,” Jason argued, feeling increasingly tense. He couldn’t believe his board members had so little faith in his good judgment. In his word. In him. “I don’t see any other option.”
“Said the original laissez-faire CEO,” Chip sneered. He’d never approved of Jason’s mostly hands-off approach, despite its proven success. Chip never missed a chance to inspire doubt. “We have to take action. A wait-and-see approach won’t work here.”
Fine. Jason eyed them. “How about an apology?”
Everyone perked up. Of course. The bastards.
Their eagerness only stoked his sense of injustice.
“Too bad. Because I don’t have one. I didn’t do anything wrong.” Casting a reproachful glance at his board of directors, Jason shook his head. Their disloyalty bu
gged him. So did his own inability to win back their trust. That had never happened before. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back on vacation.”
He was out of the boardroom, down the hall, and on his way back to Antigua before any of them knew what had happened.
Screw them and their skepticism, Jason told himself as he strode toward the elevator bank. He didn’t owe anyone a damn apology. He wasn’t giving one. Period. Wild horses couldn’t drag him into one of those corporate press conferences where sweaty, contrite CEOs tried to talk their way out of trouble. No way.
Behind him, the boardroom door opened. Someone shouted.
“Jason! Wait up.” Jogging footsteps sounded.
Annoyed and unrepentant, Jason stabbed the elevator call button. That gesture didn’t stop his friend and most frequent board member ally, Charley McIntosh, from following him.
“Save your breath, Charley. I’m not doing it.” Impatiently, Jason waited for the elevator to reach the top floor. “Tell them you did all you could to change my mind. I’ll back you up.”
“It won’t be that easy this time.” His friend shook his head. “They’re serious about this. Chip and Tony are gearing up to have you replaced. They’re racking up support, too. Barbara Ellington’s in, for one. It’s a coup in the making in there.” He hesitated, probably to allow that to sink in. “You can’t go into self-destruct mode just because someone doubted your word.”
“Oh yeah?” Jason stared straight ahead. “Watch me.”
He’d lived without having his own company once. He could do it again. No harm, no foul. It’s been fun. That’s all, folks.
Charley heaved a frustrated sigh. “You’re not exactly a saint, Jason. We both know that. You can’t just leave.”
The elevator arrived. The doors opened.
“Too late.” Jason cast Charley a stubborn, pissed-off glance. He knew it wasn’t rational, but . . . “I’m already gone.”
“You can’t screw around with this!” Charley grabbed his arm. “I know things usually have a way of working out for you—”
“Usually. When my friends back me up. In the room.”
Charley looked embarrassed. He was right to. “But maybe you won’t get so lucky this time. There’s . . . something else you should know.”
“Chip Larsen is a petty tyrant? I knew that already.”
“No. Well, yes. That’s true. He’s a complete power-hungry prick.” Charley cracked a smile. But he sobered quickly. “But there’s more to this. I think you’d better know about it.”
Chapter Two
Kismet, Michigan
When the call came that was destined to change her work life forever, Danielle Sharpe dropped the phone.
It wasn’t her fault. She was caught off guard. She had her hands full, too. Literally. The Christmas shopping season at the Moosby’s toy store she’d managed for the past six months was the craziest time of the year. Most days, Danielle could barely think, much less juggle a box of Baby Wets-A-Lot dolls, an old-fashioned landline phone, and a whole lot of holiday-tinged buzz from the not-so-distant sales floor. Also, she was technically in the midst of perpetrating some against-the-rules inventory manipulation when the call came in. Danielle was new at subterfuge. She felt 90 percent convinced the bigwigs at Moosby’s HQ had somehow caught her red-handed. Her comeuppance was nigh.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” From the toy store’s tiled floor, the phone receiver issued that faint but irate query. Impatient silence. Then, “Get me the manager. Right away.”
Oh crap. This was really happening?
She glanced at the caller ID again. Moosby’s Corporate.
Well, if they were on to her, she certainly wasn’t going down without a fight. She had perfectly good reasons for what she’d been doing with her inventory and that of the other stores in her region. An itemized list of twelve reasons, to be exact.
Awkwardly juggling her box, she picked up the phone.
“Is this the store manager?” the caller demanded to know.
Danielle inhaled. “Non, I’m sorry,” she said in a flagrantly over-the-top French accent that was inspired by Gigi, one of her best salesclerks. “Un moment. I will get her.”
Feeling her heart race, Danielle put down the phone. Then she set aside the contraband box of plastic dolls—which belonged to another regional Michigan Moosby’s inventory—and shook out her hair. She plastered on a smile, inhaled deeply, then picked up the phone again. She was ready. Ready to handle anything.
Wait. Not yet. She glanced at the framed photo of her three children—Karlie, Aiden, and Zach—that she kept on her office desk amid all the Moosby’s promotional materials, the work schedules, and (ironically) the official Moosby’s employee handbook. Seeing her kids’ smiling faces helped. Okay. Now she was ready.
