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  “You heard me. Some woman named Victoria Sosa seems to have made an offer for Braxton too. I am now in a bidding war and I’m not happy.” Tate shouted the last few words.

  “How am I supposed to know? That’s what I pay you for, and right now I’m about ready to yank your chain so hard you’ll see your toes when you close your eyes at night.” Tate had to stop at the corner for a red light. She glanced around to make sure she didn’t recognize anyone, especially Victoria Sosa.

  “I’m headed back to my office. You have thirty minutes to be standing in front of me with her social security number, the name of her best friend in high school, and how many times a week she has sex. Do I make myself clear?” The woman beside Tate glanced at her and stifled a laugh. Tate hung up and said, “You just can’t get good help anymore,” as she stepped off the curb.

  Exactly thirty-two minutes later Max McDonald was not standing, but quivering in front of Tate’s desk. She had not indicated he was welcome to sit down, because he wasn’t. She was furious that she had gone into that meeting not knowing everything possible about Braxton. She could have made a fool of herself—worse yet, completely lost the deal. She was relieved that she hadn’t said anything damaging to Victoria while they were waiting for Braxton. And what in the hell was he up to? McDonald squirmed in front of her and she wanted him out of her office. She detested incompetence, and this lapse was unforgivable. But he had what she needed.

  “Don’t stand there like an idiot. I’m waiting for the information I should have had a week ago.” She drummed her fingers on the top of her desk.

  “Victoria Crystal Sosa, born May 23, 1965. Parents Lawrence and—”

  “All that will be in your report. Get to the important part.”

  “She is the CEO of Drake Pharmaceuticals, a twelve-billion-dollar firm based here in Atlanta. She’s been at the helm eight years, and my sources say she is extremely well liked and an effective leader. They also tell me they need Braxton to shore up their operations or they’ll go under. Sosa is getting some serious heat from her board to clinch Braxton, and her ass is on the street if she doesn’t. They don’t have much to offer in the way of cash, so they’ll probably propose some sort of joint partnership or a similar deal.”

  Tate mercifully tossed McDonald out of her office ten minutes later after she heard his complete report. Her mind was spinning because of the quick shift of events, but as she processed the information the familiar tingling sensation she always experienced at the prospect of a challenging duel began. She hadn’t been this excited about a deal in a long time. Lately each one had just been more of the same—no thrilling chase, no maneuvering, and little of the one-upmanship that came with a takeover. She easily negotiated, compromised, and more often than not bullied the other company into seeing things her way. The process had gone stale without her even being aware of it.

  Lifting her feet onto her desk, Tate leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers under her chin. She sat that way for several long minutes, weighing everything McDonald had told her about Victoria against her own impressions of the woman.

  Tate hadn’t paid much attention to her when she ran into her in Braxton’s lobby, dismissing her as a fortysomething straight woman with kids, a minivan, and a husband whose belly hung over his belt buckle. What she saw this morning was anything but. She might have a kid and drive a boring car, but Victoria Sosa was anything but straight.

  Victoria’s hair had been pulled back and secured at the back of her neck with something Tate couldn’t see, but the style highlighted her high, strong cheekbones. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows arched above vivid blue eyes the color of the water in Cancun. When they shook hands Tate felt the familiar tug of sexual attraction, and if they had been in different surroundings she might have done something about it. Tate had immediately missed the contact when Victoria released her hand, but had been too focused on herself and what she didn’t know about Victoria to really be aware of her reaction until now.

  She sat there for the next hour searching the Internet for any additional information on Victoria Sosa. There was plenty, Google showing 8,459 hits. Most were of her college career at UCLA, detailing her years on the volleyball team, three of which she was a starter, and finally her final game when she won a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics. The remainder of the information concerned mainly her professional rise through the ranks of several biomedical firms and her ultimate selection as CEO of Drake.

  Admitting that she was impressed, Tate pushed away from her computer. She had to brief Clayton on the new development, and he would probably give her more shit about how important it was to her career to bring in Braxton. She wasn’t concerned. She was already formulating a game plan that included the suddenly very attractive Victoria Sosa.

  *

  “Who in the hell is Tate Monroe?” Victoria had immediately called Albert and told him to have her staff in her office when she got back. Albert must have told them she was angry because not one of her trusted advisors said anything as she glared at each of them, fighting to control her anger.

  “No one in this room knows who she is? No one has their ear to the street to know that she’s made an offer to Braxton?” She looked each one in the eye before she moved on to the next. “No one knows why I walked into a meeting with Peter Braxton fully confident that he would agree to our proposal and ended up almost being put in my place by a thirty-year-old hotshot who was just as shocked as I was?” Her voice was rising in pitch and she took a few deep, calming breaths. Still no one said anything.

  “That’s exactly how I felt.” She was calmer now than when she first sat down, though her hands were still shaking from the scene in Braxton’s conference room. More than once on the drive back to her office she almost rear-ended the car in front of her. She had pulled into the parking garage on automatic pilot and didn’t remember riding the elevator to her floor.

  “Now, I am rarely a bitch and I try hard not to lose my temper, but I am not winning that battle today.”

