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“I don’t pay you millions to be meek, Bernard. What’s going on?” Montgomery demanded, pulling a yellow pad from his briefcase and noting some thoughts that Bernard’s agenda had brought to mind.
“Actually that’s my question for you. What is going on withyou?” Bernard asked.
“Same as our last meeting. Finalizing some personal business in the US,” he replied.
“Our last meeting was in August,” Bernard noted.
“Impossible,” Montgomery snapped, but Bernard was never wrong. “Doesn’t matter. My reasons are my own.”
“It’s more than personal. You haven’t been replying to our emails. Every conference call you seem…unprepared,” Bernard said, his tone pinched and polite.
Montgomery gripped his pen tightly. Bernard was right, but it wasn’t in Montgomery’s DNA to admit he’d been unfocused—especially with business, which had come first from his point of inception. It had shifted into high gear when his father made him a lowly unit manager the day he turned eighteen.
“Out with it, Bernard. Do I have a board mutiny on my hands?” Montgomery asked in a clipped tone. Nothing like a little righteous indignation to snap the troops back in line.
“In a word, yes,” Bernard agreed. “We’ve been talking—”
“Wer hat geredet?” Montgomery bit out. “Who’s been talking?”
“Fischer, Hoffman, myself…and Bauer,” Bernard replied, his mouth a thin line.
Bauer. Fuck. Bauer was management board chair.
Bauer was the best chair Meyer Communications had ever had. He always put the company first, never put up with any director backbiting, and never minced words. He also never got involved unless he felt something was bad for the company. He’d done that only once, when they’d contemplated a merger with a Swiss manufacturer. Bauer had been right to voice his opinion.
And now he seemed to be doing it again.
“What has Bauer been saying?” Montgomery asked.
“He’s saying it might not be the right time to take Meyer Communications global.”
“And why not?”
“Because you have a lot on your plate. A lot of personal things you don’t seem to be able to put to rest,” Bernard explained.
Montgomery leaned back in the office chair.He’s saying I can’t handle my personal life,he mused, feeling the familiar rage rising inside. He’d been a volcano of emotion since deciding to divorce Hartley.
No, since deciding to make it impossible for Hartley to want to stay married to him. A subtle difference, but a difference all the same.
He leaned forward, his knees widening and butting against those delicate desk legs. Those fucking ornate, ridiculous twigs he wanted to snap in two with his hands and—
Breathe, he chanted inwardly. He focused on the pen he held, willing the molten emotion to recede. After a few seconds, it did.
“Do you feel I have too much on my plate?” he asked.
“Yes,” Bernard said without needing to soften the reply. “For the past months you’ve been distant. I thought you might have lost your edge, that your wife—”
“You thought? Past tense?” he asked, interrupting Bernard before he could say Hartley’s name.
An image came to mind, a delicate bird he held in his hands, protecting it from danger even as it pecked hard enough to leave bloody gouges.
That was how he saw Hartley: a problem that didn’t have a conventional solution. The simplest answer would be to release it. Instead, his hands just curled around it more tightly.
“Ithoughtyou might have lost your edge,” Bernard reiterated. He laced his fingers together and leaned closer to his camera. “Now I know it.”
“And how did you come to this knowledge?” he asked.
“Because we sent you the latest hardware and you didn’t reply. You didn’t even acknowledge you’d received it. What did you tell me once? That it made you ‘hornier than a Porn Hub user’ to review our latest technology. You almost fired one of our staff when a courier didn’t deliver a prototype satellite switch to you in South Carolina fast enough,” Bernard said. “What’s happened to you?”
