It was Annajane’s turn to clear her throat. Her stomach roiled with nervousness, but something else was boiling up inside her. Anger.
“You deliberately sabotaged me,” Annajane said quietly. “You and Celia suggested to Joe Farnham that he should hire me, because you were sure I would be ‘uncomfortable’ working with Celia after she and Mason got engaged. And then, as soon as I’d quit my job here, and days before I was to start there, you made sure I wouldn’t have a job in Atlanta. That was petty, Davis. It was mean and it was low-down, and I really can’t believe I’ve ever done anything to you to deserve that kind of treatment.”
“Hey!” Davis said sharply. “This was nothing personal. It was business.”
Mason looked stunned. “Is this true?” he asked Davis. “You angled Joe to give her a job—to get rid of her, because Celia didn’t want her around?”
“I assumed you wouldn’t want your ex-wife around,” Davis said easily. “Because your fiancée sure as hell didn’t. I just did what I thought you would have done—if you had any balls, which you apparently don’t.”
Mason’s face darkened. “Annajane and I had managed to get along quite nicely for the past five years, without any help from you. She’s been an important part of our team…”
“Oh please!” Davis broke in. “She came to work here because Dad thought she was a cute kid and she was married to you, and she stayed on after the divorce because you somehow felt guilty about the breakup. Well, that’s on you, brother.” He gave Annajane a pitying glance. “She hasn’t had an original idea in years. Once Celia came on board, it was clear—to everybody but you—that we needed a new direction. I did what needed to be done. And I’d do it again.”
Annajane felt her hands clench and unclench with barely suppressed rage. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she blinked them back helplessly.
“That’s enough,” Mason roared. He pointed at his computer screen. “If you’re such a marketing genius, explain to me why our sales have been sliding every quarter for the past two years. Also, explain why we’re paying a six-figure promotional fee to a scumbucket Nascar driver like Donnell Boggs, who not only hasn’t placed in a race since we hired him, he’s had two DUI arrests in the past six weeks.” Mason flung a stack of autographed glossy photos of Boggs, wearing a cap emblazoned with the Quixie logo, across the desk at his brother.
The photos fluttered to the floor. “That’s the face you hired to be the face of Quixie?” Mason thundered. “Check the front page of today’s Charlotte Observer. Or you can find the story online. It’s on all the wire services. The Mecklenburg County Police arrested Boggs at a motel in Concord last night, where he’d checked in with a sixteen-year-old high school dropout, a quart of Tecate, and eleven hundred dollars’ worth of Ecstasy.”
Davis’s ruddy face paled. “What? No. That’s not possible. I talked to Donnell last night. He was heading to Spartanburg for the opening of a new Piggly Wiggly; then he was throwing out the first pitch at a minor league game in Greenville. It was Quixie night.”
“He never made it to Spartanburg, or Greenville, thank God,” Mason said. “He was too busy hooking up with a teenager he met online. I want him fired. Today.”
“I can’t fire him. He’s got a contract,” Davis said. “We’ve got all the summer promotional materials set. Cardboard cutouts of Donnell for all the displays, models of the number eight Quixie car. Supermarket openings, theme park promos. His picture is gonna be on the twelve-pack cartons. They go to the printers tomorrow. It’s all set.”
“Unset it,” Mason said bluntly. “Do whatever it takes. Call our attorney and have him start the paperwork. I want that contract canceled based on the morals clause. I want the sponsorship deal ended, and I want our name painted over on his cars, even if you have to do it yourself. I don’t want that degenerate turd’s name mentioned in the same breath as Quixie.”
“God,” Davis said, burying his head in his hands. “We’ve spent thousands on this campaign. Hundreds of thousands. We’ll have to do new ad buys, shoot new commercials … There’s no time to create a new campaign from scratch.”
“I can help with that,” Annajane said.
Davis gave her a sour look.
