Chapter 14

Crissy

I had to admit, I was nervous about seeing Grant again. As I fluffed my hair in the mirror of my bathroom, I tried to make sure everything was in place. This morning, I didn’t wake up with the same zest for teasing him. I put on navy blue slacks and paired them with a royal blue blouse that covered all the way up to my neck. I slipped into a pair of navy and off-white heels before I put on a bit of makeup. Then I grabbed my purse and was out the door. I’d laid in bed all day Sunday, practically drooling over how his cock had felt between my lips. I could still taste his cum on the tip of my tongue. But the conversation I’d promised him loomed in the near future.

And I still wasn’t sure I was ready to have it.

I never thought things would go this far. I figured he’d either fire me or stop me before things got sent off the rails. I could have thrown this job away before pursuing the options I’d tried before Dad decided to stick his nose in shit that didn’t concern him, but now it seemed like Grant was holding on tighter than ever. Instead of backing away from me and what we were doing, he was running head-on into the growing attraction between us. I had seen it in his eyes when he told me he wanted to get to know me better. I had seen it in the way his lips had curled up into a slight smile after coming down my throat. I had seen it in his face when his eyes had scanned over me just before I dropped to my knees.

Grant Jacobs wanted more of me, and not just more of the physical.

When I arrived at the office, things were business as usual. The folders I’d completely forgotten about were still sitting out on my desk, so I got to work, quickly organizing them before handing them off to Grant. I grabbed a pen and a notepad, knowing he’d probably want me to take minutes of the entire meeting. Then I walked behind him as we made our way into the boardroom. I watched his tight ass bounce with every step he took as we walked down the hallway, and it took physical effort to remove my gaze from his ass before we stepped into a room full of old and sweaty rich men.

Grant shook every single one of their hands. I sat in a chair in the corner, getting out of sight as each of them doted on him somehow. The smile that sat upon his face had a glint of mischievousness in it, and I knew his charms were merely setting the trap. It was a tactic I used all the time on clueless men in bars, but it was nice to see it in action in a business setting.

He passed out the folders before tossing me a glance and nodding in my direction. I poised my pen above the paper, ready to get going with the meeting. Grant pulled up his PowerPoint and got to talking.

“Over the past decade, you guys have dedicated large sums of money to a particular investment fund,” he said. “That fund had gone to fueling things for this company even before I was CEO, but now that money is seeing growth. In fact, it’s seeing massive growth.”

I smirked when the men gasped as he clicked over to the next slide. He talked about some financial mumbo jumbo I’d learned my sophomore year. Shit about compounded interest and stock market fluctuations and how diversified the portfolio is, what the money was dedicated to and what it’s economic allocations were for. He clicked through slides as the men watched, but then the name “Tike Oils Co.” popped up on a slide.

All the rich white men clenched their assholes in hesitation.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Grant said, “and hear me out. This company has struggled to get into the Midwest for the past four years. Acquiring and absorbing a company likes Tike would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only expand into that area, but usurp pre-established connections and areas of dispersion. Factories are already set up, and warehouses are already up and distributing. It would simply be a matter of coming in with our sales tactics and changing the name on all the buildings.”

“But you have to take into account the reputation the company now has,” one man said. “You’d be responsible for repairing that. We might not see a return for two or three years. I take it you’re showing us this because you want to skim off the top of that growing portfolio in order to make this purchase happen.”

“Only the last one hundred thousand,” he said. “J&M already has the profits itself to foot the rest of the bill. A four-million-dollar offer on a twenty-million-dollar company is a steal.”

“But it could mean big-time bankruptcy if you can’t repair that reputation,” the investor said.

“Yes, the reputation is something to take into consideration,” Grant said. “But what you guys don’t realize is that I had to repair J&M’s reputation as well. Many connections and contacts had been lost over the years due to the prior owner’s emotional negligence, and I had to work around those circumstances.”

One of the old men shook his head. “But not nearly to the extent that you would have to do it here.”

“Let’s speak in a language that might wet your palate a bit.” Grant clicked over to the next slide and showed a desolate graph. The graph showed no growth from the Midwest acquisition at all for the first two years, and the men around the room slowly began to grumble. But as he clicked his remote, he popped up bar after bar of exponential profits. I ran the figures in my head quickly, realizing that his calculations were right, and I sat there stunned at what I was looking at.

