12
We made our way back to my desk and Klaus’s office.
The silence was a little uncomfortable.
They have a saying in sales: the first person to speak, loses.
Imagine a salesman is making a pitch to an undecided customer. When the salesman finishes his presentation and asks for the sale, he has to stop talking and wait for an answer. If he says something before the customer does, it looks like he’s desperate for the sale, and we all know how attractive desperation is. Whereas, if the undecided customer says something first, there’s this unspoken balance of power he’s bought into and acknowledged. Psychologically, he’s given the power over to the salesman, which usually results in the customer signing on the dotted line. Whoever speaks first, loses.
In this scenario, I lost.
“You still haven’t said what’s so important about these files that you have to waste a perfectly good Friday night,” I said, if for no other reason than to get the conversation flowing again.
“Actually, I believe I did,” he grinned.
“Oh, that’s right – you’re thinking about buying the company,” I said sarcastically. “How about a real reason?”
He kept grinning. “Well… if I were Klaus, I might say something about it not being any of your business. But since we’re friends, let me put it this way instead: there are things I’m not at liberty to talk about, but you could say I’m the… advance man on a very important business deal, and I wanted to check out some things before we go through with it.”
“The LMGK buyout,” I realized.
He looked surprised. “You know about that?”
I blushed. I wasn’t supposed to know, but…
“Everybody’s been whispering about it the last few weeks. And I’ve seen a few things.”
“Such as?”
“…such as things I’m not at liberty to talk about.”
He laughed. “Touché.”
“But what I haven’t seen is you before.”
Which was true. In all the hush-hush meetings between Everton and LMGK fat cats, I had never once spied Connor. I definitely would have remembered.
He gestured to himself. “Now you have. In the flesh.”
I looked at the tan chest in the unbuttoned V of his shirt and sighed inwardly.
I wish I could see a lot more of Mr. Connor Brooks’ flesh…
We got to my desk, and I rummaged around for the keys to Klaus’s office.
“Hey – ”
I turned around. I was kind of bent over as I looked for the keys, my rear in the air, and I was half-expecting another comment about my ass.
I had mixed feelings about whether I wanted to hear it or not.
But Connor was instead peering intently at the monitor, which I hadn’t shut off when I went downstairs.
“ – are those the numbers for Teramore?”
Oh CRAP.
“Those are confidential,” I said, my chest tightening with fear.
He gave me a sideways look as he bent over and starting scrolling through the report. “Remember, both Klaus and your CEO said you should give me anything I want – oh, wait, is that an inappropriate remark?”
I narrowed my eyes. “I’ll file it under acceptable innuendos,” I said coolly.
He laughed. “Acceptable innuendoes… that’s good…” he trailed off as he paged through the document.
Then his expression grew dour, and he shook his head as he kept staring at the screen. “Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, shocked.
He looked at me as though trying to make a decision. “Can I trust you with something, Lily?”
“Uh… I guess…?”
“Yes or no. I don’t want this getting back to Klaus,” he said, very seriously.
Ohhhh man…
I was too curious to say ‘no,’ though.
And Klaus was too big of a jackass for me to pretend I had some kind of loyalty to him.
“Yes.”
Connor ran his hand through his hair. “LMGK already did their own appraisal of Teramore. I told – uh, we convinced Teramore to let you guys make a pass at it, too, to see your numbers and compare how Everton would evaluate the situation.”
“Wait – you mean, this is a test for Everton Consulting?” I asked as I pointed at the monitor.
He nodded.
“It’s not an actual job – it’s just a test?”
“Well, Klaus thinks it’s a job, and Teramore will actually pay the bill as though it were an actual job. But yeah, it’s a test.”
“One we didn’t know we were taking.”
“We didn’t want you to go to more ‘trouble than usual.’ Like how the food critic doesn’t want the restaurant to know when he’s visiting or who he really is.”
“But why – ”
And then all the pieces fell into place.
LMGK was considering purchasing Everton.
And this report was part of their due diligence.
“Oh,” I gasped.
Connor saw that I’d figured it out. “Yup.”
Wow. Just… wow.
Klaus didn’t know he was being evaluated. And that evaluation could potentially influence the entire buyout.
I winced. “I guess we didn’t do so well.”
“No, you didn’t. Your appraisal of the market is waaay off.” He glanced over at me hastily. “Not you, of course – Klaus’s.”
“Well, he always does that,” I said in an off-handed way.
Connor frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve proofed all his reports over the last six months. I have to double-check everything, and, well… he tends to tell the client what they want to hear. Not necessarily reality.”
