The Real Deal (6 page)
Authors: Lucy Monroe
He nodded, already headed toward the nearest telephone.
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Amanda went back to the great room after Jillian's soap opera ended, expecting to find Simon waiting for her because he'd never come back to Jacob's quarters.
The room was empty.
Should she go looking for him?
Maybe he was still on the phone. She didn't want to interrupt and surely he knew the show was over by now.
Her gaze moved to the huge wall of windows. The water of the sound was different than the ocean in Southern California. Even in the bright sunlight of late June it looked like smoked glass rather than the shimmering blue she was used to. Simon had a dock that extended over fifty feet out into the water and a sailing yacht moored at the end.
It didn't look like a modern vessel, which surprised her. She was familiar with the sleek lines of the latest boating designs since her condo was located on the bay above an exclusive marina. Simon's yacht looked like something from a 1940s movie. Even from the distance, its dark wood exterior shone with the gloss of a meticulous finish.
As her gaze skimmed the glass wall, she noticed deck furniture to her right. A pitcher of what looked like ice tea and two glasses sat on the cedar table. Presumably, they were going to continue their meeting out on the deck that extended the length of the house. She picked her briefcase up from where she'd left it earlier and looked for a way outside.
Just like everything about Simon Brant, the exit was cleverly concealed. It took her several minutes before she found the small lever that, once pressed, sent a door-size piece of glass sliding to the right. She carried her briefcase to the table and set it on one of the empty chairs. Since Simon was not yet there, she didn't sit down but went to lean against the rail, breathing in the warm, salty air.
A small breeze blew across her face, and she closed her eyes, reveling in both the warmth of the sun on her skin and the smell of air free of Southern California smog. She couldn't remember the last time she'd allowed herself the luxury of stopping and just
being
.
being
.
Her conscience reminded her that she could be at the table setting up her facts and figures to present to Simon, but for once, she ignored the inner prompting.
This felt too good.
The quiet was broken only by the distant chatter of seagulls.
A strange inertia settled over her body as if the overwhelming pace she'd been keeping for the past two years had caught up with her all at once. She'd lived for her job since walking out on Lance. Why that sparked a sense of discontent at this particular moment, she could not understand.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes and forced herself to turn back toward the table. She flicked a look at her watch and was shocked to see she'd stood at the deck rail for half an hour.
Where was Simon?
She scanned the great room, but it was empty.
No doubt Jacob knew where to find his boss. She'd have to locate the cranky housekeeper and ask him what was going on.
Luckily she found him in the kitchen. She hadn't really wanted to wander around the huge house trying to find one of the two men who lived there.
“Jacob, do you know where Simon is? I've been waiting on the deck for him since Jillian's show ended.”
Jacob turned from where he was doing something at the sink. “The boss went back to his lab.”
“But there's a pitcher of ice tea with two glasses on the deck.” They were supposed to talk about the merger.
Jacob nodded. “Told me to put it there.”
“But he didn't come out.”
“Never does. Not once he gets that look in his eyes and goes off to his lab. Be lucky to see him again today. Probably won't.”
“Do you mean he won't be coming out of the lab again this afternoon?” It was the experience at Eric's office all over again. He'd just walked away.
She had an urge to pound on the door to his lab and insist on him coming out and listening to her, but if she got militant, how receptive would he be to what she had to say?
“Not likely.”
“You don't think he'll come out again today?” she asked, just to clarify.
“That's what I said, ain't it?”
“Couldn't you knock and remind him I'm here?”
“Wouldn't do no good. He don't hear when he's thinking.”
She had some ideas on how to get Simon's attention, but since it had never been her goal in life to get arrested, she put them in the back of her mind.
“When do you expect him to come out of his lab? Surely he has to eat sometime.”
“Has a kitchen up there, but he comes out to exercise.”
Remembering Simon's well-developed muscle tone, she had no problem believing that even if he didn't put his work aside to eat regular meals, he did in order to work out. No one got muscles like those by default. “When does he exercise?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On when he wants to.”
“I see.” What she saw was that Jacob wasn't going to cooperate with her and her patience was a second away from disappearing altogether. “Will you please give your employer a message from me?”
“That's my job.”
“Oh, really? Somehow I thought your job was to drive Simon's visitors crazy enough so that they wouldn't come back. Then he can live as a total recluse.” The sarcastic words just tripped off her tongue and she wasn't even slightly apologetic.
Jacob had the gall to look offended. “My company manners may not be what they once were, but I don't try to chase off Simon's friends.”
“Merely irritating business associates he has no desire to talk to in the first place. Does he pay you a bonus for your efforts, or do you consider it one of the perks of the job?”
“The boss didn't tell me to try to run you off.”
