Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (33 page)

“Why do you think they aren’t? You seem like a bright enough woman. Figure it out.”

“But you notice one thing?” I asked.

“What?”

“I’m not in Hemi’s office complaining. I’m in yours.”

It was a duel, then, but for once, my eyes didn’t drop. And, yes—I wasn’t exactly alone in this fight. I got that. But if Hemi wanted me here? I needed a job. A real one. “If I have to stay past five,” I said, “or if somebody tells me I did a lousy job and to start over? Too bad. I’m not fragile, I don’t melt, and I don’t break. And if Hemi has a problem with it, he can tell
me.”

To my shock, he smiled. “I have to say—I never got it. Maybe I’m starting to.”

“My appeal,” I said, ignoring the fact that my legs were shaking, and my hands were trying to do the same thing. “You figured it’d be over soon enough. Hemi would get bored with an insipid little mouse like me, or I’d get bored myself. I’d get tired of pretending to be a working woman, because it didn’t turn out to be anything like
Sex and the City
and it was too hard, and I’d go do…whatever you imagine women like me do. You know. Gold-diggers.”

“I’m not even touching that.” He paused for another long minute, and I waited and tried to act calm. “Right,” he finally said. “I don’t know what the hell to do with you. For now…my assistant’s out sick today, we’ve got a major meeting this afternoon, and I need some help getting ready for it. I also need somebody to take notes, and I guess if you can’t be trusted, Hemi’s in more trouble than I am. You can do that for today, while I figure out what poor Godforsaken soul I’m sticking you on. Or I’ll quit myself, because I don’t need this aggravation. One or the other.”

“See?” I asked. “How hard was that?”

“Don’t push it,” he growled, and I may have laughed.

For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, I was actually busy. Too busy to eat more lunch than a salad grabbed at my desk, and I wouldn’t have done that except that my funky stomach insisted that it would rebel otherwise. And it was all great.

And then I went to the meeting, and maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe it was. Turned out I wasn’t a mouse at all.

Hemi

When I walked into the larger of the two conference rooms on the executive floor and saw Hope near the foot of the table…it jolted me.

For one thing, that she was there at all. For another, that she was wearing a yellow dress I hadn’t seen before, one with a wrap-front bodice that fit a little too close and showed a little too much of her upper chest for my comfort.

Or maybe that I didn’t see her dressed for work anymore, or with her laptop open. By the time I got home, she was in her PJs or a dressing gown, letting me know she was ready for me to take them off her, or in workout gear that never failed to give me ideas. And when I left in the morning, she usually wasn’t wearing anything at all. She started out the evening dressed, but she didn’t tend to stay that way, because I liked her naked.

I didn’t know how I’d ever managed to sleep without her nude body pressed back against mine and my arm draped over her bare breasts, keeping her safe, or safely with me, or both. She was my reward, my secret solace in the dark, my lucky charm. What she
wasn’t,
though, was a distraction during a critical meeting.

I didn’t say anything, or acknowledge her, either. I kept my focus, sat down at the head of the table, nodded to Henry at my right, and said, “Go.”

He nodded to Cherise Clairmont in his turn, and she jumped up and started in on it. The Colors of the Earth line, to be unveiled during the Paris show in a few months’ time, and splashed into every bit of print and digital media we could manage after that. And today, I was seeing how Marketing had interpreted the message I’d told them to convey.

I’d turned from the mahogany table, leaning back in the leather armchair to see the screen behind me.

“The Colors of the Earth,” Cherise said, her voice ringing with confidence as she clicked on the first slide, a mockup of a variety of dark-skinned Pacific beauties, all long, dark hair, flower wreaths, and dresses in the vibrant jewel tones of my homeland in draped, figure-flattering cuts and lush, sensual fabrics. Despite myself, my pulse quickened to see my vision brought to life.