  Her friend Claire was the first to speak. “I’m sorry, Victoria.”

  Several heads nodded in agreement.

  “You’re sorry about what? That you didn’t do your jobs and I was left hanging with my butt in my hands? Drake needs this deal. I thought you all understood that fact. We cannot afford to screw this up, and let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. Your incompetence almost did us in. I take complete responsibility for this breakdown, but I rely on you to tell me things I have no way of knowing, and when I…no, when Drake,” Victoria corrected herself, “when Drake needed you the most, you didn’t come through. We very well could lose this deal.” She didn’t need to tell everyone what that meant. Thousands of people would be out of a job, with no paycheck or healthcare coverage.

  Victoria didn’t say anything else. One by one her staff left the room. Claire stayed behind.

  “What is it, Claire?”

  “Don’t you think you were a bit hard on them?”

  Claire was probably the closest she had to a best friend, but right now she was her CFO and Victoria had no trouble separating the two. “No, I don’t. I don’t have any idea when Monroe made her offer to Braxton, but I should have known there was at least the possibility of multiple offers for Braxton on the table even before I approached him the first time. I definitely should have had the information before this morning.”

  “Victoria, you’ve been under a lot of stress lately,” Claire said.

  Victoria wanted to laugh but didn’t dare. She was afraid she might cry instead. In the past month she had averaged three or four hours of sleep a night, and with the frequent headaches she was experiencing, her blood pressure must be elevated to dangerous levels. She had vowed several times last week to try to get to the gym, but the operative word was try.

  “That has nothing to do with it, Claire, and you know it. You of all people understand how much this company means to me, and I thought it meant the same to everyone else too.”


  “That’s not fair, Victoria.”

  “Isn’t it? Then how could this have happened?”

  Claire didn’t answer.

  “I admit the proposal I presented to Braxton was the best thing for both of us, but because it was such a no-brainer, did that make us complacent on anything else? All I know is I was almost handed my head in my hands this morning by someone young enough to put us all to shame. We have nothing left to offer Braxton, and now we’re in a bidding war.”

  Only in the presence of her friend would she drop her head in her hands like she did now. What am I going to do?

  Chapter Eight

  Victoria gathered her briefcase and suit jacket as the voice from the speaker called her flight. True to Braxton’s word, his assistant Susan had worked with Albert to rearrange her schedule, and the week after Labor Day she was on the four-thirty flight from Atlanta to Chicago. The seats in first class were occupied except the one designated as 2C, and after she put her briefcase in the overhead compartment she slid into its soft leather. She buckled her seat belt, then sipped a glass of sparkling water that the flight attendant promptly offered her.

  The man beside her was engrossed in his Wall Street Journal, and Victoria appreciated the fact that he wasn’t interested in chit-chat. She had been on flights where her neighbor obviously wanted to become best friends, whether the flight lasted one hour or fifteen.

  She was tired. She had gone out to dinner with Carole last night and told her about the condition Braxton had put on their bid for his company. Carole was as surprised as Victoria and commented several times how odd the requirement was. While Victoria described Tate, it was as if she was sitting across the table from her. She recalled her vivid green eyes and the no-bullshit way she looked at both her and Braxton. Victoria laughed when she compared Tate’s walk to a jungle cat’s. She was probably on the prowl in her personal life too.

  When Carole suggested they return to her place Victoria begged off, citing her flight today, but lately she was increasingly less interested in sex. They rarely slept over when they met for dinner and ended the evening with sex. Each of them preferred to sleep in her own bed, or at least one or the other had an early meeting the next day. Lately their dates seemed more like a reoccurring obligation on Victoria’s calendar than an occasion she looked forward to.

  Opening the folder Albert handed her on her way out the door, she settled in to reread the complete dossier on Tate Monroe. She had read it several times already, as was her practice with all important documents, but each time she did she retrieved another tidbit of information or impression of her adversary. She had been impressed that Tate had gone to Wharton but was not impressed with her choice of employment.

  Her boss, Clayton Sumner, was well known for his greed. He was supposedly the person that Gordon Gekko was modeled after in the movie Wall Street. Sumner probably had the trademark on the most famous line in the film, “Greed is good,” and received royalties every day. His firm ran over companies like they were toy soldiers, crushing and dismantling everything in its path and leaving nothing but a huge pile of money for himself. Thousands of people had directly lost their jobs due to him. And when suppliers and customers of the companies he shut down also had to close, his greed affected hundreds of thousands more people downstream.

  Victoria read the piece of paper that detailed Tate’s personal life. She was definitely a lesbian and unashamed of her lifestyle. She didn’t appear to have a steady relationship, but the accompanying photos showed a different woman on her arm every time she appeared in public. A minor note about her parents briefly stated that her father lived in a mobile-home park in Alabama. No other relatives were mentioned. As a matter of fact, neither was anything else. Tate seemed to have a sparse personal life.

