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“There’s a credit card attached to board membership that you can spend on meeting-related stuff. A projector, for example. Or a new case for the dog. Anything utilized in a board meeting would be reimbursed. You really don’t know any of this?”
I shake my head.
“Have you sat on a board?”
“No,” I confess.
“You’ll like it here. Locke Worldwide is like family. Doing the right thing really is the right thing around here.”
That’s the Locke motto, and I find it sweet yet eerie that she acts like it’s true.
Ten minutes later I’m in the glass boardroom with its floor-to-ceiling windows looming over all the world. Henry introduces me around. He doesn’t bother to introduce me to April, who sits in the corner with a laptop at the ready.
People sit down. I settle Smuckers onto my lap. Henry saunters around the table handing out sheets of paper—the agenda.
My belly tightens as he takes his seat across from me, beautiful and sleek in his gray suit.
“I’ve never sat on a board before,” I say. “So I’m wondering, before we start, if there are things I should know. The lay of the land. Maybe, you know, some sort of greetings wagon thingy?”
Henry doesn’t try to hide his annoyance. It lights up his face in a way that maybe pleases me too much. “A greetings wagon thingy?”
“You know, that bag neighbors hang on the doorknob to welcome somebody who just moved in to the neighborhood, and it explains things they should know about neighborhood amenities, like playgrounds, and there are pizza coupons and—”
“I know what greetings wagon means.”
“Smuckers is a bit new at all of this.”
He flicks his gaze to April, who nods quickly. “I’ll set up a courier,” she says.
I nod at April. It took guts to help me. It occurs to me that I could give her a raise. Or can I? I own fifty-one percent of the company so it seems like I should be able to. Yet not. Because while I steer fifty-one percent of this company according to my title as majority shareholder of the steering board, it doesn’t feel like I’m in charge of it at all, any more than riding a bucking bull results in any kind of steering of it.
They go over financials first, and there are a series of motions on pension funds—switching up investment vehicles or something like that. At first I try to keep up, asking for things to be explained, a task that Henry always takes on with his icy blue gaze at me that sends shivers skittering over my skin.
“…the balance sheet is figure two in your packet. We’re unhappy with an underperforming pension fund investment. Are you going to vote with us to make it right?”
“Smuckers concurs,” I say. Like I even get any of it.
I was always good at school, but this must be how somebody who doesn’t speak English feels when they’re plopped down into an English-speaking school. All these new terms. Now and then April, who is apparently the type to pull for the underdog, brightens from over in her corner, like when she thinks I asked a good question.
Ninety minutes tick by. Two hours. I question what I’m doing here, but I remind myself how I don’t let rich people push me around. How Henry had me detained, tried to bully me and pay me off.
Never again.
So I sit up. I get mentally tired of asking questions, but I ask them, then I vote however Henry votes.
Henry did, after all, make the company bigger and stronger, according to the reports I crammed on the way over. He’s fiercely protective of it, too, which I suppose is admirable. As CEO, he handles day-to-day operations, but I get to have the final say on those operations as Kaleb once did.
So, in a way, I’m in charge. I’m steering the ship and he’s my galley slave. The idea of him sweaty and shirtless, straining at the oars, comes to me unbidden. He works out. Maybe weights. No, he’s too cool for that. Henry would go for something sporty, like soccer. Or probably a sport where you hit something. Maybe boxing. Or rugby, all rough and tumble.
“Vicky?” Henry’s staring imperiously at me. “Does Smuckers have a vote?”
“Smuckers is with you,” I say. “On this one, anyway.” I say it like Smuckers might not always vote with him. Smuckers is an independent thinker.
Henry turns to the next page of the agenda, calm and suave, a Gucci menswear god without a care in the world.
They drone on to the next item. I make us take a break, blaming it on Smuckers having to go out, but it’s really me. Ten minutes later, we’re back at it.
The one woman in the meeting, Mandy, seems to be a financial person. Brett is all about business relationships. Henry is the vision and strategy guy, and Kaleb is the corporate bottom line and super-argumentative guy. Other people are heads of various business divisions.
