AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jack’s skin began to prickle. He downed the rest of his drink in one gulp.
“You want another?”
He nodded, then waited until her back was turned and she was pouring the drink to say, “The thing is, I can’t handle it by myself. I have dyscalculia.” She froze, immobilized with one hand holding the water bottle and the other unscrewing the lid. “It’s a learning disability,” he added. “Like dyslexia for numbers.”
She resumed her task, and when she came back bearing his drink, she didn’t look disgusted. She didn’t look any different than she ever did. “I see the problem.”
“So will you do it?”
“I can’t just impersonate a CFO.”
“First of all, it’s not like it’s a job that comes with a regulatory stamp—it’s not like impersonating a cop. If I say you’re my CFO, you’re my CFO.” When she started to argue, he held up his hand. “But anyway, we won’t use that title. Wexler knows Carl—the betraying asshole is named Carl, by the way—so he’ll expect to see him. I’ll concoct an excuse for Carl and call you my senior director of finance or something. I just need someone to pinch hit on the financial side of things. But just as important, Wexler can’t know there’s anything untoward happening at my company or he’ll never sell to me. So I can’t just have no one on the finance side there, or he’ll get suspicious.”
“So this explains why you haven’t called the cops on him yet. CFO swindling Winter Enterprises. That would be big news, right?”
That was certainly part of it—he wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize the Wexler deal, even if it meant letting Carl rip him off a little longer than was strictly necessary. “In part. But also, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what he did before I call in the cavalry. I don’t want a swarm of accountants and cops descending and asking me all this stuff that I…”
“That you have trouble understanding.”
He nodded. Not sure how he was going to solve that. He probably wasn’t—more likely that he was just going to have to call the cops and admit that he had no idea what kind of damage Carl had done. But one problem at a time. First, the Wexler deal.
She looked thoughtful. “Why would I do this? It seems kind of dishonest somehow.”
“It’s not! I’m free to hire whomever I want to do whatever tasks I want them to do. I want to hire you to do this. And you would do this because I will pay you—well.”
“How much?”
“Well, I figure I’d pay a consultant, say, five hundred bucks an hour. The trip will take seventy-two hours, so that’s roughly thirty-six grand.” She choked in the middle of a sip, and he grinned. “You can either invoice based on that hourly rate, or we can agree on a flat thirty-six.”
“If I’m going to do this, I have to know what I’m talking about. I’ll want to look at your financials. I’ll want to know what you know about Wexler. I’ll need to learn everything I can about both companies to get up to speed.”
Ha! Smart girl. “Fifty grand.”
She did a poor job masking her shock. “You are going to pay me fifty thousand dollars to pose as your director of finance, or whatever, and try to get this guy Wexler to sell you his company? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“This is how capitalism works. I have money. I want to buy something—in this case, it’s a set of skills that I don’t possess. I pay what the seller and I agree it’s worth. It’s no different than someone buying a drink at Edward’s.” He refrained from telling her that it wasn’t a lot of money to him. “And I’ll tell you what, if we get the deal done, there will be a bonus.” She waved off the idea, which annoyed him. “This deal is worth a lot of money, Cassie. Don’t sell yourself short.”
“Does your CFO know about your dyscalculia?”
He blinked, taking a moment to catch up to the unexpected question. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, but given how intensely she was studying his face, she seemed to really care about the answer. “Yes,” he said, swallowing the bitter saliva that flooded his mouth. “We were friends from university. I was a literature major, if you can believe it. Carl was a friend of my roommate. He was always playing the stock market, but he never did very well. I gave him some advice one day, and we figured out pretty quickly that we made a good team. I could pick the companies, and he was good with the logistics of the money. Things kind of snowballed from there. He always covered for me—or so I thought. He and my VP are the only ones at the company who know about me.”
