DEFENSE (42 page)

I laughed at him. “I already think you did a good job.”
The first bite of steak was just as succulent as I knew it was going to be, the meat only lightly seasoned, the quality of the cut speaking for itself. It was how steak was supposed to be done, pink and tender inside, all the flavors melding in my mouth. The green beans were crisp, retaining their rich taste and color, and the perfectly prepared couscous was the best possible way to complement everything else on that plate.

It was a side of Roland I’d never seen before—and probably one that hardly anyone knew about. No one beyond that office door would call him a beast if they knew how well he understood the nuances of a steak.

“Is it good?” he asked worriedly, and I looked over to see that he’d barely touched his own plate.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I declared. “It’s so good that I don’t have words for it. Thank you so much for this.”

Roland gave a tiny smile of satisfaction that made my heart shiver in my chest. Was there no one here to lavish praise on him? He’d been telling me that I’d been doing a good job all this time, but who was on hand to tell him he was doing a good job, too?

“I’d never really had an opportunity to cook before living in Seattle,” I said, smiling. “I’m having a torrid love affair with a slow cooker right now. Have you ever tried one of those? It’s kitchen witchcraft. I can dump a bunch of things in a pot and plug it in, and by the time I get home from work, there’s dinner.”

Roland laughed. “No, I haven’t ever tried a slow cooker. But I’m intrigued. Next time, you can be in charge of dinner.”

It was my turn to giggle. “Can you imagine me plugging a crockpot in at my desk? Nobody would be able to focus on their work as it cooked. That’s the hardest part of a slow cooker, waiting around if you’re not that busy.”

“Are you implying that people aren’t that busy in the office?” he asked, aping a look of consternation. “I’ll have to think of some new project to make sure I’m getting my money’s worth out of everyone. I’ll name it Project Beauty, of course, after the employee who blew the whistle on her worthless coworkers.”

I gave a mock look of horror. “You sure know how to make me the least popular woman in the office.”

We lapsed into a friendly and comfortable silence, both of us noshing on our delicious dinners. I’d been missing this kind of witty banter in my life. And I was happy to share it with Roland, if it made him happy. I could do that, at least. Try to make him happy for as long as I could.

After we polished off every last bite of our meal, I made a move to gather everything up.

“Don’t,” he said, gently snagging my wrist. “Leave it.”

“Don’t you know that the person who doesn’t cook gets to clean up?” I asked, arranging my silverware on the plate before dropping my napkin on top and concealing it all with the plate cover.

“I’ll take it up later,” he said. “Really. It’ll be my pleasure to wash them later and reflect on a nice meal. Don’t worry about it. We have to focus on the task at hand.”

Ah, yes. The task at hand. A phone call to Roland’s contact for expansion in Africa that he was clearly worried about, and that Dan was increasingly smug about. A problem that I had, quite likely, orchestrated. I wasn’t looking forward to that. I would’ve much rather focused on the delicious dinner we’d just shared.

“I’ll get my laptop and notebook,” I said, reluctantly reentering reality and dashing over to my desk.

Roland waited until we were both seated and comfortable in the chairs—I noticed he’d moved the table with the remains of our dinner away—before dialing a number on the phone and putting it on speaker.

“Roland, hello,” Mason Nchia said. I remembered his deep, musical voice well from the conference call, but even I could hear that his tone tonight was decidedly chillier.

“Hello, Mason,” Roland answered. “To what do I owe the pleasure of speaking with you tonight? I have my assistant on hand, too, to keep a record of our correspondence.”

“Not the same assistant whose plans we ruined that night, I hope.”

“The very same.” Roland smiled. “But she’s getting overtime and she’s well fed, so I don’t think she’ll complain.”

I grinned at him and shook my head, my fingers poised over my keyboard. I definitely wasn’t going to record this portion of the conversation for the record.

“The reason I asked you to get in contact with me is because I’m having some misgivings about our plans for the expansion of your business,” Mason said.

Roland frowned. “What kinds of misgivings?”

“The kinds of misgivings that make me question everything,” Mason said.

Roland began drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair, his frown deepening, faced with an unexpected and unwanted complication. “This is distressing to hear,” he said. “I thought our discussions were going very well, and that we were making excellent progress.”

“I don’t know, Roland,” Mason said slowly. “The situation is that we don’t feel very confident in your discretion, at this point.”

“That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Roland said, laughing humorlessly.

“Well, the truth is that there’s an upstart of a company here in Nigeria that has been trying to compete with the properties I own,” Mason said.

“Don’t be afraid of a little competition,” Roland said, looking grim. “What does this have to do with our deal?”

“There’s no deal, first of all,” Mason said. “We’re only in the most preliminary of discussions. And the reason this has to do with us is the upstart president of this upstart company let it be known to me that he was also in talks with Shepard Shipments about expanding into Africa with its help.”

Roland’s agitated drumming on the arm of his chair stopped suddenly. “Mason, I can assure you that this is false.”

“Can you?” he countered. “My rival seemed very sure of himself that he, too, was under consideration for a very lucrative deal via Shepard Shipments.”

“You are my sole contact in Nigeria,” Roland said. “In an effort to be fully transparent, I’ll tell you right now that I’ve made contact with another company in South Africa on the advice of my assistant. This isn’t in direct competition with you, Mason. This will complement the work I’ve asked you to do and benefit all parties involved.”

“So you can tell me—right here and right now—that you haven’t spoken with anyone else in Nigeria?” Mason asked.

“That’s right.”

