AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That bad, huh?” he asked, following me.
Except for seeing Amy there, the meeting had been a disaster. She’d been the one bright spot.
I strode into my office, with him in my wake.
He just didn't get how sometimes I didn't want him to follow me around.
I closed the office door. I didn't relish announcing the outcome of the meeting to the world. “It was a waste of time. They aren’t at all interested in selling.”
He sat down in the chair opposite my desk as I took my seat. “Did you mention the higher valuation?”
I pulled the paper they’d given me out of my pocket. “Do I look stupid to you? Of course I did. But you read them all wrong. There is no amount of money that's going to budge those women.”
I wasn't certain the statement was entirely true, but it was true enough for our purposes. There was noreasonableamount of money that would budge them, in my estimation. I'd seen this before——entrepreneurs who couldn't be separated from their companies any more easily than they could be separated from their children.
“I’m going to have another go at them tomorrow, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope,” I told him.
He sat back in his chair. “So it's on to Plan B, I guess?”
Plan B meant approaching Hubricht Schmulian of Springbok Foods again, and it hadn't gone so well the first time we’d attempted it.
“You remember Springbok?” he asked.
“How could I forget?” I shot back.
I’d gotten my own front-page spread in the local tabloid right after the meeting, which had blown the whole deal. Hubricht Schmulian was pickier than most——well, pickier than anyone I’d ever met, when considering who he might sell his business to.
“It just means you have to put on the charm offensive,” Josh said.
“That's sort of an understatement, isn't it?”
“Well, maybe he's cooled off a bit. You haven't exactly been front-page news lately.”
The tabloid story had been about how I’d been seen at three different clubs over the course of a weekend, with three different women, of course. I wasn't exactly the stable family man Hubricht Schmulian wanted to entrust his business to.
I appreciated how he treated his employees as family. We tried to do the same here at Quigley-Fulton, just perhaps not with his intensity. He was also a bit of a moralist. Schmulian viewed my lifestyle with more than a smidgen of disdain.
I didn't see the problem with entertaining multiple women, so long as I treated them well and they enjoyed themselves. He didn't agree.
Josh left my office, and I sat my head down on the desk after closing the door he’d left open.
A bit later I heard a commotion outside.
“But I need to see him,” the woman said——a voice I couldn’t place, muffled by the door.
Veronica was in protect-the-boss mode and refusing to let her in.
“But it can’t wait,” the woman tried to explain.
I rushed to the door and opened it to find Mirabella from payroll, a woman I hadn’t had much interaction with.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Quigley, I tried to explain——” Veronica said.
I stopped her mid-sentence with an upraised hand. “Mirabella, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes, Mr. Quigley. It’ll just take a minute, I promise.”
I motioned for her to enter the office. “Certainly. No problem. Thank you, Veronica. But this is okay.”