  Studying the five-by-seven glossy photo of Tate, Victoria felt old. Tate’s skin was firm, with only a few small lines around her eyes, unlike the multiple deep ones Victoria had noticed on her face this morning in the bathroom mirror. Where did they all suddenly come from? It wasn’t as if they were there last week. Were they? And Tate’s eyes. She was gazing directly into the camera, and Victoria had to remember she was viewing a picture, not the real thing.

  Victoria had seen those eyes look just the way they did now, very dark and twinkling with amusement. She studied the picture more intently. Was it her imagination or was something hiding deep inside the pools of green?

  *

  Tate couldn’t wait to get off the plane when it touched down shortly after eight. She had been traveling for a week, and this was her sixth flight in as many days. If she had to take her shoes off and her laptop out of her briefcase one more time, she’d scream.

  It had been so much fun when she had first started flying on business. Each trip was exciting and she felt important. She had never flown as a child, her parents too worthless to hold a job or go anywhere other than the local bar and the quick mart for cigarettes. Joey Monroe couldn’t keep a dime in his pocket or a commitment. He played poker with his buddies every Friday night, and between the beer and his bad luck he usually lost more than he won, leaving his family to scramble for just about everything. Tate went to bed hungry most of her childhood.

  She was the subject of snickers and pointing fingers when she went into the grocery store for her mother, who was typically too bruised or drunk to leave the house. She felt the clerk’s sympathy when she didn’t have enough money to pay for what they needed to get through a few more days. Often they charged her for only half of what she put on the checkout counter. She didn’t want their pity, but pride didn’t fill her empty stomach.

  The only thing she remembered about her father’s job was that he was always bitching about it. Her friends had fathers who worked, and they took vacations to Disneyland or the beach or just to visit relatives. The farthest Tate got out of town was when she ran off with Camille Masterson in high school.

  Tate was a sophomore when Camille, a senior, first came on to her. Camille, her first real girlfriend, had much more experience in the sex department than Tate, who had just “fiddled around,” as she called it, with one or two girls at a slumber party. Camille had a car and a fake ID, and Tate was totally smitten. One night after the football game Camille suggested they drive to the next town and get beer. Tate tried hard to act as mature and sophisticated as Camille, but when she threw up all over the inside of her Chevy, she knew she would never see Camille again.

  It wasn’t until she was a junior in high school that she thought she would ever have an office, let alone the one she was sitting in now. Her high school guidance counselor had encouraged her to take the SAT, the massive college entrance test that could be her ticket to higher education. The exam consisted of ten sections, each of which had to be completed within a certain amount of time. Tate finished section after section before anyone else, and when she put her pencil down for the last time, four minutes remained. She double-checked her answers and when the proctor signaled time was up, she was a nervous wreck. By the time they were dismissed, her knees were shaking so bad she thought she might fall as she practically ran out the door.

  A scholarship to Ohio State took her away from Hillsdale and she never looked back. Her mother died of pneumonia the summer she graduated from high school, and no one was there to see Tate off when she boarded the Greyhound bus bound for Columbus.

  Now traveling, even with the comfort and amenities of first class, was just a pain in the ass, she thought, working her way through the congested walkway at O’Hare. She chuckled because she always thought that flying into Chicago was exactly like the childhood story called “The Tortoise and the Hare.” You flew six hundred miles an hour to get there, then moved like a snail once you did.

  Thankful she didn’t have to check any luggage, Tate flagged down a cab and gave the driver the name of her hotel. She had been to Chicago several times for business and smiled to herself, remembering how on more than one occasion she was able to combine business with pleasure.

&
nbsp; When she had thought about pleasure the past few days, the face of Victoria Sosa always came to mind. Even last night when the lovely waitress from the restaurant was writhing under her, Victoria intruded on her thoughts. Tate rarely fantasized about one woman when she was making love to another, but what the hell? They were total strangers both getting what they wanted, and Tate didn’t hear the woman complain. As a matter of fact she—

  “Hey lady, we’re here,” the cabbie said.

  Tate glanced around, noticing the familiar landmarks, and tossed the driver a fifty-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” she said, grabbing her overnight bag and briefcase. The bellman immediately took both items as she stepped out of the cab and into the lobby. They would miraculously appear in her room in about fifteen minutes, and she dismissed them as she walked to the registration desk.

  *

  Victoria wandered down Wacker Drive searching for a quiet restaurant. She needed to review her notes for tomorrow’s meeting with Braxton, and even though she had read about the operations they would be touring tomorrow a dozen times, she wanted to re-familiarize herself with them. Several couples were emerging from a doorway about fifteen feet ahead of her, and she glanced into the adjacent window. The interior was dimly lit, but not so dark that she wouldn’t be able to see to read or make notes. She grabbed the door before it closed behind the last couple and stepped inside. Several tables were open, so she didn’t have to wait long to be seated.

  She had just taken a sip of her wine when she glanced at the door. Standing just inside and looking right at her was Tate Monroe, dressed in khaki trousers and a light green polo shirt. Victoria’s stomach contracted and she looked away before propriety necessitated she invite Tate to join her. She wouldn’t accept anyway; they were rivals, after all. Better yet…she thought, catching Tate’s eye and motioning her over.