by Mia Caldwell
“Many people do,” Nick pointed out. “It’s not like it’s ancient Sumerian!”
“It’d have to be someone in the company. Someone who understands our business already. Someone we can trust.”
“So, a woman in the company, reasonably attractive, vaguely resembling Vanessa, and speaks French?” Nick shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like a major ask to me. Not exactly a needle in a haystack. We do have over 3,000 employees.”
“I just can’t see how anyone could take her place.”
“A trained poodle could do it,” declared Nick. “Provided it spoke French (which I sort of assume most poodles do) and worked for the company. All you need is the right trainer.”
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
“I can.”
Adam sat up as straight as his heroic consumption of strong liquor would allow. “You? You’re saying you could do this yourself? You could train someone to be Vanessa?”
Nick hadn’t really thought about it but… yes. Why not?
He’d been sent to the best of schools, he knew about art, he knew about food and wine. Hell, if he got up in drag with the right wigs and makeup he could probably do the job himself! Certainly he could train someone else who looked somewhat like Vanessa to do the job.
“You bet I could do it!”
Adam’s ears pricked up at one particular word. “Bet? You mean it?”
“What?”
Adam’s eyes flicked momentarily to a girl who had just entered the room, apparently looking for a friend. He leaned forward on the sticky bar. “I bet you, that you can’t turn an ordinary girl into a convincing Vanessa Reese. And I pick the girl”
“One who works for the company, resembles Vanessa, and speaks French?”
Adam nodded.
“How long do I have?” Despite himself, Nick was becoming interested.
“Three weeks.”
“What are the stakes?”
Adam leaned still closer, so Nick could smell the alcohol on his brother’s breath. “Your stake in the company. If you lose, I become sole decision-making CEO. You will only retain dividends from your stock. You will sign over all your voting power on the board to me.”
In a way, Nick had nothing to lose – he had no interest in the business and never went near it. He usually gave his brother decision making power anyway. But, however much he did not like taking an active role, Nick had to admit that he very much liked having the possibility of taking a more active role, and the prestige and respect being the CEO of RothCo afforded him.
Giving that up would be… well, it would be a lifestyle adjustment. Then again…
“And if I win?” That would surely be the determining factor.
“I’ll give you the wines and spirits division,” said Adam. “No one could say that you don’t have experience in the area. It’s worth about two-hundred million yearly.”
Nick was confused. “If I win, you’ll give me the thing that you’ll only get if I win?”
Adam rolled his eyes at his brother’s ignorance. “I keep the distribution. That’s what I want. That’s the three billion. Jourdan’s got a global network that has a stranglehold on the market. You get to go off to France and run a vineyard. All that lovely French wine. All those lovely French girls. I understand they have nice bread and cheese too.”
From the moment he had said it, Adam had known that he had his brother.
Running a vineyard was Nick’s idea of heaven. More accurately, running a long-established vineyard was Nick’s idea of heaven. He wouldn’t want to set one up – that would be work – he wouldn’t even want one that was just ticking over – Nick could run anything into the ground, even his bar was struggling. But controlling one that essentially ran itself and had done for the last two centuries? Sitting back and watching the money flow in while he drank and chatted up the Mademoiselles? That was a future that appealed to him.
Especially the Mademoiselles. Nick had a serious weakness for women, and vice versa.
Adam stuck out his hand. “We have a bet?”
Nick grabbed his brother’s hand and shook. “Oh yeah.”
Adam leaned back and pointed across the bar to a mousy, chubby, girl seated in the corner. “I pick her.”
“No, no!” Nick wasn’t going to be caught out that easily. “We agreed - it has to be someone from the company who speaks French.”
“She’s Vanessa’s assistant,” grinned Adam. “Isn’t it a small world?”
“She’s got to resemble Vanessa!” Even from across the bar Nick could see that the girl was lacking height, and the elegance and grace of Vanessa Reese. He watched as the woman dribbled nacho cheese sauce on her blouse, and then suck on the finger she used to scoop the glob up, with growing horror.
Adam shrugged. “She’s got the right…skin tone. That’s what counts. Like I said. Jourdan has a type.”
Nick looked across at the girl. It could probably be worse, but not much. As he watched the girl, she slugged back her drink, and then choked violently, spilling alcohol down her front and finally coughing up the lemon wedge she had nearly swallowed.
Adam beamed – the deal had been doomed the minute those wildebeest had taken a dislike to Vanessa, but at least he could salvage something out of it.
Getting rid of his brother’s potential to interfere with the direction he wanted to take RothCo was not as good as a three billion dollar wines and spirits deal, but it would still be pretty sweet.
“She does speak French,” he added, to cheer up his brother. “Slight Southern accent, but I’m told the French find that charming.”
Nick buried his face in his hands – he had said that he could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but he now wished he’d taken a look at the sow first.
Chapter Three
If you are returning home from an African Safari, then it really doesn’t matter where you live, it will be a come down. And if you are forced to come home early because your boss is apparently as objectionable to wildebeest as she is to everyone else (only the wildebeest at least had balls enough to do something about it) then the come down is going to be that much worse.
