by Mia Caldwell
“Sir, that’s…wrong,” I paused, pointing at the screen. “You have here that the Ashen account is running over-budget.” I stepped closer, pointing out a specific area on the projected page. “We had Accounting get in touch, and they freed up another $10,000 for us…” My finger moved to the Staff Investment column. “…And Toby figured out an After Effects trick to automate some of the motion graphics work, so their immediate commercial needs are being met with a full three days’ of work shaved off. Furthermore, Toby and Samantha are collaborating and staggering their work, so that the final product renders overlap and they can maximize their time appropriately. We’re actually running ahead of schedule and thirty percent under budget.”
I turned back towards the table, not sure what to expect. If anything, I was afraid that I’d be banished from the room and reluctantly punished by my boss – possibly even put on some sort of probation. My gaze fell upon the only face in the room that mattered. Cole Andrews was sitting forward now, his elbows uniformly against the table, fingers clasped.
Is he…is that a smirk?
“Miss Walker,” Coppersmith stammered, standing to his feet. “You have interrupted this private meeting for long enough. Leave this room this instant, and let Larry know that I expect to–”
“Enough.”
Everyone turned to the founder, who had concentrated his gaze on Larry’s superior. I couldn’t really see his look from across the room, but it was far less pleasant than it had been just a moment before.
“Sit down,” Cole Andrews commanded, and Coppersmith reluctantly slid back down into his seat. He turned his gaze back towards me; it was no smirk, all business. “Is this true?”
“Yes, Mr. Andrews.”
A crisply dressed, older woman with cropped, graying hair angrily spoke up, leaning back into her executive chair. “Why on Earth are we hearing this from you?”
“I…” I paused, realizing that they – including Andrews – were all expecting an answer from me. “I don’t know who is in charge of that information. It doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the revisions I just offered. However, these were somewhat last minute changes, so it’s natural that they might not have entered your compiled reports.”
“How last minute?” A middle-aged Italian woman in a modest, casual suit asked.
“As recent as this morning, I believe.”
“Unacceptable,” the older woman cut in. “These are the kinds of things we need to know to properly conduct these meetings. There was a breakdown of communication here. The Ashen account is our priority right now! If we’re running under budget, well, that changes damned near everything we’ve already discussed!”
I nodded, listening to the resulting verbal outbursts. My eyes flitted from suit to suit, observing their collective fury. It appeared that they had temporarily forgotten me, and I took the time to inch towards the door.
These people didn’t strike fear into my heart, like they did to my coworkers. That’s because they took this job with every intention of making it their professional career. Sure, upward mobility was in full swing, and with time-tested reliability and talent, one ascended the ladder at Andrews Enterprises comparatively quickly.
But this was just like every other job I had ever had, and every coworker I’d ever enjoyed working beside.
They were expendable.
These executives didn’t intimidate me because they were just as little to me as I was to them. Of course, this didn’t mean that I came to work and did an awful job by any means – I was every bit as professional and fluid as an employee could be. My work spoke for itself, and I had made enough ripples for at least one executive to recognize me on sight.
While they continued their rowdy, indignant argument over this perceived gap in their intelligence, I decided that I had seen enough of this. “I’m afraid I must return to my work,” I cut in, chin held high. “Thank you for your time.”
“Dismissed,” a spry, Irish suit with thick fiery hair nonchalantly waved, never pulling his eyes from his verbal combatant.
I embraced the order and let myself back outside…but not before I noticed Cole Andrews looking directly at me, a confident, panty-drenching smile across his lips.
(Back to Table of Contents)
Chapter 2
Cole
Running a pair of fingertips through my thick hair, I let the rest of the quarterly revenue and projections meeting continue on. It only took a few minutes for the fracas to settle down as fingers were pointed and accusations thrown. In the meantime, I deduced approximately how long it would take me to reach the street level, walk into one of the clothing stores, completely change, and then outpace the gridlocked traffic down to the park.
Personally, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about these reports. I had already built the company, moved the correct people into upper management, and seen that the tight-belted, well-oiled machine ran well without me. All I needed to know could be answered in two simple questions:
“Are we still in the green?”
“Will we still be green in three months?”
For all my desire to ignore the business, I couldn’t just step away. If I did, I’d miss all the little things that inevitably drew my attention by being so interesting.
And lately, I found myself interested in Kiona Walker.
Yes, I knew exactly who she was. My extensive background checks pulled up almost everything I could want to know about her – including the fact that the clever girl had not only fabricated her entire resume, but had also passed three interviews with some of the most competent people I’ve ever met. I hadn’t believed it until I personally reviewed the tapes. She was confident, presentable, and knew her material.
