by Katie Dowe
At the moment, that didn’t seem appealing at all.
Nicole rested her head on her hands, on the wheel, and closed her eyes.
She had a meeting with Max Daniels the next day.
Now, ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a pain at all. Quite the opposite – Max Daniels had a reputation for being extremely nice, and he was extremely handsome. He was also supposed to be an intelligent man. Spending time with him wouldn’t be a hardship at all.
But she had to follow Mr. Anderson’s line when she met him. She had to use the angles he wanted her to pursue, and, at some point, sell poor Daniels the horrible, out-of-date ideas that Anderson would have for the brewery.
What a pity it was, thought Nicole, that she would have to do that to poor Max Daniels. From all accounts, he deserved much better.
“Be a company girl,” she told herself as she stepped out of her car and made her way up to her apartment.
It wasn’t anywhere near as spacious or well-designed as Fred’s place, but she loved her little apartment. She’d lived there for four years. She could probably afford to move somewhere bigger, but why bother? She loved her home.
She’d made it so thoroughly hers. It had been her one real joy all the times Anderson had been a complete asshole to her.
She’d made her throw pillows herself. She’d sewn whimsical curtains. She’d found stencils and decorated the wall with little pictures.
And of course, there were the books. Nicole had put up bookshelves everywhere herself, and she still needed at least one more.
If there was one real reason to move somewhere, thought Nicole, it would be to make room for her books.
She knew she should sleep, but she was restless. Walking around, she straightened things that didn’t need straightening and got rid of invisible specks of dust that didn’t need wiping. Giving up, she drew herself a warm bath, hoping that that would give her a way to settle down for the night.
She added some violet bath salts, for good measure. Nicole considered using up one of her precious bath bombs, but it didn’t seem like the day for it.
Feeling better, she undressed, giving herself a cursory glance in the mirror and noticing that there was nothing that needed fixing, before pulling on her comfortable robe. With a grin, she rubbed the back of her neck. She was still getting used to her new bob. Well, it did at least mean that she didn’t need to pin her hair up when she was taking a bath anymore. She had always been very bad at buns. They always unraveled and got her hair all wet.
Walking to the crammed bookshelf in the bathroom – the only one with a door, to attempt to deal with the humidity – Nicole considered. Finally, she chose a Jane Austen book. Mansfield Park, decided Nicole, was what she felt like at the moment.
Jane Austen’s books reminded her that at least she had choices. At least, she had more choices than finding the right man to marry, especially when the right man just meant a man who would give you financial security and wouldn’t raise his hand to you. Times had changed. Even if her boss seemed to be stuck in the fifties when female colleagues were there to fetch coffee, he was in the minority.
She would do her best, decided Nicole as she slipped out of her robe and sank into the bathtub, sighing with the sensual pleasure of how the warm water with the soft bubbles kissed her coffee brown skin. She would do her best for Max Daniels, even if she knew she wouldn’t agree with the ideas that Anderson would try to make her sell to him.
Maybe she could do a good enough job to mitigate the effects of the dated ideas Anderson always pitched.
Maybe Max Daniels would be as interesting as he was handsome.
But as that stray thought pushed its way into her mind, Nicole closed her sharp mind to it and turned to her book.
If nothing else, it would make her drowsy, thought Nicole with a grin. If it didn’t work, she’d been considering rereading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It might even be a good night for that.
*****
Max was working. It was almost midnight, but he didn’t even consider going to bed until his work was all done. He wasn’t very good at delegating.
He had doubts.
It was never a good thing when he had doubts. Max had gotten far by trusting his instincts. Beginning to doubt them was never a good thing.
Still, he couldn’t find any flaws with the reports in front of him. He had been going over them for the last hour, and he knew that they made sense.
One of the best demographic for people who wanted to sell alcohol was the 21- to 35-year bracket. He had never had to worry about that before, though. His brewery was one of the best in the world and had been a favorite with young people.
One of the best thing about their best-selling lager was that it appealed to everybody except those who loved their stout. For them, well, he had the best thing his brewery had ever produced – a porter that could rival anything sold in Ireland.
It did well in its target demographic. It had, recently, begun to do better with younger people, too. It had been one of Max’s biggest achievements.
But now, he had a problem. Their lager had competition, and it came from a place he had ignored. It came from people who wanted to try something new and trendy.
Seasonable beer, thought Max with a sneer. It was a silly idea. Beer wasn’t supposed to taste fruity or flowery. Beer was supposed to taste like beer. Wine was supposed to taste like flowers, and Max had never developed much of a palate for wine, anyway.
He was far too rich for that to be a problem. Only people who didn’t have that much money tried to placate snobs by pretending to taste notes of aniseed and nutmeg, or whatever else it was that they wanted to believe they smelled and tasted in wine.
It was made of fermented grapes. The drier it was, the better it usually was. As long as it wasn’t corked, it was fine. And he would take a pint of rich stout over it any day.
Beer had nuances. But those nuances had nothing to do with sunflowers or poppy seeds. Poppycock, more likely, thought Max with a scowl.
