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‘Oversight’ being our polite term for ‘sending in a guy at the last second to hog all the credit.’
He sighed a deeply regretful sigh that made me want to strangle him. “Consumer confidence is our game, Ally. I can’t change the way we do business just because it hurts your feelings.”
Typical. Running around at Chuck’s beck and call whenever he threw a little hissy fit was just the way we did business but when I calmly stated my dislike for it, it was just ‘hurt feelings.’
“Of course,” I said, gritting my teeth. “And how are we planning on mollifying Chuck’s concerns?”
“Knew you’d be on board,” he said placidly, even though I hadn’t quite climbed onto said board just yet. Like most people at the company, he liked to as**sume reality was the way he wanted it to be, and just wait for it to conform. “I’d like Chad and his colleagues to come by and lend a hand,” he continued. “That group has some real unity of vision, you know, and they’ve been chomping at the bit to really prove their stuff.”
I’d been chomping at the bit for years, and all it had ever gotten me was patronizing lectures about how overly ambitious women came off as bitches and lost contracts.
“Sandra and Hunter and I have all the vision we can handle right now,” I said, going for a light and breezy tone that didn’t communicate, and I will let the Douchebros’ vision come to light only over my dead body.
“Sounds like you could use a little help corralling it, then.”
“I as**sure you, sir, we’ve got everything under control.”
“Now, now, missy,” he said, in what I had to as**sume was the same voice he used when his granddaughter wanted another scoop on her ice cream cone. “The client comes first, remember? We have to make him feel secure.”
“Hunter feels so secure in this he’s been calling in favors to get us the best sizzle reel possible,” I pointed out. “And last time I checked, he was the client, not Chuck.”
This was venturing dangerously close to sass territory that normally would have earned me a reprimand, but today I just got an indulgent chuckle of the ‘I’m about to impart some wisdom to this innocent na?ve sweet summer child’ variety.
“That he is. For now.”
I felt my hackles rise. “What are you saying?”
“Read the changes in the sky, Ally,” he said, sounding especially pleased with himself for the touch of metaphor. “Stormy weather’s coming, and if we want to keep this contract we can’t afford to back the wrong horse.”
I resisted pointing out that he’d changed metaphors mid-race. “Sir, with all due respect, the direction they want to take this in is completely antithetical to—”
“Allison, I’ve made my decision and that’s final.”
His voice had lost all its fake cheerfulness, and was grim and final and set in stone. And there was nothing I could do.
“At least talk to them,” he went on, his voice going back to its normal tone as he returned to pretending that I had a choice in the matter. “They’ll all be at that liquor industry event in the city, you know, the awards one?”
Message received. Fine. I would play nice as long as they did. Which meant that science would probably need to invent a new, shorter unit of time.
Especially since my temper was already going to be on a hair-trigger—Hunter was bringing Paige to that event. I’d planned to skip it for precisely that reason, but now it seemed I had no choice.
“All right, sir.” I tried not to sound as sour as a lemon. “I’ll chat them up for sure.”
“Glad to hear you’re still a team player,” he said, and after a few more minutes of polite chit-chat—essential both to politeness and to maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t just railroaded me—we said our goodbyes.
I stared at the phone, the full implications just starting to sink in.
Fuck.
#
“Martha!”
Martha jumped, and tried to hide the book she was reading under a pillow, though not before I got a good look at the cover: some kind of steamy sci-fi romance, with muscular Amazonians in space-suits surrounded by lithe, oiled, barely-clad men.
Well, that was one fetish.
“Ally Bo-Bally!” Martha said, trying to hide her flush. “What can a lady of the world such as myself do for you?”
“A huge favor,” I admitted. “My boss just steam-rollered me into attending this big social function—”
“And you need to check a boy-toy out of my man-harem to accompany you? Good thing for you I keep a Rolodex for these very occasions.”
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