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“You’ll need a lawyer to sign the contract as well, just a legality to ensure you weren’t coerced into signing it. Call our assistant when it’s done and we’ll have a courier come pick it up. Once we have it back, we’ll arrange a wire transfer to your nominated account of the entire amount the same day.”
She stood, and I followed suit. “We’ll arrange for the stock to be picked up from your warehouse at the end of the week. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Lloyd.”
We headed for the door, the meeting over, and waited until he followed us, contract tucked into his black folder. We shook his hand and put him on the next elevator down to the lobby before taking the stairs up one floor to where our office was located.
Marian stood when she saw us. Our personal assistant had been with us from the beginning, taking as big a chance on us as we had on her. In her late forties at the time, she’d just divorced the man she’d been married to for over twenty years after she’d caught him fucking his secretary, leaving her to raise her two teenage daughters alone.
What the hell was wrong with some men? They had these beautiful women in their lives and couldn’t stop themselves sticking their dicks in someone else.
Ten years on, she’d stuck with us as our businesses had grown and was as close to family as we had. Like a mother hen, she made sure we ate properly and took time out for ourselves so we wouldn’t burn out.
“How did it go?”
Emilia held up a fist and Marian bumped it with her own. “He signed the contract on the spot.”
“He took the seventy-five thousand?”
“We only offered him forty.” I gave her a grin. “He tried to extort us for two hundred grand, so that cost him thirty-five.”
Marian laughed and shook her head. “You two are ruthless and I love it.” She picked up two separate piles of small pink notes and handed one to each of us. “Your messages from this morning.” We’d gone straight into this meeting with Lloyd from the one we’d had before it, so had been away for a couple of hours.
Emilia followed me through the door which led to my office and parked herself in one of the chairs with a sigh. We shared this side of the floor, our offices separated only by a glass wall with a door we pretty much always kept open unless we needed some privacy.
A private bathroom and dressing room ran along the wall facing north, and directly opposite our offices was a private meeting room, where we met our company heads and their assistant managers every Monday morning, and the elevator. A reception area sat along the wall facing south, and Marian’s desk was in front of our offices.
“That went easier than I thought.”
I chuckled at her statement. “You’re not wrong. He looked like he was going to piss himself when you delivered the smackdown.”
She gave me a small smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “He’s a worm. He’ll probably blow the forty thousand in two months.”
“Probably. And even if we sell the vibrators for eighty bucks a piece, that’s still a gross of a hundred and sixty thousand from that product alone.”
Emilia studied me carefully across the large, polished wood desk. “You think we should undercut his pricing? He’s selling at one hundred just fine.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Right, but if we put it on sale for eighty, we’ll likely sell all two thousand units within a month and can buy ten thousand more as soon as we have the signed contract from Lloyd.”
“Then we jack the price back up to a hundred.”
“Exactly.”
Her mouth twitched and the first genuine smile I’d seen in days made the corners curl up. “I like the way you think, Mr. Bennett.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Miss Quinn.”
We flicked through our messages and I couldn’t miss the shaky sigh my business partner let out. My head came up to look at her. “What’s wrong, Em?”
She plucked out four pieces of paper and threw them on my desk. I turned the one closest to me around so I could read it, and my face darkened when I saw the name Marian had written on it.
Patrick fucking Hobbs. The asshole Emilia had dumped when she’d found out he’d been caught on camera fucking a woman at our nightclub.
He’d been stupid enough to do it right in front of a security camera, one he knew was there. He’d obviously been too drunk to remember or care. One of Connor’s team had recognized Patrick on the feed and had notified his boss, who in turn had called me on Sunday.
It had been up to me to break the news to Emilia, and as much as I’d grown to dislike Patrick and his increasing possessiveness over my best friend, it still broke my heart to see her so fucking hurt and sad. I had every intention of punching him in the throat the next time I saw him, the prick.
I’d had his name put on the blacklist for both the nightclub and the strip club, and he’d been removed from all our invitation and mailing lists. He wouldn’t get anywhere near Emilia again, and I’d given permission to our entire security team to use physical force to keep him away if necessary.
Emilia had called him in my presence on Sunday afternoon, after I’d spent hours comforting her. She’d told him it was over and she’d seen the security footage. She hadn’t, in truth, because she hadn’t wanted to, but I’d watched it that night after Connor sent it to my personal email address at my request.