The only thing I couldn’t figure out was who sent her.
Kiona was brought to my attention when the checks all came back and legitimized that the marketing positions she had previously worked in were almost completely inaccessible. Sure, her references gave her stellar reviews, but the inability to reach the companies themselves had given HR enough reason to bring me into the loop. Of course, I knew better. They just wanted my final approval to cover their own ass. After all, you can’t be blamed for making a potentially negative hiring decision if the founder of the company signed off in things, right?
Of course, Kiona had pre-emptively supplied reasons why her job history might have a few gaps, and they made total sense. One was a small, off-the-books agency in England, and relatively hard to reach; another company had been a small, offline agency that handled local businesses. On any other day, I’d have put my signature on her file and sent it back to HR without a second thought… But something caught my eye.
The third employer was not like the others.
She claimed she’d held a position at a recently closed and bankrupt company that had fallen into some ongoing legal troubles. That particular company had suffered a suspiciously convenient server fire just prior to going under, and there was no way in the world anyone was going to retrieve the records, much less talk to the notoriously secretive management. That was especially true now that they were under indictment for securities fraud. I’d sooner be able to call up Elvis than get those idiots on the phone. It was all very convenient.
And that was her big mistake.
While the first two companies were fabricated and her references nothing but sock puppets paid to give glowing praise, the third company was very real. Someone hadn’t done their research, because the CEO of that particular company was a particularly vile and racist asshole and I’d had the displeasure of working with on more than one occasion. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he would have hired a beautifully dark skinned and almost stunningly intelligent woman like Kiona.
This made Kiona interesting. I signed off on her paperwork without saying a word about any of this to HR, and I paid for my own background checks to be done in private. There’s a saying in business; keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I wanted to keep Kiona very
close until I knew her secrets.
My own little investigation pulled up something puzzling: her real job history. There were a string of bizarre jobs that made pinning down her professional career a nightmare. Kiona had managed a small sandwich shop, a fitness gym, worked freelance for a temp agency, and after that, she had been a corporate trainer for a national restaurant chain. From there, she went off the grid entirely. No employment, no identifiable method of paying her bills. She had become a ghost.
And now she was working for me, bursting into board meetings she had no business walking into, and making it clear that she had been keeping a keen eye on the most intimate financial and operational details of this company.
While the rest of the meeting went on with only my scarcest attention, my mind was constantly drawn back to her. It wasn’t entirely a professional interest, of course. Kiona was remarkably beautiful, and absolutely impossible to pin down. She was just as talented as she claimed, but catching simple mistakes well beyond her scope. Her subtle derailing of my entire boardroom was evidence enough of that, but I knew that she was still going to be trouble for me if I let her… How much longer could I tolerate a viper in my midst?
And where does that leave me now?
“Cole?”
I pulled my eyes from the window. Half the boardroom was staring directly at me, waiting for my answer on some question. I didn’t have the patience for this. I took a moment to glance thoughtfully at the darkened screen on my cell phone.
“Ladies, gentlemen, something has come up. Continue this without me.”
The executives shared concerned glances as I stood up, buttoning my blazer.
“Sir…we need you here to decide on–”
“That’s what I have you lot around for, right? You decide. I’ve hired or promoted all of you with the expectation that you don’t need me around to sign off on every single decision. As usual, pass everything requiring my direct attention through Kylie.” I motioned to my executive assistant, seated beside me. She was the only one not openly gawking at me, instead reserving a measure of veiled disappointment. I knew that she hated being left as my proxy, but that came as part of the job after five years of shadowing me…and if she wanted to earn my trust, she was going to have to accept responsibilities like this.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
I strolled out the door, towards the elevator. Briefly, I was taken with the idea to follow through with the fantasy – to just spend the day at the park, pretending I was anybody else in the world. It would be so easy to do.
Sadly, the chains of responsibility bind.
I made a quick phone call, and when I stepped out onto the roof, my helicopter was ready. My pilot, Patrick, was reading something on his phone when I approached, having already primed the engine and opened the door for me.
“Early departure, sir?” He cheerily asked, pocketing it.
“Boring as always. Take me home.”
“Right away, sir!”
I relaxed in the back as he closed the door, then climbed into the cockpit. After he ran his quick diagnostics, we were lifting up above the building, then coasting over the traffic-congested city.
It was probably a bad idea to leave the conference room without proper oversight. Half of the men and women in that meeting had become dear to me, but there were sharks even among my closest friends. I had learned to trust only myself even before my company had fiscally catapulted me into the ranks of the esteemed billionaires.