Zoe had been very much looking forward to her African Safari, and even Vanessa’s constant haranguing had not dulled her enthusiasm for it. There had been things she had been looking forward to seeing (vultures for some reason were a favorite bird of hers) that she had now been denied. Everyone who went on safari used the same phrase: ‘once in a lifetime trip’ – it was sad to think that she might never get another chance.
On the other hand, she had expected to remain in what was, to Zoe at least, one of the less interesting parts of Africa – the city of Johannesburg – and she had been pleasantly surprised to find that she was not. As Vanessa Reese’s personal assistant Zoe had naturally assumed that she would be spending the next three months at her boss’s bedside, relaying messages, typing up dictation and fulfilling all the tasks that a broken leg prevented her employer from fulfilling.
It had not been something that Zoe had been looking forward to, partly because she would be run off her feet, but mostly because she would have been spending even more time than usual with Vanessa, and a broken leg seemed unlikely to improve her overall temperament. The relief therefore had been massive when Vanessa told Zoe that she (Zoe) should head back home and handle Vanessa’s State-side commitments while she (Vanessa) was out of action.
True, Zoe got what felt like thirty phone calls a day from her boss with no respect to differing time zones, but that was still better than having to be in her physical presence.
“I’m so glad you’re back!” Zoe’s flat-mate Alisha enthused. “I thought you were going to miss my birthday!”
“Yeah,” Zoe managed to force a smile. “Funny how things work out.”
Zoe liked Alisha very much, but they were not similar people, and one of the main differences between them was their definition of a good time.
An African safari or some other o
nce-in-a-lifetime adventure was Zoe’s ideal while Alisha would prefer to get falling down drunk in a bar. Zoe considered treasured memories that will last a lifetime to be a key component of a good time, Alisha thought that if you remembered a night then you hadn’t had enough fun.
Privately, Zoe thought that Alisha’s preference for memory-voiding levels of alcohol was a defense mechanism, because if she remembered the things she did when she was drunk then she would never drink again (or indeed set foot outside the apartment).
“We’re meeting the girls at Nick’s,” Alisha explained. “Then we’ll see where the night takes us.”
That sounded like a free-wheeling remit but Zoe knew from experience that it always went the same way: first a stop at Nick’s bar, secondly heading to a seedy club around the corner call Rank (which was accurate but hardly enticing), then passing out in the gutter. She hated to be thought of as a stick in the mud (perhaps because that was exactly what she was) but that was not her idea of a good time.
“I do have a lot of work to do,” she began, tentatively laying the groundwork for saying no. “And Vanessa could call at any time.”
“You should quit that job.”
“That’s a separate issue. I can’t afford to be unemployed, so I need to keep the job I have, so…”
“One night off won’t hurt you,” Alisha remonstrated. “It’s my birthday.”
And that was Alisha’s trump card. Try as she might, Zoe could not say no to that. There were times, many of them in fact, when Zoe seriously wondered if she had a thick enough skin for the business world. She hated hurting people or letting them down, while those around her seemed to live for it. In situations like this, whether she wanted to or not, Zoe always found herself doing ‘the right thing’.
“Okay,” she sighed.
“Yay!” Alisha cheered. “We’re going to have such fun! Maybe we can get you laid!”
“That’s quite all right thank you.”
“Well, I know you don’t like getting drunk,” said Alisha, thoughtfully. “So why not get some instead?”
“I’m just not all that…”
“It has been a while,” pointed out Alisha. She raised her eyebrows suggestively.
Zoe did not need Alisha to tell her that.
It had been a while.
A long while.
Longer than she liked to think about.
So long in fact, that Zoe had started rounding down the months so it did not seem so long.
She was not, and never had been, the type to go out and get laid, she preferred having a man in her life – a boyfriend. That was how sex was supposed to be done – with someone you cared about. On the other hand there had not been anyone keen to take up the job recently and there was something to be said for the efficiency of picking up someone in a bar, retiring briefly to the back seat of a car, and leaving as a happier, less frustrated person.
Perhaps part of the reason that Zoe was so anti the one-night hook-up was that, while she could tell herself that she was single because she had not met the right man, if you went out looking for sex and failed to find it then that was hard not to take personally.
When she looked in the mirror she was not horrified by the face that stared back, but there was plentiful room for insecurity too. Was she too round-faced? Perhaps. Was she too plain? Probably. Would she look better with contacts instead of glasses? If she could have afforded them, maybe. Was there anything that could be done with her hair? Almost certainly not, though it didn’t stop her from trying.
She wasn’t fat by any means but nor was she stick-thin, and in a club, standing beside emaciated blondes in dresses that seemed to have been sprayed on, she felt like a blimp. She looked, she always thought, like the girl next door. The problem was that people seemed intent on moving away, so they could live next door to someone better looking.
She had always considered herself average, and had been happy with that until Alisha had helpfully pointed out that it meant that half the world was better looking than her. That seemed like an awful lot.