As the show went on, though, I became restless. “Looks good,” I interrupted after yet another slide, this one for a magazine feature. A woman, her arm wrapped around a fern tree in the endless, impossible green of the New Zealand bush, the dress she wore a startling contrast in its rich rose hue, the caption
The Colors of the Earth: Escape to Paradise.
“You’ve gone all Pacific, which is good, but you’ve done it with the models, which isn’t. And nothing but the standard look, even if she’s dark.”

“Well, yes,” Henry said. “Hitting the theme hard.”

“We’re meant to be going for wearability,” I said. “Diversity.”

“And we’ve got diversity,” Henry said. “No blondes. Not much European at all here.”

The rest of the table looked concerned, except for Hope, who was just looking at me with interest. She’d been typing all along, but now, she seemed to have forgotten to and was sitting with her hands poised above the keyboard.

“That’s not diversity.” I tried to contain my impatience. “That’s anything but.”

“We have focus-group data.” The voice was confident, cold, and came from a brunette halfway down the table.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Maggie Anderson,” she said. “I ran the groups, and I wrote up the results. The response to the Pacific campaign was by far the most positive of the looks we tested. The data were sent to you, I believe, several weeks ago.”

The table seemed to hold its collective breath, and Hope, I saw at a glance, looked like she was ready to challenge Maggie Anderson to a duel at dawn.

I’d known I shouldn’t have taken that holiday. I didn’t take holidays, because they meant time away I couldn’t afford from the 24/7 control that was necessary to run a corporation. I’d done it, though, I’d dropped a few of the balls I’d normally have been juggling, trusting to others in a way I normally didn’t.

How had that worked out? Not so well, apparently. Time to fix it.

“I realize that,” I said, keeping my voice level. “But I specifically asked for diversity.”

“The data…” Henry said. “It’s unequivocal.”

“I’m not going for safe,” I said. “I’m going for broke. This is a breakout campaign. This is new.”

“And it
is
new,” Maggie-of-the-overconfidence said. “It’s very daring.”

“No,” I said. “It’s more of the same. This is meant to be a campaign for everybody. That’s our theme. For everybody. That every woman is beautiful. You can’t say that and then show one type of woman. I asked for different types. Different races, different heights, even some different shapes. That’s the vision. Do it again. Do it fast.”

“We showed that,” Henry said after a long, tense pause. “To the groups. They were…puzzled.” He nodded to the woman who’d been doing the presentation, and she clicked ahead about ten slides and displayed a graph, and then, after a few seconds, another one. “That was the least successful of the campaigns. It’s too much of a departure.”

More silence. I was rocked, and I was never rocked. If half of my success rode on the wings of my creativity, the other half rode on the ruthlessness of numbers, of data.
Had
I been too convinced of my vision? Too swayed by the promise of an ideal future, by the kind of fluffy-bunny thinking I didn’t indulge in?

I looked around the table and said, “Convince me. Go.”

Henry nodded to Maggie, and she talked, cold but passionate, and then Cherise, the presenter, did, with Henry weighing in. Laying out their case, and it was a strong one. Normally, I’d have been persuaded. The line was one of the best I’d ever designed, the messaging was powerful, and the presentation was absolutely gorgeous. And yet…and yet. There was that niggle at the back of my neck.

I heard them out for ten minutes, letting the conversation flow, the challenges and questions bounce back and forth across the table, and then I said, “Wrap it up,” and Henry did.

“I haven’t heard anything to change my mind,” he said. “Yes, a skincare company or two has produced some well-publicized body diversity campaigns, and they’ve had positive media attention. ‘Fat is beautiful,’ et cetera. But how successful have they been in selling the product? How successful would they be, especially, in selling fashion? Is it revolutionary? Yes, but ask yourself why nobody’s done it. There’s an ideal body type that men want to see and women aspire to, and showing anything less is asking for trouble.”

Maggie jumped in, then, when nobody else would have dared interrupt Henry. “Middle America is fat,” she said. “Nobody at this table is. Why is that? Because it’s ugly. Thinking otherwise is wish fulfillment for unattractive women, and it’s fashion suicide.”