When he inherited the brewery from his father at the relatively young age of twenty-five, he had just been told not to run it into the ground. His father had never asked him to take it to new heights. He had never been told that he needed to surpass his father’s achievements. Such pressures had never had any place in his family.
The brewery’s existence was thanks to his maternal grandfather, a proud Irish man who had claimed that of the Americans who liked to drink, they needed to drink good, Irish beer. He had been right, to Max’s mind. The Irish knew their lager, their ale, their stout, their porter, their whiskey – there was very little about the amber ambrosia that the Irish didn’t know.
So his grandfather, whose father had come over to America when his grandfather had still been in diapers, had pined for his pint. He was pretty sure that his grandfather could only remember of Ireland what he had seen when he had gone back home to Cork in his forties. But a more Irish man had never lived.
When Max’s father fell in love with Brianna, he had had to work long and hard to get that Catholic Irish family’s approval. No matter how well Brianna had loved her John, she would not have married him without it.
First, Max’s grandfather, the fearsome Shawn O’Connor, had told John that he needed to learn the ins and outs of the brewery first. His daughter was a fine barmaid and an excellent brewer, and he would not let any man take his Brianna away from her first love.
John had loved Brianna enough to learn everything Shawn O’Connor had taught, and, to his surprise, he had found that he enjoyed it.
But at sixty, he had decided that it was time for Brianna and him to retire and enjoy their life. Maybe, he had joked, they would set up their brewery in sunny Barcelona and start a new business there. But their family brewery, Green Gold, was now Max’s. It was all up to him.
Max knew his beer. He knew how to brew. He could set up a microbrewery from scratch if he needed to.
He had also gone to business school to learn more. In the f
ive years since he had taken over, he had marketed their brewery so successfully that their family’s wealth had multiplied. They had already been rich. But on Max’s twenty-ninth birthday, their fortune had passed a billion dollars, and in the last year, it had expanded even more.
So he should be happy, shouldn’t he? He should be satisfied.
And yet… Max was restless. And he knew why he was.
It was because he hated to lose, even a little bit. His competition, with their substandard product, had managed to hit him because they had zeroed in on the market that he had ignored.
Young people liked trendy things. Trendy things needed to be made, and marketed, using all those fancy words that really didn’t mean anything.
Or at least, so he was told, many times, by his advisers. So it said in the reports he had been reading.
Max had spent the evening tasting. Usually, he enjoyed that. He enjoyed beer tasting. He never overindulged, but what was the point of being in the business if you didn’t know how to appreciate what you were selling?
Max had long had the policy of not selling what he wouldn’t drink, himself.
And now, he was faced with doing exactly that.
The spring beer that was to be their new product was something he would never order. It claimed to have tones of spring in it.
Of course, it was complete bullshit, thought Max, irritated. The only way a beer reminded you of spring was if you took beer along on a picnic in the spring. The whole thing about wildflowers and berries – that was just to attract people who didn’t know anything about enjoying a cold pint of excellent pale ale on a hot afternoon, or a dark dubbel as dusk fell.
Though, he thought with a grin, his grandfather would have a fit if he ever heard of Max having a dubbel. Have a pint of good, Irish stout, he would say, and he would have an excellent point.
Still, sometimes the market dictated its terms, whether you liked it or not. It meant that he had to market the ale that he had no faith in. Sometimes, the marketing strategy could change everything.
If he was selling to people who didn’t care if they had good beer as long as it sounded impressive, then the strategy had to be perfect.
His head ached as he thought of the meeting he had the next day. He had barely been getting enough sleep.
Max really hated problems he couldn’t solve to his satisfaction. When his heart wasn’t in it, he couldn’t do anything properly. It had always been his biggest flaw. Or, as he saw it more often, his biggest strength.
But he paid advisers because he admitted that since he’d taken over, the entire enterprise had become a bit too big for one man to make all the decisions.
He paid experts for their knowledge. They were expert brewers, and some of them were experts at recognizing trends before they became trends. They were supposed to help him establish an empire.
Well, more than he had established already. His grandfather had never really dreamed that his beer would be exported around the world, had in the tropics and in another hemisphere. He hadn’t dreamed of it, but he had seen much of it before he had left this world to, hopefully, the great beer garden in the skies.
His grandfather would’ve been very pissed off if that hadn’t been where he had reached, and it took a braver man than he to stand up to Shawn O’Connor when he was angry.
God himself wouldn’t stand a chance, thought Max, with a grin, before the pain hit him again. Sometimes, losing his grandfather hurt so much that he didn’t know how he could even breathe through it.
Enough, he thought, and set everything aside. He was off his game. He needed sleep, and he would meet this representative from Anderson. Maybe his path would be clearer then.
Chapter 2
Nicole woke up feeling sluggish. She had a meeting with Derek Anderson first, and then she needed to meet Max Daniels. She wasn’t looking forward to either.
She packed her gym bag and headed off to get that workout she’d promised herself. It wasn’t a hardship. One of Nicole’s biggest expenses was her membership at the health club, which she loved. The pool, the machines – Nicole might be small, but she was strong. She intended to remain strong.