“If you give me two years of stagnation to repair Tike’s reputation, this is the growth you’re looking at,” he said. “What you have to understand is that we aren’t going to own Tike. We are usurping their resources and distribution warehouses and contacts and bringing them underneath the J&M umbrella. We will literally be changing the names on the warehouses, and the moment Tike Oils Company comes down and J&M goes up, our reputation will replace theirs.”

“Are these numbers actually correct?” another investor asked.

“Yes, and these numbers don’t even take into account the dispersion the Midwest could have farther north. None of this considers expanding into places like the Dakotas, or Minnesota, or Michigan, or Wisconsin. This graph is solely based on the areas they dominate now. Nothing more.”

Oh, he’d sunk his teeth in well. The men around the table salivated at these numbers. Their jowls were practically foaming with excitement, and I caught Grant’s stare again before I lightly shook my head.

He wasn’t just a shark in the boardroom. He was a charmer. He commanded a presence and trust that people just wanted to throw at him. Even if they did question him, within two sentences, he had them eating out of the palms of his hands. Now the boardroom was eerily silent as the fat white men flipped through the folders underneath their noses.

And all Grant did was cock his hip up onto the side of the table and wait.

“So, who wants to take this adventure with me?” he asked.

One question. That was all it took. A fifteen-minute presentation and one question in order to walk out of the room with a dedicated amount equal to the offer he was about to shoot over to Tike. The company wouldn’t have to take a dime out of its fucking pocket, and I just realized that was what Grant had set out to do. He’d carved out a budget in J&M to make it look like he was ready to buy the company with profits when in fact he was buying himself time to woo over an entire investment fund of men. Now he could take the budget he’d allocated and turn over every place Tike owned in one get-go.

It was absolutely amazing what he’d just done in the span of fifteen minutes.

I walked behind him as we made our way back to his office, but this time, I wasn’t staring at his ass. I was wondering if he could teach me how to do that. How to be conniving and keep it under wraps. How to command a room full of men and have them eating out of my hands in under a half an hour. Sure, I could shake my tits and wear some tight clothes, but he did it in a professional capacity that I’d never witnessed before.

They didn’t teach us that shit in college, and I wanted to learn how he did it.

As we walked into his office, I debated whether or not to flirt with him. I knew our promised conversation was coming up, but there was a different one I wanted to have. I couldn’t just default to my striking good looks to get me what I wanted, but that meant I had to actually buckle down and listen to what Grant was telling me. I couldn’t brush him off just to get him going. Nor could I continue to undress him with my eyes whenever he was at his desk. I had to start taking this seriously if I was going to learn a serious skill like that to take with me into the company I was going to own one day.

So, as I sat down in the chair across from his desk, I decided I would do it. I would start applying myself to this job, and I would learn whatever I could from the man who just gave an A-plus performance in that boardroom.

After all, I applied myself to my degree and graduated with honors. If I applied myself here, I’d succeed, too.

“So, Miss Marks,” he said. “I believe there’s a topic we need to broach.”

“Actually, yes, there is,” I began. “What you did in that boardroom. Could you teach me?”

Shock rolled over his face as his gaze whipped up to mine. I held his eyes, eager for him to begin explaining how the fuck he had just pulled that off. But all he did was lean back in his chair before he crossed his leg over his knee.

“Could I teach you what?” he asked.

“You were phenomenal in that boardroom, Grant. College can’t teach shit like that. I tuned out a bit during the whole talk about the investment portfolio and the compound interest and the allocations and economic dedications and whatnot. That stuff, they hammered into my head with multiple classes in colleges. But that acquisition proposal? How you just slipped it underneath them and put the scent of blood up their nostrils? They were eating out of your palm within fifteen minutes. How did you do that? Could you show me?”

“You want to know how to become a shark in the boardroom,” he said.

“Yes. I learned a lot in college, and there’s a lot about this place I would change if I had the opportunity—”

“Oh, there is, is there?” he asked.

“Yes, there is,” I said. “But what you did back there—I can’t do that. At all. If I want to run a company myself one day, I’ve gotta know how to do that. Especially since I’m a woman.”

“You want to run your own company one day?” he asked.

“What?” I asked. “You don’t think I can?”

“Oh, Miss Marks,” he said. “Not only do I believe you to be capable of it, if you gave yourself enough time and applied yourself and learned a bit more, but I’d consider you a worthy adversary.”

“Then teach me. Teach me how to be your worthy adversary, Mr. Jacobs.”