I looked around the group once more. Everybody was nodding or, at best, trying to look neutral, checking to see which way the wind would blow so they could jump. Everybody but Hope. She was staring back at me, looking as if the words were bursting to get out of her mouth and she was barely holding them back.

“Anybody else have a different opinion?” I asked.
Show me what you’ve got,
I told her with my gaze.
Put up or shut up.

She didn’t do what I’d expected. When had she ever? She looked straight back at me and said, “Everybody else has
said
what they think. What do
you
think?”

Maggie made a sound. A snort. A huff. Something.

I said, “That’s not an answer.”

Hope said, “All right, then. What is Te Mana? What do you want it to be? Is it pretty clothes? Because they
are
pretty. They’re gorgeous. Or is it the brand everybody’s going to be talking about this autumn, because it’s something more?”

“So what would you do?” I asked her.

She took a breath. And then she told me. “I’d do what you asked for. I’d listen to your instincts. I’d take it all the way. I’d do plus-sized models, you bet I would, and petite models, too. Asian bodies, sub-Saharan African bodies. I’d do a model who’s over a size twelve, and one who’s four foot eleven and thinks she doesn’t have enough curves, and one with a butt the fashion industry says is way too big. I’d do a model in a wheelchair, or one with a…a prosthetic leg. A disabled veteran, maybe. Or I’d do both. And I’d put them in the show, too.”

“Tokens,” Maggie muttered, and Hope turned on her in a flash, fierce as any Maori.

“What’s the alternative to a token?” she demanded. “I’ll tell you. It’s everybody looking exactly the same. It’s everything
staying
the same. It’s starved teenage girls with their clothes hanging off them like all they are is clothes hangers. It’s women looking at that picture online and thinking, how would this dress look on a real person? How would it look on
me?
And not having a clue, because they can’t
tell.
If the campaign is focused on the clothes being wearable, then
show
that. Call it…call it ‘For Every Body,’ or something. Like a subtitle, or whatever you’d call it.”

There was a faint snort this time from Cherise, the presenter, who was sitting at my left now. If Hope heard it, she didn’t let it stop her. “You can call that tokenism,” she said, “sure you can. Or you can say you have to start somewhere.” She turned to me again. “You’ve named the line ‘The Colors of the Earth.’ You’re saying every woman is beautiful. That’s your vision. Inclusiveness. So
show
that. Build some buzz from the start. Show your vision. Make a
statement.”

“It’s still idealized,” Henry pointed out into the total silence that followed Hope’s outburst. “You won’t find a plus-sized model out there that most men don’t think is still beautiful, because she’s not going to be
that
plus-sized.”

“So?” Hope again. “So it’s idealized. So what? So you show an objectively beautiful woman in a wheelchair. So you show an objectively beautiful woman who weighs a hundred sixty pounds. You’re still saying there’s more than one standard, there’s more than one ideal. You’re still making progress.”

“We’re not trying to make progress,” I said. “We’re trying to sell a product.”

She looked straight at me. Her color was high, her breath was coming hard, and at that moment, we were the only two people in the room. “Then I think,” she said, “that you’d better listen to your own gut about how to do that, because that’s all that matters. I think you’d better dance with the one that brought you. I think you’d better trust your instincts, because your instincts are good, and you know it.”

I stared back at her and knew that I’d been wrong. The source of my success wasn’t fifty percent design and fifty percent data. The niggle at the back of my neck figured in there, too. Impossible to quantify, and impossible to ignore. And just now, it was tingling hard. Or maybe that was something else.

“Right,” I said, then told Henry, “We’ll talk in my office. One hour.”

He nodded, and I could read his expression.
It’s going to mean overtime, and lots of it.
And I looked back at him and sent my own message.
I don’t care.
We’re going to do it again until we get it right. We’re going to do it my way.