The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  She looked at his face as his wrote; it betrayed nothing. This was effortless for him, just something he did.

  He fascinated her.

  Eilis certainly did not want to take her company public, but if she protested too much, he’d get suspicious and start Knox to digging deeper into her life than he already had, and that was the last thing she needed.

  None of this made sense. King Midas was really trying to put her back on her feet. This wasn’t the evil Sebastian Taight she’d heard rumors about all these years, but of course, no one had told her he was drop-dead gorgeous, either.

  She asked before she thought. “What makes you decide whether to fix or raid?”

  He stopped writing again and stayed still, looking at his pad. She wondered if he didn’t even know his own pattern and thus, no one else could. Then he turned his head and looked her straight in the eye and said, “I take companies whose ownership and/or management can’t be salvaged.”

  She managed to quell any reaction to that. So, he’d been serious when he’d threatened to rip her company right out from under her. He continued,

  “In the end, it all comes down to the people, the leaders. I despise bad management. If the owners can’t be trained, if they fight me—and remember, I only go to companies when they call me for help—if they can’t be persuaded that their way doesn’t work and thus, needs to be changed, I take it.” He stopped for a moment and she knew he was letting that sink in a minute. It was a threat, a promise, a fact. “I’m always willing to look at options if they’re presented to me logically, but I’ve been doing this too long to mess around with bullshit. And no, Wall Street can’t figure out why I do what I do because they don’t know the players’ personalities like I do. And no, I’m not going to let the Senate pound it out of me, either, so I’d suggest you keep that to yourself.”

  Eilis couldn’t help it. Her eyes widened and she pulled away from him a bit at the distinct threat in his voice.

  The corner of his mouth twitched up and his eyes darkened to lavender. “Ah, she does have a soul underneath all that Chanel.”

  The only thing that saved her from his seeing her blush was the heavy makeup. And then, because she couldn’t seem to keep her curiosity in check, she said,

  “What really happened at Jep Industries, with Senator Oth?”

  His cocked at eyebrow at her. “What do you think happened?”

  Eilis studied him in return a moment, wondering if this was a test or if he was fishing for her impressions. “I think,” she finally said, carefully, “that his executive staff was diverting cash flow and he either didn’t know or he couldn’t figure out how to stop it and fix it on his own.”

  His mouth twitched a bit. “Very good,” he murmured. “So why didn’t I have them prosecuted?”

  “I’m assuming because you couldn’t prove it without getting Roger indicted.”

  “Precisely. And why did I lay off twelve hundred people?”

  Eilis had to think about that for a moment, to think about what she knew of Roger Oth and his company, to follow the flow chart she’d built in her head from rumor, speculation, and absolutely no facts. It took a minute, but then the entire plan blossomed in her mind. “The 401(k) accounts were about to be cleaned out. The only way you could stop the pending transactions was if Jep Industries didn’t exist anymore.” He inclined his head in what she realized was approval. “Then you dismantled Jep enough that Hollander Steelworks could absorb it piecemeal without arousing anyone’s curiosity.”

  There was a light of great respect in his eyes that warmed Eilis to her soul. “Yes.”

  “Was that your idea?”

  He shook his head. “Knox’s.”

  Eilis started. “He’s a lawyer.”

  “With a degree in accounting and a penchant for taking the scenic route around a problem. Mitch Hollander needed Jep’s products to stay in business and he begged me not to shut it down, but we couldn’t find anyone qualified enough to run it. Don’t think we didn’t try; too many businesses would’ve gone under without Roger’s goods.”

  “How long did it take you to figure out they were stealing?”

  “Three days. It took three of us two weeks to follow the paper trail to its source.”

  “And then another two weeks to shut it all down.” Eilis fought the urge to betray any emotion. Jep’s circumstances too closely mirrored her own, only Eilis hadn’t been able to call for help.

  “Yes.”

  “You said you only go where people call you.”

  “Typically, yes.”

  “What about OKH Enterprises?”

  He pursed his lips as he stared at her and it seemed like he was wondering if or how much to tell her. “I don’t know why you’d ask about that,” he said softly, and she knew she’d given away far more than she’d meant to, just by asking. “The Journal’s all over it.”

  “The alliances are fuzzy,” she finally said, not looking away from him.

  His eyebrow rose. “Really? What do you think the alliances are?”

  “Before or after you were assigned as my trustee?”

  He sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “Both.”

  “Everybody I know thinks you’re at war with both Knox and Fen. That’s the assumption I made until he assigned you to me. Now, I don’t know what to think.”

  “Really!” He seemed surprised by that and tapped his fingers on his mouth. “Interesting. I didn’t know that was how it was being read.” Then he went back to his work, not having answered her original question and only leaving her with more.

  * * * * *

  32: R.O.I.

  Eilis watched him come in the door, as tall and elegant as he had Thursday and the day before. She’d have said arrogant if he were any other man, but Sebastian hadn’t come off as arrogant once she’d met him, talked to him.

  No, not arrogant. Preoccupied. Thinking, always thinking. Living in his head.