“This is the store manager,” she said confidently into the phone, ignoring the customer hubbub outside. “How can I help you?”
Danielle was still reeling when she reentered the sales floor. A cacophony of conversation, squawking toys, and squealing children surrounded her. Christmas carols underlaid all the madness, spinning on constant jolly repeat from October to New Year’s Day. The air smelled Christmassy in the store too, redolent of fresh evergreens, spicy gingerbread, and minty candy canes. Not that she was thinking too hard about the overall ambiance, given the game-changing news she’d just received.
As Danielle made her way between stacks of Lego sets and piles of new video game consoles and homey displays of Moosby’s own More More Moosby’s! exclusive line of handcrafted toys, Gigi glanced up. Her freckled French face lost its grin immediately.
“Oh là là! Danielle! What is wrong?” Gigi hurried nearer, temporarily abandoning the job of tidying the store’s hands-on play table. Its Crayola, Play-Doh, and glitter-filled surface attracted dozens of children every day, coaxing them into trying out a rotating assortment of toys—and into showing up for Moosby’s daily demos. “Did something happen?” Gigi gave her one of her patented no-nonsense (yet somehow flirtatious) looks. “Is it Henry? Did he do something? Because I would be happy to speak to him about it. I know exactly how to set that man straight.”
At the thought, Gigi’s elfin face took on a certain . . . mischievousness that didn’t bode well for Henry. He’d been in Gigi’s romantic sights ever since she’d arrived in Kismet. So far, Henry had (inexplicably) eluded her.
Not that Gigi was dissuaded. Gigi was never dissuaded.
“No, it’s not Henry.” Danielle shook her head, automatically scanning the sales floor for things that needed to be done. She added a few essential items to her ongoing mental to-do list. It was her safety net. Without her to-do list and the security it provided, she would have been sunk. Her job was complicated. Her life was complicated . . . now that she had a demanding job, three elementary-school-age children, one (two-timing) ex-husband, and one ex-husband’s new (much younger) wife to deal with. Deliberately, Danielle refocused on the now. “It’s Moosby’s HQ. I just got off the phone with them.”
“With the company head office? In Los Angeles?” Gigi sighed. “I suppose they are asking us to play that corporate-mandated boring Christmas music instead of our custom mix?”
“No, that’s not it.” At Danielle’s Moosby’s, they sneaked in a few holiday songs performed by local artists. They were big hits with their customers, many of whom knew the performers.
Adding a personal, down-home touch was one of Danielle’s goals for her store. It was working brilliantly. Plus, she enjoyed coming to work when she felt she was helping people. The local artists really got a boost from having their music played.
“They want us to wear those hideous yellow aprons?” Gigi wrinkled her nose. “No one looks their best when they appear to be an enormous banana. I will go on strike first. I promise.”
Danielle couldn’t help grinning. “No, it’s not the aprons, either.” Those garish but practical garments might have to make a reappearance, she knew. Sadly. “Although we might have
to toe the line a little bit more around here. Just for a few days.”
“But why? Everything here is très parfait !” Indicating as much, Gigi expressively threw her arms to the sides. Around them, customers thronged the cozy toy store as they filled their red and green seasonal Moosby’s reusable tote bags—customized by local artists—with merchandise. Several of them consulted with other members of Danielle’s staff, getting toy recommendations and gift ideas. “This place is like a well-oiled machinery!”
Danielle nodded. Gigi’s English grammar might not be perfect, but her assessment was accurate. Ever since taking over for Edna Gresham, the store’s curmudgeonly (and by-the-book) previous manager, Danielle had tripled sales. She was proud of that.
“Well, corporate does agree that things are going well here.” Danielle paused to relish her impending announcement, feeling ready to burst with pride and excitement. This was an accomplishment she’d engineered on her own—with the help of her loyal employees, of course. Danielle needed this recognition. Especially after her divorce and all the upheaval that had followed it. “That was a congratulations call. We are now the top-selling Moosby’s in the whole chain. In the whole world!”
Gigi’s eyes widened. She shook her head. “No effing way.”
Gigi loved American profanity. With her Parisian accent and enthusiastic delivery, her abbreviated swearwords somehow seemed more charming than vulgar. But Danielle glanced around to make sure none of their customers had overheard, all the same.
The trick to business, she’d decided, was attention to detail. She’d put in lots of attention to detail during her tenure at Moosby’s. Her meticulousness was about to pay off big-time . . . just the way Danielle had hoped it would someday.
“It’s true. I heard it from Chip Larsen, the chairman of the board himself.” He’d sounded like a smarmy nincompoop on the phone, to be honest. But Danielle could forgive him for that. The man obviously possessed some intelligence. He’d recognized her, hadn’t he? “Because of our stellar sales record, we’re officially being designated as a Moosby’s model store—and we’re getting a special congratulatory visit from Moosby’s CEO. We’re going to be the first stop on his holiday media tour. On TV! And in the news and in a series of Moosby’s ‘hometown’ ads, too.”