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“Fact: you yourself know absolutely nothing about marketing,” I told him. “Sure, maybe you’ve hired some halfway decent people, but they’re nowhere near the caliber of people I have working for me. And do you know why that is?”
He coughed once, then shook his head. “No. Why?”
“Because I built this company from scratch,” I said angrily. “I worked hard for it, I shed blood for it, and I’ve vetted every single one of the people that are here.”
Aric returned just then with a bottle of water. It was one of the warm, room-temperature ones from the storage room, rather than a cold one from one of the mini-fridges.
It’s the little victories that tide you over, Aric had once told me.
“Now you might’ve swayed Legendary with some flashy sales pitch,” I went on, “and the promise of having a west-coast presence. But the second you can’t produce for them they’ll see right through your bullshit. They’ll drop you just as fast as they dropped me, only they won’t even fulfill their existing contracts because they owe you no loyalty.” I leaned back and shrugged. “In fact, they might even sue you for misrepresentation, or at the very least take back any deposits they’ve already given you.”
I don’t know if it was apprehension I sensed, but there was definitely doubt creeping in. In just a minute or two, the man’s whole demeanor had changed. The confidence and swagger he’d walked in here with had been utterly shattered.
“You’re going to lose them,” I finished, twisting the knife, “and there’s nothing you can do about it. So be prepared.”
John James finally stood up. Red-faced and practically shaking, he set the water bottle down on my desk and looked at me pointedly.
“So you think you’re getting Legendary back?” he sneered. “Is that your master plan?”
Once again I delivered a shrug. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
The man snorted, turned, then glared at Aric, who stood silently in the corner.
“If they come my way again, I’m sure I’ll take them back,” I reasoned. “But not at the old rates. Not at the ‘we’ve been loyal partners forever’ rates, because now I know their loyalty is fleeting.”
My own anger began boiling up inside me. Not at John James, because now I could see the CEO of Skyline was nothing more than a kid playing grown-up with other people’s lives.
No, I was more mad at Robert Valentine. Or more specifically, the people above him who actually thought they’d save money by letting this infant destroy their brand.
“We’ll talk again soon,” said my uninvited guest, on the way out of my office. “Maybe sooner than you think, oh she-who-knows-everything.”
He said the last part with such a sneer of contempt I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh I don’t knoweverything,” I told him. “Not even close. But James?”
He slowed contemplatively, then eventually stopped to turn around in the glass hallway.
“One thing I do know is that you’ll never,everbuy out my company.”
Forty-Four
GAGE
The call came at the worst possible time, as it almost always did. I was face-down, spread eagle in bed. Still woozy from all the alcohol of the previous night, as the three of us had gone out to cut loose for a little while.
Cut loose… and try to forget abouther.
It wasn’t that we wanted to forget about her either — just the opposite, in fact. It was more like we had to get her out of our minds for a while. Juliana had us preoccupied with all kinds of crazy thoughts, but in the few weeks since she’d gone back to New York, she still hadn’t given us an answer.
Was there really an answer to give?
If you asked Maverick, we’d scared her away. Devyn wasn’t so sure though, and neither was I. Yes, what we’d suggested had been radical, unbelievable, totally out there. Society-wise, maybe it was even groundbreakingly fucked up. In the end though, I didn’t care. And that’s because we’d been genuine. We’d told the truth.
“Get up.”
I groaned, turning sideways toward the doorway. The shape of Maverick stood silhouetted against the light coming from the hall.
“They’ll be here in eight minutes.”