She wasn't buying it. And she wasn't sticking around for more of Jacob's annoying half-answers. Eric Brant wanted this merger too. He could convince his cousin to meet her. She spun on her heel and marched out of the kitchen.
After retrieving her briefcase from the deck, she had her hand on the front door handle when Jacob came into the entry hall. “There's no need for you to leave all in a huff, Ms. Zachary.”
“I'm not in a huff. I'm cutting my losses.”
“You wanted to leave the boss a message.”
“There really isn't any point, is there? He'll just ignore it as effectively as he's managed to ignore me.”
Only he hadn't ignored her over lunch, or during Jillian's show. He'd focused his considerable concentration on her and their discussion, which made his subsequent snub feel personal. She was used to male rejection. It wasn't something she would probably ever take in stride, but she had learned not to set herself up for more of the same.
She turned the doorknob. “Good-bye, Jacob.”
“Wait.”
The command shocked her into stopping. Not only in the fact that the irascible man was actually encouraging her to stay, but also by the authoritative tone of his voice. “What?”
“He doesn't mean anything by it. He's a genius.”
“So I'd heard.” She found it very difficult to believe Jacob was defending Simon's actions to her, as if her opinion mattered.
“He's not ignoring you so much as he's so focused on the complexities going through his mind, he's not even peripherally aware of what is happening around him.”
“What happened to your bad grammar?”
Jacob's skin took on an interesting burnt hue. “I talk the way I want to.”
She let that go. Jacob, she was discovering, was an entity unto himself. “You don't think it was on purpose?” she asked, referring to Simon's second abandonment.
“No, Ms. Zachary. The boss doesn't mean to do it. It's just the way he is.”
“No wonder he doesn't have a lot of friends.” She was making an assumption based on Simon's lifestyle, but Jacob sighed.
“He's spent his whole life out of step with his peer group one way or another. The boy is more comfortable experimenting in his lab than making friends. I think he finds his computers easier companions than people.”
The boss had become the boy and she realized the relationship between Simon and Jacob was more multifaceted than it appeared on the surface.
“If I leave him a message to call, do you think he will?” The prospect of talking to Simon on the phone and seeing him again, even after his habit of disappearing without a word, was much too appealing.
“Yes.”
She gave Jacob her cell phone number as well as the name of her hotel and room number. He wrote them down and she left.
The ferry ride back to the mainland passed quickly as she tried to strategize a foolproof plan for presenting the proposal to Simon. Unfortunately, by the time she reached her hotel over an hour later, she was no closer to a solution.
Both Jacob and Eric had made a point of telling her how wrapped up in a new project Simon could become. He was evidently in full new-project-mode now and she couldn't help thinking that any hope of presenting the merger to him in its entirety was doomed from the outset.
When she got back to her hotel room, there was a message from her manager requesting she call him. She wasn't surprised. She'd had to tell him about the glitch with Simon Brant when her last meeting with Brant Computer's president did not end in a concrete step toward the merger.
“How did Simon Brant respond to the proposal?”
“He didn't.”
“What do you mean, he didn't? Is he a deep player, keeping his thoughts close to his chest?”
“He's deep all right, but he didn't express any reaction because I didn't get a chance to present the benefits of the merger to him.”
“I thought you were meeting with him this afternoon.”
“So did I. He didn't want to discuss business over lunch and afterward he disappeared into his lab.”
“Don't tell me you couldn't steer the direction around to the merger over lunch. It was a business meeting.”
“Simon doesn't see business in the same light most people do. He wanted to get to know me over lunch. He's not comfortable doing business with someone he doesn't know.”
Her boss snorted. “And you went along with that? This is no time to decide to let your ice queen persona melt and start pursuing a personal agenda on company time.”
“I am pursuing Extant Corporation's agenda to the best of my ability.” The ice queen crack hurt, particularly because it wasn't true. She wasn't an ice sculpture, just a flawed one. “I'm not sure trying to convince Simon to support the merger is a practical direction to take right now.”
“I talked to Eric Brant and according to him, we need his cousin's cooperation, or the deal is dead in the water. Or at least close enough to justify calling in the coroner.” The fact that her boss and Eric had been talking took her aback. She'd been under the impression she was on her own during the preliminary negotiations. Her stomach knotted at the idea that she might be judged and found wanting as a negotiator.
She explained about Simon's preoccupation with his current project. “Even his housekeeper warned me that trying to pin Simon down in one place long enough to hear the presentation is going to be difficult.”
“I don't care if you have to camp out on his doorstep until you get him to listen to you. We need that man's cooperation for this deal to go through. If you don't think you can get it, maybe I'll have to come up there and take over the negotiations.”
The knots in her stomach drew tighter until she felt in desperate need for an antacid tablet. “I can handle it, Daniel.”
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