“It’s what Mason was just talking about. Returning to our roots. Retro. I’ve got all the old mechanicals and illustrations for the Quixie ads from the forties through the sixties,” she said. “And I bet if I call Farnham-Capheart they’ve still got footage of the old commercials. We just clean up the graphics for the print ads, maybe reshoot some of the commercials, cut out the footage of Donnell and the Quixie car, maybe substitute with novelty bits from the old commercials. Make the new ones look like those old Dr Pepper ads everybody used to love. We can do Facebook pages, the works. If we get started right away, we should be able to pull it off.”
“Fine,” Davis said tersely. “You seem to have it all figured out. I’ll leave it to you.”
“Davis, enough!” Mason snapped. “Annajane didn’t hire Donnell Boggs because she wanted to party with a bogus celebrity. You did. Now stop with the pissy attitude and let’s get this fixed.”
Davis stood abruptly and dumped his nearly full Quixie can into a metal trash can, where the sound of metal meeting metal made a hollow clang.
“You can’t fire me,” he told his brother. “And you can’t stop the inevitable. You can slow it down, but only until next week, when old man Norris gets off his ass and tells us how the trust works. But we both know how it’s gonna go down. Mama’s tired of watching this company slide into the dumper. She’ll vote to sell. And when that happens, you’ll be out. I guarantee.”
* * *
Mason watched his brother’s exit with a pained expression on his face. He turned to Annajane. “Fun times, huh?”
She winced. “That was pretty brutal.”
“At least we cleared the air,” Mason said. “No more of this bullshit passive-aggressive radio silence. He knows how I feel, and I definitely know where he stands on things. Also, it’s gonna be expensive, but at least we’re shed of that slime-dog Donnell Boggs. I knew that guy was trouble the minute I laid eyes on him.”
“I guess we’re just lucky he got arrested before the new campaign rolled completely out,” Annajane said.
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Mason said. “I’ve had a private investigator following him for weeks. As soon as he saw Boggs pull into the motel parking lot with that girl yesterday, he called me, and then he tipped the cops.”
30
An unfamiliar woman’s voice on the other end of the line asked, “Is this Annajane Hudgens?”
She glanced at the caller ID screen on her phone, but it said UNKNOWN.
“Yes,” Annajane said cautiously. “Who’s calling?”
“My name is Katie Derscheid. I’m a friend of a friend of your friend, Pokey Riggs. I understand you’re interested in knowing something about Celia Wakefield and Gingerpeachy?”
Annajane’s pulse quickened. She got up from her desk and closed and locked her office door. Just in case. She’d been working furiously all day, trying to rebuild and rebook the summer Quixie promotion, had even worked straight through lunch, so she’d fortunately managed to avoid Celia. But she wouldn’t put it past Celia to be lurking somewhere nearby.
She sat back down at her desk and straightened her shoulders. “Hi Katie. I was actually going to call you today, until I got involved in putting out assorted forest fires around here.” She lowered her voice til it was just above a whisper, and still deliberately avoided saying Celia’s name out loud. Just in case. “So … you do know her?”
“Ohhhh yes,” Katie Derscheid said. “She’s, uh, not a friend of yours, is she?”
“No,” Annajane said, a slight shiver going down her spine. “Definitely not.”
“Oh goodie,” Katie said. “Now we can really talk girl to girl.”
Annajane laughed ruefully. “She’s a bit of an enigma, isn’t she?”
“She’s a scorpion,�
� Katie said. “Absolutely deadly. And not in a good way. She screwed my former company, Baby Brands, big-time.”
“Interesting,” Annajane said. “The company I work for, Quixie, hired, um, that person, as a consultant, based on her reputation as a sort of girl genius with branding and business development.”
“Yeah, what’s genius about Celia is her ability to totally bullshit her way through life,” Katie said.
“Did she really sell her company for ten million? That’s what we all heard. In fact, I think she kind of alluded to that herself.”
“The purchase price was actually just under half that—five million,” Katie said. “The deal was structured so that Celia would be paid in staggered amounts. She did take Baby Brands for more than a million in cash, but she’ll never see another dime of their money—not if their lawyers have their say.”
“Oh my,” Annajane breathed. “So … what happened?”
