“Stole what you have, you mean,” she muttered, but loud enough for him to hear it.
“Fuck you.”
It just slipped out. Forget about smutty daydreams. She had managed to make him drop his cardinal rule of staying calm in initial meetings with a target, never losing his temper. But the thought that this corporate princess with all her family money was judging him and his methods unexpectedly infuriated him. Maybe he wasn’t as squeaky clean as she thought she was, but he’d done what he had to. Done things she’d never even imagine dirtying her hands with.
She popped open her Diet Coke and took a sip. “No thanks to that either.”
“Don’t be so hasty.”
Those gorgeous gray-blue eyes watched him thoughtfully. “You’re probably the kind of guy who never took the hint in college when a woman said she was washing her hair.”
“You may find this hard to believe, Miss Beckett, but I never heard that.”
He didn’t bother to point out that was because he’d never attended college. He was too busy working his ass off trying to stay off the streets of New York.
“That tells me more about who you were asking out than it does about you.”
Something about the way she was getting calmer and he was getting more worked up in the course of this conversation was just wrong. He tried to take back the upper hand. “Cut this bullshit. You’ve heard the proposal. Our companies are a good fit. I’m willing to cut you in on it, but if you’re not interested I’ll steamroll right over you.”
“You can try.” She took another sip from the can. “Who are you talking to in my company, by the way? Who gave you the tip? The greedy old aunt of mine you purchased your stock from wasn’t exactly advertising on eBay. I assume someone knew who to approach.”
“I don’t divulge my confidential sources.” He leaned against the vending machine, all his thoughts of getting a Coke himself long gone. “At least without some kind of a payment.”
“I don’t reward corporate spying.”
“You’re such a good girl, Miss Beckett. It almost tempts me to find out if you have a bad side.”
Annoyed as he was with her, she was quite sexy in her own way—well, in anyone’s way, actually.
“I do. It comes out when somebody is condescending to me. Or screwing me over.”
He laughed. “Gee, I almost got you to swear.”
“I’m glad you’re having such fun, Mr. Winston.”
“Grow up,” he responded dismissively. “If you don’t realize by now that I have you by the bal…throat, then you better get out of your ivory tower and get serious. Otherwise, this meeting is a waste of time and Winston Enterprises will be moving to an alternate plan.”
“Dare I hope that involves selling me back my stock?”
“Not quite. It involves getting a director or two on your Board to start with. And then you’re going to see how much trouble a dissident shareholder with as much stock as I have can cause. You may have been a good manager to start with, Miss Beckett. But from now on, I promise you, you’ll be spending half your time answering to me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Winston, for making your bullying tactics abundantly clear. I suspected this would be the case, but I at least wanted to hear what you had to say. Now that I have, I can be prepared for your shareholder eroding tactics and tantrums and can act accordingly. Was there anything else we should discuss?”
Aaron wondered how he had gotten so hostile so fast. Sure, he played hardball, but usually with a little more finesse.
That didn’t shut him up, though. Apparently he was on a roll.
“Well, for the record, since we’re already on such shitty terms—”
Her lashes dipped. “Your vocabulary is so wonderfully varied as well.”
“I’ll just throw in that if you want to fuck while we work this out, I’m more than amenable.”
Uh oh. He had said that one out loud. Clear as day. He levered himself away from the vending machine and licked his dry lips, waiting for her reaction. It was sort of out of line. He was actually a little ashamed of himself. He was usually more politically correct. He was a lot of things, many of them not so nice, but he’d never been a sexist.
But what the hell? Hard to believe he could go any lower in her estimation. And frankly, as much as she was pissing him off, she was turning him on too. Bizarre.
She didn’t slap him. By her calm reaction, she had expected the worst of him anyway, no matter what he said. Or else she was used to getting propositioned more often than her lofty station would suggest.
“This keeps getting better, Mr. Winston. Is this part of your normal intimidation tactic or are you making a special case for me?”
“Absolutely a special case. I’ve never wanted to fuck one of the CEOs of a company I’m taking over before. It adds a whole new dimension to the experience. But don’t worry, it’s not a one-time offer. Any time you feel the urge to take me up on it, give me a call. In the meantime, think about my other offer.”
“I’d rather die on both fronts, you conceited jerk.”
She stalked out of the room, nearly knocking over Rye who was coming through the doorway.
“What was that all about?” Rye asked him.
“I think I just made your job harder. I really pissed off our target.”
“Aren’t all our targets pissed off—unless they have a golden parachute, that is?”
“After the conversation I just had with Virginia Beckett, I don’t think a platinum parachute would help. We’re going to have to modify our approach in this case.”
“Why? What’d you say to her?”
“I offered to fuck her while she thought about my offer to take over her company.”
Rye pushed his glasses back up, then shrugged. “Wow. That bachelor-of-the-year thing really went to your head.”
* * * * *
Only when Virginia was safely back in the plush blue comfort of her office, the noon autumn sun streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows, could she permit herself to think about what had just happened. Losing her legendary cool was putting it mildly. She was livid. Ever since Aaron Winston had entered her life a few days ago, she’d felt off-balance. Conservative and careful herself, she was baffled by Winston’s erratic behavior. First, threatening to try to take control of BFD and now, this. Insulting her with the oldest way to make a woman feel inferior—implying she was put to best use on her back.
