Her lips part, a flush of humiliation creeping over her face like spilled wine. “You can’t be suggesting?—”
“I’m sure Mr. Wilder knows better than to suggest that every female employee within this company has climbed her way to where she is by using her body.” Natalie’s voice from the doorway has me going completely still, every muscle in my body tensing at the sound.
She enters the room with the confidence of a woman who’s ready for battle, eyes blazing with protective fury. “I’m sure he’s not implying that, Iris, because he knows that such discriminatory behavior is grounds for a lawsuit. Am I right, Mr. Wilder?”
I stare at Natalie, both amused and annoyed by her dramatic entrance and the way she’s immediately jumped to defend her colleague. The fire in her eyes does something to me—something I’m not entirely comfortable acknowledging. “Of course. We wouldn’t want a lawsuit now, would we?”
Natalie crosses her arms over her chest, glaring at me with enough heat to melt steel. The pose draws my attention to the way her blouse pulls slightly across her chest, and I have to force myself to focus on her face. “I would like to be part of this meeting, if you don’t mind.”
My brows arch at her presumption, though I find myself oddly pleased by her protective instincts. I gesture towards the visitor chairs with exaggerated courtesy. “By all means.”
She’s like a mama bear, ready to claw my eyes out if I blink wrong. My dark mood evaporates almost instantly as I watch Natalie usher Iris Campbell into a chair with gentle efficiency, her maternal instincts on full display.
Once the two of them are seated, I set down the financial reports and the reports from the Marketing Department in front of Iris. “Can you explain why the recent reports fromFinance relating to Marketing’s expenses are not matching the ones your department is generating? For the past two years, Marketing’s budget has been increased by 15%, yet you are not spending your allocated funds.” I gesture towards the reports. “You can see for yourself.”
Iris glances at Natalie for reassurance before turning her attention towards the reports with obvious confusion. After a few minutes of careful study, she frowns deeply. “There is no discrepancy. Both amounts are the same.”
“They look the same because they have been altered. Now look at these.”
I slide the same papers towards her, only this time I’ve marked the altered amounts in the marketing report with red ink. She doesn’t look at them immediately, however, her eyes still on the ones I handed her before.
“This can’t be right.” She looks at Natalie with growing alarm. “We were very much under budget this year. We only had one new model come out, Serenity 90, and that was last year. We were told to use the previous material to market it. I should know—I prepared the reports myself. These expenses are all wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Natalie leans in towards her.
“Here. We took a potential buyer to dinner a few months ago, the one who wanted to display our yachts in their club’s grand opening ceremony, remember? We spent around one thousand. It says three thousand here.” She looks genuinely bemused, her confusion apparently authentic. “I called you that night.”
Natalie blinks in recognition. “You said that one grand was too much for this client, and I told you to send a receipt to the Finance Department.”
“It should be in my email,” Iris says quickly, her professionalism kicking in. Her head whips to face me with sudden determination. “Wait, I have the expense report on my laptop, theone I prepared for the Finance Department. I can show it to you.”
She takes out her laptop from her bag and sets it up. As her fingers fly on the keyboard, she looks tense but determined to prove her innocence. Natalie glances at me, and I see the frown in her eyes—concern mixed with something that might be approval for my thoroughness.
“Here. See!” Iris turns the laptop around with evident relief. “I emailed these to Charlie, Robert’s assistant. These are what I sent. Not that fabricated nonsense. I also said we were under budget and the budget forecast that I made for the next half of the year was significantly lower. It’s July. I sent this email near the end of March. All the campaigns we’re carrying out are digital. We were not having any large-scale campaigns for our clients. We didn’t need that much money.”
“I see.” I study her screen carefully, cross-referencing the information with what I have. “Send me this email. Does anybody else have access to your laptop?”
She shakes her head emphatically. “I work from home as well, so I take it with me. I never leave it unattended.”
“Alright, Miss Campbell.” I watch her forward me the email with obvious relief. “You may go now.”
She begins packing the laptop, looking somewhat relieved but still shaken by the experience. As she heads toward the door, she pauses and turns around to look at me with vulnerable honesty. “Am I going to be fired?”
“Not today,” I assure her, and mean it.
She presses her lips together and nods with visible gratitude. “Thank you.”
Natalie is right behind her, but she doesn’t leave with the woman as I expected. Instead, she closes the door with deliberate force and then turns around to face me, her posture radiating barely contained fury.
I get to my feet, anticipating the explosion I can see writtenall over her expressive face—and finding myself oddly excited by the prospect.
The silence between us is broken by the sounds of the wall clock ticking away as each second passes, the tension building like pressure in a steam engine. Then she speaks, her voice cold as ice but with an underlying heat that makes my pulse quicken.
“Before you start firing the female staff or asking them if they’ve been spreading their legs to get their promotions, you should perhaps ask me first. I was the one who hired Iris. She was the marketing assistant at a rival company. I offered her the marketing manager position because she was doing an exceptional job there, and I felt she could do it much better here. She joined us two years ago, and since she did, she single-handedly managed to revive our backlog yachts—those that are still in circulation but were marketed poorly. When the previous marketing head retired, I nominated her for a promotion, and she got it. She has a lot of experience in managing large numbers of people. She’s worked in teams, and she knows how to lead them. She’s honest and incredibly creative, and?—”
Natalie’s cheeks are flushed red with passionate indignation, and I can’t help but be fascinated by the scorching fire in her eyes. She’s magnificent when she’s angry—absolutely breathtaking in her fury.
“I understand.”
