Executive Perks (3 page)

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, taking 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 elevator, 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…

Virginia shook herself from her reverie. “Absurd, completely absurd!” she said aloud to nobody. What was the matter with her? It must be the wine.

She put down her wine glass and flicked open her laptop, never far from hand. She’d received all the reports on the corporate raider and his targets and his business approach. Now she was in the mood for a little more down to earth snooping.

She ran a Google search on him.

The first entry that came up didn’t exactly help with that sparking thing. The photo of Winston, relaxed and smiling at some woman who Virginia barely saw, was mesmerizing. What was it? Oh, he was smiling. That was it. And not just the snide quirk of his lips she had seen today as he ribbed her. On the contrary, the smile in the photo was relaxed, confident…nice.

She flicked on another photo, balancing the laptop on her lap. This time it was of a much younger Aaron Winston. The caption, involving the words shark and attack, was not very complimentary, like most of his publicity, but the photo was appealing. God, how old was he in it? She looked for a dateline. It was a decade and a half ago. He wasn’t much more than a baby. She read the name of his target that time, but instead of sympathizing with the management, as she usually did, she found herself wondering how so young a man had pulled off so big a transaction. Scanning the details of the accompanying write-up, part of the answer was buried in the fourth paragraph with an explanation of a corporate maneuver that was as clever as it was ruthless. The photo drew her eyes back. He didn’t look much older than Mindy and Missy, her younger twin sisters, who at this time in their lives were worrying about no more than what grade they may get on a lit final or who they might go out with on a Friday night, and usually more about the latter than the former.

The third Google entry, being as how it involved a paparazzi photo of him sans shirt sailing on a yacht with a topless woman, prompted her to slam the computer shut. Damn, why the hell did that infuriating man have to be such a heart-throb?