“Smoke and mirrors,” Katie said cryptically. “That was the essence of her company. When Baby Brands bought Gingerpeachy, they were told she had millions in orders from several chain retailers—Gymboree, Pottery Barn Kids, Macy’s. We bought everything—the name, the outstanding orders, the inventory. And all of it was bogus. The order numbers were wildly inflated, and as for inventory—there was none. A couple bolts of fabric and a ton of factory seconds that were unsalable as far as we were concerned.”
Annajane’s eyes widened. “How did she manage to pull that off?”
Katie’s laugh was the deep, throaty chortle of a woman who’d seen a lot. “Celia Wakefield has ESP—extrasensual perception. She meets a guy, and within a couple hours, he’s begging her to ‘beat me, hurt me, make me write bad checks.’”
“And that’s what happened at your company?”
“She met the president of Baby Brands, Reeve Sonnenfeld, in the lobby bar at the Mansion at Turtle Creek, in Dallas, during the Winter Mart week. Celia was repping her own line in a little showroom at the time.”
“I think I know where this is going,” Annajane said. “She met my boss in the exact same way.”
“Gotta love a gal who trolls hotel bars, right?” Katie said with a chuckle. “She’s one step up from a whore, that Celia. Anyway, she strikes up a conversation with Reeve, tells him she’s got this great line of dresses, reversible, all cotton—she even whips a sample dress out of her purse to show him. And then she acts all surprised when he tells her he IS Baby Brands. They have a couple more drinks; then Celia gives him her business card and takes off, leaving Reeve begging for another look, if you know what I mean. Of course, they meet later that night, after Reeve’s wife Sandee has gone back to the suite.”
“Right there in the same hotel with his wife?” Annajane asked.
“Oh, it was all business,” Katie said. “At first. Reeve came back from Dallas raving about this brilliant young entrepreneur he was going to ‘mentor.’ It was revolting. I mean, she’s two years younger than his daughter, for God’s sake. Pretty soon, he’s flying off to meet Celia in Atlanta and LA for Marts there, only those times, he made sure Sandee stayed home. Everybody in the company knew what was going on with those two. Everybody but Sandee.”
Annajane leaned back in her desk chair and looked out her office window. It was getting late in the day. The parking lot was emptying out. She got up and walked over to the window. If she stood at just the right angle, she could see Celia’s parking space. It was empty. She exhaled noisily.
“Hey, are you still there?” Katie asked.
“I’m here,” Annajane said. “What happened next?”
“The inevitable,” Katie said. “Reeve got the brilliant idea to buy Gingerpeachy. As soon as the deal was inked, Celia and Reeve were history. And we were left holding a big bag of Gingerpeachy crap. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. You know what the economy’s like.”
“Is Baby Brands in trouble?” Annajane asked.
“They’ll survive,” Katie said drily. “Of course, it meant some belt tightening. Which meant I lost my job.”
“Oh, wow, I’m sorry,” Annajane said. “So, how does she get away with something like that? I mean, isn’t what she did fraud or something?”
“Or something,” Katie said. “It’s all been kept pretty hush-hush. But yeah, I think Baby Brands has started legal action against Celia.”
“You mentioned Celia met your vice president at a hotel bar,” Katie said. “Are they having a fling?”
“No. Davis was infatuated with her, but strictly on a professional basis, as far as I know,” Annajane said. She was somehow reluctant to reveal to this stranger that Celia had targeted a much bigger fish at Quixie, in the form of Mason. “He brought her into the company as a consultant, based on what he thought was her marketing expertise and, of course, because of her track record starting and selling a successful retail business like Gingerpeachy.”
Katie’s laugh sounded sour. “Let me just fill you in on Celia Wakefield. First of all, is she still peddling that line of crap about how she designed the original PopTot dress?”
“Yeah,” Annajane said. “I’ve seen the dresses. They really are adorable.”
“They’re very adorable,” Katie said. “But there’s some question of who actually came up with the idea for them.”
“Really?”
“After Baby Brands bought out Gingerpeachy, Parenting magazine did a nice spread on the dresses,” Katie said. “Not long afterwards, the reporter who did the piece called to let us know that she’d had a call from a woman claiming that Celia stole the idea from her.”