“Wait – wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Do you know about – ”
And for the next five minutes it was like I was defending a doctoral dissertation.
He asked tons of questions about previous business deals Klaus had done. The thing was, Connor knew details that he shouldn’t have been able to know, and he kept throwing out numbers left and right off the top of his head.
I did my best to keep up. I did okay – when you spend as much time as I do babysitting for Klaus, you have to clean up a lot of messes. I remembered some of them particularly well.
At the end, Connor shook his head. “Incredible.”
“What?”
“That you’re an assistant and not a junior executive, at the very least.”
He looked serious.
I blushed. “Well… it’s nothing really, just what I’ve picked up in the last six – ”
“Stop,” he said, almost angry. “Don’t do that. Don’t be modest; don’t lessen your worth like that. You’re an assistant, but you just showed a better grasp of the big picture than a couple of Harvard MBA’s I’ve hired in the last month. Don’t play it off. It’s damn impressive. You’re damn impressive. Don’t ever make yourself out to be any less than what you really are.”
I was about to swoon.
He was looking deep into my eyes as he said all these things… and that scent, that masculine, intoxicating cologne, was making my head swim…
“It’s also a little sad,” he finished up, which jolted me out of my reverie.
“What is?” I asked, taken aback.
“That a woman like you is working for an idiot like Klaus. The situation should be reversed – and if it were, I would hope you’d fire his ass.”
I grinned. “In a New York second.”
He leaned in a little bit. My grin faded as my vision went woozy again.
“I see so much potential in you, Lily… a huge future. Somebody who could really go out there and kick some ass. Smart, capable, funny, charming…”
He paused, and the barest hint of a smile played at the corner of his mouth.
“…beautiful, if it’s not inappropriate to say that again…”
My heart skipped three beats this time.
He leaned in closer.
“It’s too bad you’re such a doofus.” And with that, he broke into a huge grin.
I snapped up straight, totally jerked out of the spell. “What?! I am not!”
And then, because I didn’t really know what he meant, I asked, “…what exactly do you mean by ‘doofus’?”
“Somebody who, either out of a lack of intelligence – which isn’t your problem – or a deficit of self-esteem, sells herself short and puts up with crap she shouldn’t. Only doofuses work for douchebags,” he said, with an expression like I hate to break it to you, kid, but the truth hurts.
Okay, by that definition, I actually am kind of a doofus, but I wasn’t about to admit that to him.
I crossed my arms. “I have to pay rent, I have to eat, and if the only way to do that is to work for an a*shole, sorry, Mr. Bigshot ‘Gonna Buy The Company Someday,’ but I like having a roof over my head and dinner every night. It’s not going to be that way forever. It’s only temporary. Haven’t you ever had to put up with crap, ever, or is your life so charmed that you never had to overcome any setbacks?”
He laughed as he headed towards Klaus’s office. “Alright, alright… so you’re just a little doofus. Come on, let’s go dig up some more evidence of your boss’s douchebaggery.”
13
Connor spent another hour intently examining file after file. He asked for the companies by name, and he seemed to know exactly what he was looking for.
I didn’t do much except look for folders as he sat in Klaus’s designer office chair, his rock ‘n roll boots propped up on Klaus’s desk, and read and read and read.
At the end, he tossed the last file on Klaus’s desk and leaned back, his fingers steepled in front of his face as he thought.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
“I feel like a cappuccino. You feel like a cappuccino?” he asked.
“Uh… I guess I could go get some Starbucks if you want,” I agreed, feeling a little let down. I’d spent the first ten minutes of our acquaintance fielding passes from him, and the last thirty minutes playing Susie Secretary. Now I was demoted to Gidget Gopher.
“Screw that,” he said. “Last time I was here, there was a pretty nice machine up in the boardroom. Want to check it out?”
My heart caught in my chest.
Everton rented the penthouse of the building, on the 27th floor. That was where the Executive VP’s had their offices, and where they held all their meetings with multi-million-dollar clients.
Rather than answer the question, I tried to avoid it. “When were you here?”
“Oh, long before your august tenure at Everton began,” he teased. “So, what do you say?”
“I don’t have access to that.”
He held up a badge. Klaus’s badge. “I found this on your boss’s desk. I’m pretty sure he has access, doesn’t he?”
“I… I don’t think we should do that…”
“Oh, come on, live a little. Besides, you’re supposed to give me anything I want, remember? And right now, I want a cappuccino, and I want your company.”
My heart was thudding against the sides of my ribs.
A cappuccino in the company penthouse with the man of my dreams…
I just knew this was going to come back to bite me in the ass.
“Okay,” I agreed with a tremble in my voice.