  The backpack he carried was an interesting choice for a man who wore immaculate black (she wondered if he wore any other color) custom tailored suits, crisp white dress shirts, black silk ties, and never, ever looked rumpled. It didn’t take anything away from his sinister air.

  Sinister

  Sin

  Eilis thought Sebastian Taight looked like six feet, two inches and two hundred twenty pounds of pure sin.

  He stopped at a cubicle and introduced himself to its occupant. Eilis tilted her head. That was . . . odd. Even more odd—he went to several cubicles and introduced himself, shaking hands. The cubicles’ occupants smiled and laughed. Sebastian didn’t, but none of the employees who’d spoken with him seemed to notice or care.

  Why would he do that?

  Eilis’s insides turned over at the thought that it might be possible for him to take her company away from her through her employees. Sneaky bastard!

  But . . . nowhere in her dictionary of evils that defined Sebastian Taight was an entry for sneaky. Oh, no. Sebastian Taight was the most cunning of devils: He did it to one’s face, in the open, where everyone could see. He was thoroughly transparent.

  Not that anyone noticed that.

  Eilis had watched more than one CEO go down because they didn’t believe his brazenness, his honesty. They’d been so busy looking for schemes and machinations they never found that they hadn’t seen what Sebastian Taight wanted them to see.

  That still didn’t explain why he was chumming up with her employees.

  He worked his way toward her office without looking up, without acknowledging her presence, by going to this cubicle or that cubicle, talking to people. Eilis suddenly realized that she didn’t know quite how King Midas actually worked. There were lots of tales, lots of bitterness, lots of buyer’s remorse once owners and CEOs had convinced themselves that Sebastian hadn’t done anything for them but collect a fee. But nobody had described the process to her.

  Perhaps she should just be grateful for the knowledge that he wasn’t interested in raiding her
company.

  Finally he disappeared under her mezzanine floor and she could hear his footsteps coming up the stairs. Soon, he had dropped his backpack on the table and joined her at the window again, as he had his first day at HRP. He was silent for a long time, his hands behind his back. When he decided to speak, it took every ounce of control Eilis had built up over the years not to show how startled she was.

  “May I make a suggestion?” he asked politely and she somehow knew that if she said no, he would respect that, but he would remember it.

  I take companies whose ownership and/or management can’t be salvaged.

  “Please.”

  “I suggest you not stand here watching your employees work. It’s nerve-wracking and I don’t think nervous employees are very productive.”

  “I’m not watching them,” she said calmly, hurt that he had found fault with her management style instead of just her books and bad decisions.

  “They don’t know that. All they know is they don’t feel free to check email, instant message, surf the ’net on their breaks or lunch. Whether they do those things on your time is a delicate balance, but they need to know you trust them to do what you hired them to do. By and large, if they’re surfing on your time, they don’t have enough to do and they’re bored, or they don’t like their jobs.”

  Eilis said nothing. This was who she was, how she validated her existence. Watching over what she’d built was part of her morning routine.

  “Obviously,” he said when she remained silent, “it’s up to you.”

  He turned away from the window and strode to the table. Eilis watched him in the reflection in the glass as he took out a laptop, pens, pencils, and a pad of his green engineering paper—

  “We do have office supplies, Mr. Taight,” she said, turning.

  “Sebastian, please. And yes, I’m quite sure you do, thank you.” He sat then and opened his laptop. She watched the screen as he promptly began to check emails, instant message, and surf the ’net—and none of those things were related to business. She waited for him to finish whatever personal business he was taking care of.

  And waited.

  And waited. Half an hour.

  She was outraged.

  “Why are you doing that? You’re supposed to be working!”

  She knew she’d stepped into his trap before she’d finished the question, but couldn’t stop the words from coming out. “Object lesson number one,” he murmured, his stare boring into hers. She kept her face carefully controlled and the rush of blood to her face was hidden, thankfully, by the heavy foundation. She fought to keep her composure.

  “One thing you need to learn,” he continued softly. “There is a breed of intelligent people out there you don’t seem to understand because it’s not your breed. They need constant stimulation. They think so fast that it only takes them fifteen minutes to do something another person would need an hour to do. You gain productivity when you understand, find, and exploit those people to the hilt—and they will thank you for it.”

  Eilis stared at him, not really understanding what he was telling her. She had built an outsourcing human resources company. Did he think he knew more than she?

  “Let me put it another way,” Sebastian continued when she didn’t speak. “I’ll bet a good half of your employees have some sort of personality or mood disorder, and they’re either on medication for it or they’ve developed a bunch of coping mechanisms to deal with it.”

  Horrified, she said, “What?”

  “Attention-deficit disorder. You could throw hyperactive, hypomanic, and possibly mildly bipolar somewhere in there and call it good.”

  “Oh, no, you would not find those kinds of people here,” she declared. “My screening test filters them out.”

  His eyebrow rose. “Really.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to take one of those tests.”

  Only too glad to comply, she went to her office and got one out of her own files and brought it back to him. He looked it over, then began filling in the bubbles. He did it faster than anyone she’d ever seen. Once he was finished, he gave it back to her. “Score that, if you would, please.”