A good, hard workout followed by some cardio usually left her feeling much better. Not that day, though. The thought of dealing with the mundane details made her feel quite dispirited.
Being in advertising was supposed to be fun. Her workout shouldn’t be the best part of her day.
Needs first, she reminded herself as she dressed. At least she could make sure that she looked good. She picked a charcoal gray skirt and a matching jacket, with a bright pink blouse that suited her glowing, dark skin perfectly. At least, with the bob, she didn’t have to spend any time worrying about what she was going to do with her hair. That was a definite advantage.
Running late, Nicole grabbed coffee in a go-cup and ran out. She had long since mastered driving while sipping coffee.
At least she lived in San Francisco, thought Nicole, comforting herself. She did love her city. It was beautiful, and it was a lovely day. She should take advantage of the weather and blow off work for a day, just sit in a park and read.
But she knew she couldn’t.
Sighing, she parked and made her way up to her floor. She’d made it just in time.
“Nicole, Anderson’s yelling for you,” said Jeff, as soon as she walked in.
Nicole sighed again.
“I’m not late,” she said defensively.
“I know you’re not. But since when does that matter to the dinosaur?”
Jeff was right, of course.
Jeff Nickerson was her one solace at work. They were both fairly lowly minions and overworked, but they could at least bitch about Anderson and his ways together. They agreed on most things.
Jeff also knew that she had a steady boyfriend, and he didn’t hit on her. That was a huge plus in Nicole’s book.
“I guess I should go and get it over with. I knew I should’ve just taken the day off. Do you know what a lovely day it is?”
Jeff grinned.
“It won’t be, once Anderson’s done with it.”
Shrugging, he went back to his work, nipping her coffee neatly out of her hand.
“You won’t need this while you’re getting yelled at,” he told her, and nodded towards Anderson’s office.
He couldn’t eat her, at least, she comforted herself. But she had no doubts that he would try. Bloody outdated dinosaur, thought Nicole, and she had to make an active effort not to say it out loud.
“Mr. Anderson, did you want me?” asked Nicole, knocking on the door.
“Nicole, come in. Yes, where have you been? You have an important meeting today. It’s a great deal of responsibility. If you can’t take it seriously and treat it with the respect it deserves, perhaps I should send somebody else.”
Nicole gritted her teeth.
“Mr. Anderson, it’s only nine. I’m on time. I prepped for the meeting quite extensively yesterday. I’ve sent my observations regarding the brief to you. It’ll be in your inbox. I am very familiar with your ideas. I can make the point quite well, and get the information required from Mr. Daniels. We’re meeting for lunch, which means that I still have three hours to prep. The other copy has been done – the one for the aromatherapy client. You asked me to use my judgment since you’re not familiar with the field. It’s ready to be sent to the client. I already outlined it to the admin, who makes most of the decisions, and he liked the idea. I’m prepped, Mr. Anderson.”
He pushed his glasses up his short, snub nose and rubbed his bald head. Nicole was pretty sure that the man thought he was a bit of a stud.
“You’re not supposed to send copy to clients without running it past me, Nicole.”
Nicole sighed.
“I didn’t send it to the client – I just outlined the idea to Jessica, Ms. Donaldson’s admin. There’s no point fleshing it out without getting Jessica’s okay. Ms. Donaldson trusts Jessica to make the call there. Without her a
pproval, it would never even get to Ms. Donaldson. The copy itself, with the suggested layout, is in your inbox. None of that will go out without your approval, of course.”
Of course, thought Nicole, trying not to scream. What she had done was perfect. It would be cleared by the client without any changes. She knew it. She had an excellent feel for strategy.
Nicole also had absolutely no doubt that Anderson would find something wrong with it, and would screw it up. Then Jessica would get back to him with a short, snappy and unpleasant email. Anderson would blame her for it. Eventually, what she had sent him would be sent out, as if Anderson had come up with it and fixed all the terrible mistakes she had made.
Sometimes, she wanted to just kick his ass.
“Fine, fine. I’ll take a look at it now. Go through the Daniels brief again, and make sure you’re thorough on all points. I don’t need to remind you that this is a big account for our firm. It’s a big responsibility that I’m trusting you with. Try not to disappoint me.”
Oh, how she would like to pop him one, thought Nicole.
“I won’t, Mr. Anderson.”
“All right,” said the jackass, effectively dismissing her.
Seething, Nicole went back to her desk and tried taking a few deep breaths. They didn’t really help.
“Let it go, Nikki.”
Jeff’s soothing words did make her feel a bit better.
“I’m trying. I’ve got the meeting today.”
“You’ll ace it, of course,” said Jeff.
Nicole grinned.
“I know. But nothing Anderson comes up with will be good enough. Anyway, I don’t really… Well, I tried the damn ale, Jeff. It sucks. Who the hell wants to drink flowery beer? I mean, really, it’s a silly idea. It’s a silly product. Beer should be beer. It should have flavor, but no flowers.”
Jeff chuckled.
“I don’t know, some of the seasonal beers are quite nice. The ales with the citrus hints, you know. They can be quite good.”
