Page 102 of Boss Me
My best friend stared into my eyes. “Coop, are you—”
“I’ll be okay. I’ll let you know what happens.”
He glared at my father, then at Weston. Then he strode off toward his office.
“You can wait out here, Mr. Fallon,” Weston said to my father. “I’ll call you if we need you.”
Did he mean if things got rowdy in the boardroom, or if he needed to throw my father in my face again? I squared my shoulders. It didn’t matter. Or it shouldn’t. I had a job to do. Focus.
“Wait,” I said.
Weston turned and raised his eyebrows.
“There was another man out here. A man with a limp. Who was he?”
“I have no idea.” Weston’s face was a mask. But those deep blue eyes of his flicked to the side so quickly that if I hadn’t been closely watching him, I would have missed it. He knew the man. Why was he now a security guard at Synergy?
But before I could press him, Weston said, “It’s time for the meeting to start. You know how we are about punctuality.”
He was right. I was already at a disadvantage. The last thing I needed was for the board to have another reason to vote against me.
Numb, I followed Weston into the room. The board members had settled into their usual seats around the table. Charles Hayes sat at the head, and the seats to his right and left were reserved for Weston and me. Jamila sat in the leather chair to the left of mine; the secretary, Rod Sanchez, bent over his laptop at the foot of the table, and the rest were arranged along the sides.
Weston closed the door behind me. The click of the latch felt like I’d been locked into a cage to fight for my life. I froze a smile on my face and greeted each of the board members, who suddenly felt less like my team and more like my opponents. Even Jamila, who didn’t miss the tremble in my fingers when she shook my hand.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her big, brown eyes widening with concern.
“I’m fine. I talked to Dr. Pradhi yesterday,” I whispered. She hadn’t made me feel any better, but at least it had been an hour that I wasn’t concerned about the fate of my company. I’d had bigger demons to confront.
And now one of those demons, my father, menaced me from outside the boardroom. And the mystery man—Weston’s man, who’d been in my home—roamed freely in the halls.
She whispered, “What about—”
I shook my head. I had to wait until the meeting ended to make my hail-Mary pass. If Ben wouldn’t listen to me that afternoon, I was done. No more chances.
I took my seat and, while Charles called us to order and ran through the agenda, I jiggled my knee under the table. Weston smirked at it through the glass, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to shake each board member. They wouldn’t be here if not for Jay and me. They had to see that we were worthy of another opportunity to make the shareholders—and each of them—millions of dollars richer. I glanced at the clock. Would we finish in time for me to race downstairs and meet Ben? And would I have good news or bad to share with him and Marlee?
Finally, Charles turned to the main event. “First item. As we discussed in last week’s meeting, we received a buyout offer from Gurusoft. We agreed to meet today to vote on whether to accept or reject the offer. If we accept, we call a shareholder vote to confirm. Now I’ll open the floor to discussion. Harris, I believe you asked to go first?”
Weston stood. “Thank you, Charles.” He slowly circled the table. “I believe some of you have been approached to ask for your vote against the merger. I understand that emotional arguments have been made to encourage you to side with Mr. Fallon, who seems to have recently changed his mind about the company.
“You see, Mr. Fallon”—I winced every time he used my last name, remembering that I shared it with the despicable human on the other side of the door—“recently sold a significant number of his Class A shares in the company with the intention to exit his position. Now, suddenly, he’s regained interest in keeping the company independent. Why?” Weston spread his hands. “Maybe he’ll tell us when it’s his turn to speak. Maybe it has to do with what Mr. Fallon got up to during his leave of absence.”
Frosty recognition gushed through my veins. That was it.
Weston’s man, the pretend housekeeper and now pretend security guard, had planted cameras in my house and reported to Weston what I’d gotten up to. My brain clouded with rage, but I fought through it to think clearly. Where else had I seen him? Perhaps in the bar, but I’d been too drunk to trust my memory. At the restaurant with Ben that night? There had been a man eating alone, and he’d had a similar build. The day we went shopping? I couldn’t be sure. I had eyes only for Ben that day. And I’d been worried about his ankle.
His ankle.
Ben said a burly guy had jumped him and Coco bit him. Was that why he was limping? Was he the guy who attacked Ben?
My vision hazed in red.
Beside me, Jamila cleared her throat. She narrowed her eyes at the pen in my fist. I’d bent it with the force of my grip, and crimson ink dribbled over the back of my hand. I snatched up a napkin and blotted it.
Focus.
“Regardless, Mr. Fallon’s”—Weston hesitated and spat out the next word like it tasted bad—“instability should be a cause for concern to this company and this board. We’ve all observed founders with emotional attachments to their companies who fail to see what’s in the shareholders’ best interest. I’m afraid we’re in that situation now. Mr. Fallon appears to have an emotional entanglement”—his blue-eyed gaze caught mine and held it—“that may prevent him from seeing clearly that a sale is what’s best for Synergy.”