Comparatively young, I was a prime target for sabotage and excessive tabloid scrutiny; all the more reason to keep everyone out. I hadn’t gotten this far by relying on other people in my personal life – all that I needed were the right people in the right roles, and I could let my business life run on autopilot.
I could buy myself some time…
It wasn’t that easy, unfortunately. As much as I wanted to brush it all aside, I now had hundreds of employees relying on me to keep their families fed. I had every intention to give them proportional cuts of the buyout, but that hinged on there being a buyout at all. The Megami Corporation loved our numbers and tenacity, and they could do great things with the castle I’d built – all I needed was to hand them the keys.
Unfortunately, the elderly Alphonse Megami was somewhat of a traditional man, and he liked to do business with traditional people. Much to my amusement, he’d mistakenly thought I was gay. That was the tabloids fault. Some asshole of a photographer had done an almost hilariously bad photoshop job that made it look like I might be holding hands with another man. The scandal barely made waves, but it was enough for Alphonse to bring it to my attention. I thought a few real paparazzi shots with a sexy supermodel on my arm and a libel lawsuit against the seedy little news rag would dispel that illusion.
To do proper business, Alphonse needed more. Part of it was his talk of ‘traditional values’, but I knew the other half was a desire to express his control over the negotiations. When billionaires clash, influence is more important than money. It’s fun to see what silly hoops you can make a powerful man jump through, and Alphonse was the one with all the power in this particular arrangement. His stipulation was simple and he stated it clearly. For this deal to go forward, I had to do one little thing.
I had to get married.
Settling down had never been part of the plan, and I detested the idea of putting anyone through what would come of that. Mr. Megami was providing a way out of all the responsibilities I’d caged myself into. This was the first legitimate offer I’d been made since privately painting the crosshairs on my own corporation. It was too tempting to pass up.
Some would undoubtedly wonder why I did it, when the ink dried… After all, I was a billionaire on paper when you added up the assets of my company. Why sell out? A few weeks later they would understand…
I regretted that I couldn’t do it alone. I’d built this whole business on the back of brash and impossible decisions. People used to joke that I was running my company as if there were no tomorrow, but that didn’t mean I could act freely. For example, I could never sell even a fraction of my stock without crashing the company’s value on the market. As the largest shareholder, they would see any movement of my position as a sign of weakness. The losses would be staggering, and could put the entire future of the company in jeopardy. Worse yet, the declining value would leave me with too little in liquid funds to accomplish my life’s work.
Megami Corporation was only answer. They had the cash reserves to liquidate my position instantaneously. My paper wealth would become real over night. Unfortunately, his offer came with a hard deadline, and my rendezvous with Alphonse drew ever nearer…
It was the right move. I knew that much. I could handsomely reward everyone who had stuck it out with me over these years, cut my ties, and move on with enough accumulated resources to last the rest of my life and support a charitable organization with my name on it that would help people for generations upon generations. That’s what I wanted now more than anything. A legacy, and time to take a walk in the park. The pieces were all in place…all but one. I still needed a wife.
My thoughts drifted back to Kiona Walker. A panderer I was not, but it wasn’t lost on me that a prominent African American businessman like Alphonse Megami might look favorably on Kiona. Surely, he would take steps to ensure our relationship was real. Thankfully, the mystery woman had completely and continuously fooled my entire company – and importantly, she’d won over my assistant in less than a half an hour.
Kiona was many things. Clever. Opportunistic. Adaptable.
Someone had paid her well to infiltrate my company and gain my respect. That much was certain. She was an actress worthy of my grudging respect.
She was perfect for the role.
(Back to Table of Contents)
Chapter 3
Kiona
That evening, I was still trying to shake the sight of Cole’s smile from my head. There was something about the way he had been apatheticall
y part of the meeting – obviously, he hadn’t wanted to be there. But then he’d turned his attention to me, and for a brief moment I felt the weight of his crushing gaze…and I wanted more of it.
Cole Andrews was the hottest guy I’d ever met. My keystrokes betrayed me as I pulled up the company staff page, then clicking his headshot to pop-out a full-sized picture. There he was, with his thick brunette hair, piercing blue eyes, and chiseled cheekbones. But despite his physical handsomeness, there was his trademark crisp stare – not even the faintest trace of a smile. I’d never seen a picture of this man smiling, and if the tabloids were to be believed, nobody had. He looked perpetually distant at all times, simply going through the motions at any given time.
I’d believe those tabloids too, if I hadn’t seen the ear-to-ear grin he’d flashed me in the board room.