Maybe Winston hadn’t gone quite that far, but he’d been inching up to it. Unbidden, the memory of how he had looked as he casually propositioned her came to mind. She had to admit he was handsome. His ruffled black hair, deep blue eyes and tall, lean frame had undoubtedly earned him a good deal of female admiration. But he could not possibly be arrogant enough to believe she would just fall into bed with him while she was fighting to save her company.
Even though he was rather hot.
A tousled blond head that would have looked more at home on a beach poked itself shyly around the half open door of her office suite. “I have it on the highest authority from several sources that you stormed in here and are prepared to eat alive anybody who has the audacity to disturb you.” Her brother Brendan hung dramatically on her door as if fearful to enter farther and deadpanned, “So I thought I’d come over and say hi.”
“Come on in, you idiot.” Virginia laughed in spite of herself. She rose to get them both a soda from her office refrigerator, handing her brother a can and then joining him on the overstuffed leather sofa.
Brendan whipped a cellophane-wrapped packet out of his shirt pocket and offered it to Virginia. At her blank look, he clarified, placing it in her hand, “Marketing sent this up. It’s a new cracker BFD is going to carry. Go on. Try it.”
“No thanks.” Virginia reached over to put the cracker back in his pocket. “Meeting Aaron Winston this morning made me lose my appetite.”
“So I take it that the big bad wolf, Mr. Winston, is not just going to go away?” Brendan asked, taki
ng a swig of the soda and crossing his long legs in their perfectly pleated gray pinstripe onto the low glass coffee table.
Virginia took a drink of her own soda, buying time before she had to answer, finally saying, “I don’t know, Brendan, I think this guy is definitely on some kind of a power trip.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know. But what’d he do today?”
If it had been any one of her sisters sitting across from her, Virginia might have been tempted to give an honest accounting of Winston’s completely unexpected, unsolicited and unwelcome pass at her. But since it was her little brother, such full disclosure was out of the question. The impetuous Brendan would probably charge out to beat Winston up and end up with his surfer-boy good looks spoiled by a broken nose. Virginia didn’t stop to analyze why she assumed that Winston would win any such imagined fight. There was a toughness in him that she may have sensed or just automatically attributed to him in view of his rags-to-riches background in contrast to her brother’s privileged upbringing.
From what she’d been reading about Winston in the last few days to educate herself on her adversary, he was an orphan who had built his lucrative and predatory company from the ground up, as he’d more than hinted at with his sneer about types that inherited their fortunes.
She hedged Brendan’s inquiry as to the specifics of the meeting. “He seems completely unpredictable. Our meeting accomplished nothing. I finally just walked out.”
Brendan seemed poised to pump Virginia for details when her secretary buzzed on the intercom.
“It’s your attorney on line one. He says it’s urgent.”
With Virginia’s nod of assent, Brendan rose to turn on the speaker phone on her desk. “What now?” Brendan began the conversation. “Did Winston dig up some Beckett second cousin in Peoria that wants to sell him some shares?”
Virginia smiled, grateful that Brendan made such an easy joke of Aaron Winston. She had the feeling he was becoming less and less laughable to her.
“On the contrary, my boy,” James Minlow boomed. “Virginia, are you there too?”
“I’m here, James.”
“I was a little skeptical, I must say, when you walked out after your informal meeting with Winston.”
Virginia ignored her brother’s raised eyebrow in inquiry.
“But whatever you said to him privately must have been quite convincing since I’m holding in my hands a very respectable draft of a six month standstill that Rye and I have worked up and Winston has agreed to sign. My secretary is emailing it to you as we speak.”
Just as Minlow finished his sentence, Virginia’s secretary brought in a single-page document that Virginia and Brendan immediately hovered over, scanning, as Minlow continued. “There’s a right of first refusal, as well, so if he tries to sell he has to offer it to us first.”
Virginia and Brendan rolled their eyes at the lawyer’s pedantic tendency to explain things to them that they already knew.
“I must say, I’m very pleased with it.” A master of understatement, Minlow was positively beaming over the telephone wires.
Brendan, done with the document quicker than Virginia—a testimony to his less intense scrutiny of most legal documents—exhibited the unrestrained enthusiasm that Minlow could only hint at in his decorous manner. “Wow!” Brendan clapped his hands and gave an exuberant fist-up sign. “This is fantastic!” He turned to his sister who was still poring over the document. “I thought you said the meeting wasn’t productive? You are so humble.” He gave her an affectionate bear hug which she didn’t allow to interrupt her engrossed examination of the document.
She shrugged him off. “I was exaggerating by even calling it a meeting, frankly. I had one heated conversation with him at the Coke machine and then walked out and texted James to carry on. I thought Winston would walk out as well. I assume this means he didn’t?”
“No, he did,” Minlow’s voice confirmed, “but he’d given Rye authority to negotiate this, apparently.”