“And can this assistant also tell me that there hasn’t been contact made with anyone in Nigeria?” My fingers froze over the keyboard, and Roland looked at me.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, not taking his eyes off of me. “My assistant wouldn’t have access to those kinds of contacts.”

“Would your assistant have access to someone who did?”

I was being accused—and rightly so—of sabotage. Mason had hit the nail right on the head.

“It’s impossible, Mason,” Roland said firmly, still watching me as my fingers flew across the keyboard. “Please put it from your mind—and don’t mention it again.”

The warning was right there in his voice, and what should’ve felt like a warm vote of confidence from a man I admired only made the rich food in my stomach make an unfortunate squirm. I wasn’t to be trusted. Couldn’t he sense that? Mason was right in this situation, and somehow, Roland was blind to it.

“I don’t mean to accuse anyone of anything unjustly,” Mason said. “All I know is that a rival has reliable information about a proposal I believed was only for my company.”

“I will get to the bottom of this, I promise you,” Roland said. He didn’t know what he was promising. Getting to the bottom of just what had upset his Nigerian colleague meant that Roland would have to ferret out the deceit sitting right across from him.

“I trust you, Roland, I do,” Mason said. “This came as a shock, honestly. I really don’t know what else to say.”

“I don’t know how this happened, or how this rival thinks that we’re mulling doing business with him,” Roland said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “But that just isn’t the case, and I’ll make every inquiry I have to in order to sort it out. I still want nothing more than to be able to do business with you, Mason.”

“And I you,” Mason answered. “I hope that we can get this sorted out.”

“I assure you that we will.”

They made their goodbyes, and Roland ended the call, clasping his hands together before resting them over his mouth, his eyes narrowed.

He was quiet for a long time, and I devoted myself to typing up an analysis, checking my handwritten notes for emphasis. Of course, I didn’t need to think very hard about why Mason Nchia was suspicious. This was clearly the work of Dan, the reason he’d been so pleased with himself when I told him this conversation was happening. Dan had made a contact in Nigeria and engaged him using Shepard Shipments as a cover. It made Roland look bad, and it made Mason leery of getting into business with someone he couldn’t trust.

But it had been Mason who’d gotten it right. I was the bad apple in the barrel. I was the one who’d told Dan about the conference call I’d sat in on, giving him the blueprint on how to wreak havoc on a deal that still had yet to come to fruition. I was the weak link in this situation, and Roland had to realize it.

And I had to be strong enough to stick my neck out and wait for the ax to fall.

“Beauty?”

Here it was. I paused in my overly busy typing and looked up, meeting a quiet but intense gaze.

“Yes?” My mouth was dry, and I tried to lick my lips to relieve it.

Roland waited for several long seconds before speaking again. “Do you think it might be possible that you mentioned the conference call you sat in on a while back to anyone in the office?”

“I don’t really talk to anyone in the office,” I said. “Besides Sam, the receptionist, really. But it’s not a close friendship. We have lunch sometimes. She’s usually more interested in who’s sleeping with whom than with what Shepard Shipments actually does.”

I flushed, realizing I’d just mentioned sex to Roland.

“So you didn’t mention to her anything about the call,” he said, his face unreadable.

“No,” I confirmed, quickly. Then, something dawned on me. I could tell the truth. Not the whole truth, of course, but some of it. I’d still been innocent when it had happened and could come out of it blameless at best—and naïve at worst.

And maybe, just maybe, I could throw someone else under the bus, for a change.

“I just remembered something,” I said, sounding as uncertain as I felt but knowing that it would help my story.

“What did you remember?”

I found myself wishing that Roland would show some kind of emotion, but he had everything except those burning eyes in check.

“It might be nothing,” I said quickly, “and I don’t want to imply something that’s not there. Maybe you should forget it.”

“Beauty, I need to figure out what went wrong with Nigeria,” he said, his voice patient and even. “Please tell me whatever you can to help me puzzle it out.”

“The day after the conference call, Dan came to my apartment,” I said. “I was supposed to go out to dinner with him that night, but I postponed it.”

“I remember,” Roland said, his voice noticeably tighter.

“Dan asked why you’d kept me so late,” I continued, gripping the edge of my laptop, unable to look directly at Roland anymore, “and I said it was a really important, really exciting conference call with important people.”

Roland didn’t move a muscle or breathe a word.

“He asked me more about it,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, “but I felt weird telling him anything else, especially since he’s the vice president and he didn’t know. I told him I didn’t want to talk business outside of the office, and that was the last of it.”

Except that now, I talked business with Dan every single day outside of the office, telling him the secrets that Roland was trying to keep in order to steer the company in the direction he thought was best.

“I don’t want to cause any drama between you and your brother,” I said, babbling in Roland’s epic silence. “That’s why I didn’t think I should tell you. It’s an awkward situation on many levels. But Dan’s the only one I mentioned anything to about it. I didn’t mean to mess things up. He asked, though, and he is an executive in this company, and I thought he’d know something about it. I was surprised when he didn’t, and I didn’t say anything else.”

“I’m going to tell you an uncomfortable truth or two about Dan,” Roland said, clapping his hands suddenly and looking as if he’d come to a decision about something.

“If you think that’s appropriate,” I said, more than a little hoping he would reconsider.

Roland plunged forward. “My brother is my brother, and nothing will ever change that,” he began. “But I can’t really vouch for the decisions he makes professionally…or personally, for that matter.”

I swallowed hard. “But he’s the vice president of your company.”

“And here’s the second uncomfortable truth,” Roland said. “If he knows what to say, who to say it to, and when to say it, and if he sticks to the script, my brother makes for a decent executive. At the very least, a more effective face of the company than I could ever manage.”