“Why do I have a mental image of the theme music from Jaws in my head?” Annajane asked.
“A shark would be insulted to be compared to Celia,” Katie said. “Celia happened to be working at a boutique and she got hold of one of this girl’s sample dresses, which she was sewing at home with her mother. So Celia, sniffing an opportunity, drew up a business plan, hired a sewing room, and turned out a line of dresses exactly like the ones from the boutique. The next thing you know, she’s the girl genius of retailing.”
“Did you do anything to check out the other woman’s claim?” Annajane asked.
“Nope,” Katie said. “It’s not like she trademarked the dresses. Anyway, there wasn’t anything we could do about it. We listened to her story, but what could we do? We’d been victimized, too. By then, Celia was long gone.”
“I know,” Annajane said, putting down her pencil. “By then, she was here.”
There was a knock at Annajane’s office door. Her pulse quickened. “Katie, I have to go now. There’s somebody at my door. Thanks so much for the information.”
* * *
Mason stood in the hallway outside her office, his laptop case slung over his shoulder.
“Hey, you,” he said, looking puzzled. “You’re locking yourself in now?”
“Sorry,” Annajane said. “I had so much going on; I just couldn’t deal with distractions today.”
“Wish I could lock myself in. Or other people out,” Mason said. “Look, it’s nearly six. Wanna go get some dinner?”
Annajane looked up and down the hallway. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “I’ve still got a ton of work to catch up on.”
“Let it go until tomorrow,” Mason said firmly.
“It’s not just that,” she said. “You know how people are. If they see us out together, it’ll just fire up the rumor mill again.”
“So?” He brushed his hand through his hair, impatient. “I’ve got news for you, Annajane. People in this town already think we’re having some big flaming affair.”
“I hate being the topic of gossip,” Annajane said.
Mason rolled his eyes. “Me, too. Especially when I’m not even getting to do the things people suspect we’re already doing.” He caught her hand. “Come on. Please? We’ve wasted five years pretending we don’t care about each other. I don’t want to waste any more time. Do you?”
She felt so torn. She wanted to see h
im, be with him. Why was it so hard to say yes to making herself happy?
“Annajane?”
“All right,” she said finally. “But I’ve got to finish up a couple things. I’ll meet you. Where?”
“There’s a new place, Blueplate, in Creekdale. Where the old Emile’s used to be? But it’s silly to drive all the way over there in two separate cars. I’ll go home, check on Sophie, shower and change, and meet you back here—in an hour?”
“It’s a deal,” Annajane said. On impulse, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
He raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Now you’re talking.”
31
Blueplate was located in a small wood-shingled cottage set back from the road in Creekdale. Annajane had eaten there once when it had been Emile’s, but hadn’t cared for the ersatz French menu—or the haughty waiters.
Now, though, the place had been transformed. Rough whitewashed plaster walls replaced the overblown red damask wallpaper, and the furnishings were a friendly mélange of wooden tables and mismatched chairs. A small bar took up most of the entryway, and, beyond, they could hear the clatter of dishes and the hum of conversations in the dining room.
The hostess, a slender brunette with pale skin and tattoos wreathing both wrists, identified herself as Tabitha, the owner and wife of the chef, as she gathered up a menu and silverware for them.
“It’s such an awesome night; I think we have a table out on the patio, if you want,” Tabitha offered.
Annajane looked to Mason for approval. “That’d be great,” he said. “We’ve both been cooped up in an office all day. It’ll be nice to have some fresh air.”
As they were led through the dining room, Annajane kept her face lowered and stayed a couple steps ahead of Mason. Realizing that she still felt awkward and self-conscious about being seen in public with him, she gave herself a mental scolding.
Stop hiding! You’ve done nothing wrong. Anyway, it’s only dinner.
The patio was just as charming as the interior of the restaurant, with a rough-beamed peaked ceiling lined with twinkling white lights and a flagstone floor. Despite her earlier internal scolding, Annajane was grateful when the hostess seated them at a table shielded from the rest of the room by an enormous potted hydrangea whose platter-sized blue blossoms formed an effective screen.
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