Although she tried her best to dress to impress, Zoe felt that she stuck out like a sore thumb amongst Alisha’s other mates when they turned up at Nick’s. Zoe had felt that she had gone pretty risqué with her choice of clothing, there was a certain amount of cleavage and a certain amount of leg on display. The dress was tight in many of the right places and padded in those that needed help.
And yet Alisha’s friends comfortably out-did her, they flaunted flesh like it was going out of fashion and drew the eye of every male in the bar. All of which rather confused Zoe, who knew for a fact that they all had boyfriends. Were they confident enough to show this much skin because they knew that nothing would come of it? But then, why bother dressing like that if you weren’t trying to pick someone up? Certainly not for comfort.
The high heels Zoe wore had been making her feet ache since she had put them on, her dress only seemed able to contain her breasts by digging painfully into her sides and she kept feeling cold air in areas that she felt instinctively should not be exposed to anything.
Were this not bad enough, the girls all ordered shots, downed them instantly and ordered more. This confused Zoe as well. These girls were all as insubstantial as matchsticks; how were they able to cope with this amount of alcohol and remain standing? Especially since they all teetered about on ridiculous stilettos. Zoe sighed – even their heels were skinnier than hers.
Refusing, for now at least, to cow-tow to peer pressure, she ordered herself a vodka and lemonade and sat down to drink it. She noted that she was also the only one to order any food. She hesitated only briefly before ordering the nachos, eyeing the lithe figure of the girl seated next to her, then thought, ‘what the hell.’ Skipping a little cheese sauce tonight wasn’t going to ever get her into a size two, no matter how much she might dream of it.
Unfortunately her gaze was so distracted by the spectacle of Alisha’s friends downing yet more shots then she failed to notice the slice of lemon in her own drink. By the time she had finished coughing up vodka, pouring liquid cheese all over herself, and ruining her best going out dress, Zoe wondered if choking on a lemon wedge would have been preferable to dying of embarrassment, which she was pretty sure was what she was going to do now.
She decided to sneak out when Alisha went to the bathroom. She did not want to get drunk, and the chances of her picking up a nice guy after the exhibition she had just made of herself seemed pretty low.
“Hi.”
It would be too much to say that the face into which Zoe looked was that of the most handsome man she had ever seen.
It was not like she kept records of every man she had ever seen therefore being sure of that sort of thing was impossible. It was hard to believe that he was not in the top five, but that was the best she was prepared to say without more thought on the matter. That said, she was as sure as she could be that he was the most handsome man who had ever approached her in a bar (although that was not a long list).
“Hi.” Zoe blushed crimson, adding to the overall picture of vodka-soaked, lemon-choked seductress that she currently presented.
“Zoe Blanchard?” the man said.
Zoe took a moment away from thinking that her name had never sounded sexier to wonder how the hell he knew her. If he knew her then this was not a random pick up, which was less flattering in a way, but she was willing to let that slide for this particular individual.
“Yes…?”
“I’m Nick Rothberger.”
The name immediately clicked with her – the Rothberger family owned RothCo, the company for which she worked. Arousal had now been replaced (or at least diluted) in Zoe’s system by fear and confusion: what the hell was going on here?
“Pleased to meet you,” she replied warily, staring at deep blue eyes in which she would happily lose herself.
Nick smiled, which was apparently the one thing he could do to become even more handsome, and Zoe wondered if the top of her head ha
d blown off.
“I’ve got a job for you. Be in my office, nine thirty tomorrow morning.” His brilliant white teeth sparkled even in the dim light. He didn’t wait for Zoe to respond, apparently used to having his orders followed.
“Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
Zoe watched him walk away, noting his perfectly shaped rear end that was hugged by tight jeans, and she wondered briefly if someone might not have slipped something into her drink, because none of this made sense to her.
Reflecting back on the events of the night before, Zoe had to admit that it had not gone exactly as she would have hoped when Nick had first come up to her. By the time he had introduced himself he had already, in the confines of Zoe’s mind, swept the glasses aside and taken her roughly across the table while the whole bar stood and watched in quiet awe.
She would have settled for him buying her a drink and discussing work, the weather and where they might send their three children. The fact that his coming over to her was entirely work-related had been a disappointment.
On the other hand, it was still an interesting disappointment. What could he want?
There was a degree of eager anticipation and nervousness bubbling in Zoe as, the following morning, she made her way up to the CEO offices at the top of the RothCo building. Possibilities bubbled excitedly through her brain: was she getting promoted? A raise? A transfer to a different boss? Any of those would be brilliant (and in all honesty the third of those options was probably the most desirable).
Today, Zoe told herself, was going to be a good day.
But, on the other hand, that did pre-suppose that she was being called up to the CEO’s office for something good.
What if it was something bad?
All of a sudden, the bounce went out of Zoe’s steps and the ebullience out of her demeanor as a fleet of butterflies set up home in her stomach. Did CEO’s personally discipline personal assistants? It seemed unlikely. But no more unlikely than CEO’s personally handing out raises and promotions or assigning transfers. Of course, Zoe did work for one of the most important people in the company and since she was temporarily indisposed it was possible that someone else would handle her staff. But a CEO?