“I wonder why.” Long a proponent of not looking a gift horse in the mouth, though, Virginia dropped the subject. “Fine. Okay, let’s get it signed up. Then I, for one, plan to forget about Aaron Winston for a little while.”
The mechanics of getting the standstill signed required a few more minutes of conversation. They decided that Brendan would journey over to Minlow’s offices later in the day to sign on behalf of the company.
“Winston’s team seemed to assume that you would be coming over to sign, Virginia, but I guess it doesn’t matter,” Minlow said.
Not on your life, Virginia thought even as she said diplomatically, “I’m going to get out of town this afternoon in light of this development. I could use a break.”
“You going to Bransport?” Brendan asked as they hung up. Bransport, the hundred-acre Beckett family estate, was located in Connecticut, only an hour and a half from Manhattan.
“Yes. You can call me there if any of this changes. Otherwise I’ll be back in the office on Monday.”
“No problem. I was going to mention something to you that IT found, though. It’s sort of weird. They said it was some kind of patch to, I don’t know, spy on our emails or dupe them or something. I’m foggy on the details.”
As on most things sometimes.
“Did they fix it?”
“Yeah, no damage done, they said. But it was weird. I thought you should hear more about it directly from the source.”
“Do they suspect it’s a competitor or something? It apparently happens.”
Though never to BFD so far.
“Or, God forbid, it wasn’t Winston, was it?” As if that guy could go any lower in her estimation.
“No, actually, they think it was just kids. You know, out for fun. Something about how it was done.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to IT about it. Monday.”
Noticeably light of any baggage as she made her way to the elevator—she kept a complete wardrobe at the country house so she could drop in whenever she had the time without the need to think about packing—Virginia felt like a truant grade-schooler.
“Virginia? You could not possibly be thinking about leaving the office now, could you?”
The reproving voice stopped her as she was about to step into the elevator.
She turned guiltily to see her uncle, hands folded across his chest, shaking his grizzled gray head at her, his patrician face frowning. Uncle Victor, her great-uncle actually, was sweet and a very capable businessman, but he still treated her as if she were twelve years old and needed to be watched by a grown-up.
“Hello, Victor.” She had dropped the “uncle” after she took control of BFD in the hopes that it would temper Victor’s somewhat patronizing attitude toward her. It hadn’t. “Actually, you’ve caught me on my way out to Bransport.”
“I just heard about the standstill from Brendan. You must have made quite an impression on Mr. Winston to win that kind of concession after only one meeting.”
Inexplicably, Virginia bristled and was about to protest that Winston’s behavior had nothing to do with her when her uncle cut her off. “But I think congratulations are a bit premature. The document isn’t signed until it’s signed. If there is one thing I have learned in my fifty years with this company, it’s that anything that can go wrong at the last minute will go wrong.”
Dreading the lecture that invariably followed any reference from Victor to his fifty years with the company, Virginia tried to reassure him. “Minlow says Winston has agreed to the document and I’ve already reviewed it. But if anything comes up, Brendan will be there to handle it.”
“Young Brendan is a fine boy, but…” At the exasperated warning look from Virginia, Victor apparently changed his mind about that train of thought. “Well, if you think he can handle it, I guess I defer to you.”
“Thank you.” Virginia leaned forward to give the stern old man a peck on the cheek. He really was sweet. “I’ll see you on Monday,” she said and stepped into the elev
ator, giving a quick last wave.
* * * * *
That night, it took a glass of wine, a roaring fire and the comfort of her favorite easy chair in the library at Bransport to finally relax Virginia. The drive up to Connecticut, meant to help her unwind, had just added I-95 traffic to her list of annoyances. But as she laid her head against the familiar cushioned chair back, the black night outside the picture window, she could almost let it all go. She closed her eyes.
The library always calmed her, the shelves of tomes never dusty but well-used by her sisters and brother and, when they were alive, her parents. Her mother and father, even long into their marriage, had cuddled up together on the couch and read and watched the fire. She opened her eyes. Well, at least she had the fire, even if there was no one to cuddle up to.
Once upon a time, she had thought there would be. She’d assumed she would be the half of a contented and happily married couple, but no such luck. The guys she’d dated, with less and less enthusiasm, not to mention frequency, through the years had either not sparked enough interest in her to go to the trouble of trying to get to know them or else had sparked only interest, and not of the happily married kind.
Unbidden, the thought of Aaron Winston intruded. Drats, just when she had been so successfully keeping him out of mind. She sipped her wine, never really doing much more than sip. To be truthful, Aaron Winston was the type of male who fit into that “sparking” category. All the while she had been arguing with him earlier that day, she had felt some kind of incredible, er, pull, to put it politely. She had been genuinely infuriated by his proposition, but she’d be lying to herself if she said she didn’t find him attractive.
She was, though, pretty good at lying to herself usually. She looked at the empty couch. Tonight for some reason she didn’t want it to be empty. What would it be like to cuddle up with Aaron Winston? Would he be cuddly and boyish, or manly and comforting? Looking at that huge leather couch, she could imagine him snuggling in the corner of it, a pillow behind his head, his arm around her shoulder, wearing a nice soft V-neck sweater in blue, to match his eyes…
Executive Perks Page 2