  She called to her assistant Louise and asked her to take it down to the scoring room, then wait for the results and bring them back. Sebastian turned back to his laptop and tapped into her server, as her CIO had granted him access to the wireless network. He said nothing as he perused digitized employee files. Every so often, he said, “Huh.”

  Louise came back and gave the results to Eilis. When she looked down, she gasped—actually gasped.

  She looked at him and he smirked.

  “You flunked this on purpose,” she stated matter-of-factly and laid the test and results on the table.

  “You’d really like to think that, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, I know it.”

  “Eilis, if I did it on purpose, it means your test can be beaten and is therefore worthless. If I didn’t, it means you wouldn’t have hired me. Now, which one would you prefer to think?”

  Eilis didn’t know what to think. She calmly sat and looked her test over, looked at his answers and could verify that they were consistent with the little bit of Sebastian Taight she knew. She swallowed.

  “I wouldn’t have hired you,” she said softly.

  “Object lesson number two. You and your clients are missing out on a lot of good, productive people. Even if you can’t get your clients on board, you would be well served to give people like me a second glance. Give them challenging work they enjoy and lots of it.” He stopped to peruse the employee database again, then, suddenly, “How does your CIO hire programmers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he use the screening test?”

  “No. He refuses to, but he does an excellent job, so I let him do what he wants.”

  “Do you know why he refuses to use it?”

  Eilis looked back at Sebastian’s test then and thought about the collective strangeness of the programmers who worked for HRP. Then she understood what he was saying, now on an even deeper level. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know why.”

  “Object lesson number three. Now,” he said, picking up the employee list, “I need to have the hard copy contracts of your officers and executives.”

  * * * * *

  Eilis Logan had no business in human resources, that was clear to Sebastian. She didn’t know what kind of talent she had working for her. She didn’t know how to delegate effectively. She didn’t know how to match weaknesses and strengths to the workload.

  She couldn’t fire anyone. And because of that, she’d been suckered by a thief.

  On the other hand, she had built a very successful business in spite of her deficiencies. She was doing something right and Sebastian knew where the disconnect was: HRP grew. It just did it very slowly and very inefficiently.

  Well. Sebastian would fix that pronto, with some very well-placed dynamite.

  He sent the digitized officer and executive contracts to his employment lawyer for dissection, along with a detailed list of accomplishments for each, provided by Eilis, her computer files, and by listening to the employees. What they didn’t say was more telling than what they did, and their body language screamed paranoia.

  HR Prerogatives was not a fun place to work and Sebastian was all about having fun with one’s work.

  * * * * *

  33: OPPORTUNITY LOSS

  Sebastian and Knox were clearly startled when Giselle came in the front door from work at one in the morning, hauling the forty-pound bag of textbooks she’d bought that day. They watched her as she dumped them on the table across from Sebastian, then pulled her gun from her waistband and put it on top of her books. Knox sat at the foot of the enormous conference table, the files spread out in front of him covering more than half the length of the table. Banker’s boxes full of papers sat in the two chairs that flanked him, his laptop was open, and his Glock served as a paperweight.

&nbs
p; She went to the fridge. She was not happy and while Knox would mind his own business, it wouldn’t be long before Sebastian started with the third deg—

  “Uh, Giz, it’s Tuesday. Shouldn’t you be going to Kenard’s every night and fucking his brains out? I thought you’d be practically moved out by now.”

  “I’m re-thinking,” she said shortly. Knox raised an eyebrow.

  Sebastian sat back in his chair. “Oh, don’t get all squeamish now that you’re out of bed and back to real life.”

  “I’m not. He’s fixed.”

  Silence. Then, “Well, Giz, there are worse things in the world than not having kids. Like, oh, spending the rest of your life alone with your vibrator.”

  She snarled at him, then dropped into the chair across from him with a package of pepperoni. “Coming from you, that’s rich.”

  “She’s got a point,” Knox muttered. “You want sixteen kids, but you’d settle for eleven.”

  Sebastian grunted.

  Knox sat back then and folded his arms over his chest. “So, uh, this weekend—?”

  “Better than I ever dreamed possible. It’s like the evening couldn’t have turned out any other way. Went to dinner and talked for hours and hours and hours. Man’s brilliant.”

  Sebastian snorted. “So he fucked your mind first.”

  “Oh, yes,” she sighed.

  “What did he have to say to get you in bed?”

  She looked at the wall behind Sebastian, a smile twitching at the edges of her mouth. “‘I want to fuck you, Giselle.’” Both of them stared at her, their mouths open, before they burst out laughing. Sebastian laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. She went on. “I mean, what’s any girl in her right mind gonna say to that? No? Hardly.”

  “Giz, that’s not exactly a normal seduction technique. And coming from a man that big with that face? Trust me. I know from seduction.”

  “Oh, please. You don’t seduce. You overwhelm. How’s Ms. Eilis Logan, by the way? Let me guess. Tall, blonde, rubenesque. You met her a whole week ago and you haven’t railroaded her into bed yet? Or did you decide not to bother getting her to the Den of Iniquity?”