The Heat

by Alice Ward

  At that moment, a thousand possible reasons flooded me. Maybe it was because they didn’t hire females. Or because I looked fifteen. Or because deep down, he just didn’t like me. But none of them seemed right. Roger hadn’t discriminated before when he’d brought me aboard, and he did like me, as a person at least, if not a lawyer. I knew it.

  “But I’m good at this, dammit. I’ve more than proven myself to you,” I demanded, standing to my full, unthreatening height of five-four and leaning over his desk to show him I meant business.

  He didn’t even blink at my display of badassness. He shook his head instead. “Atlee. Don’t get me wrong. You’re good. You’re very, very good. But you can get too, um…” he scratched his chin, “emotional when it comes to these cases.”

  I froze. There it was, the bomb. Dropped and detonated, all over my face. “What?”

  “It’s true. It’s good you’re passionate about the environment. But too much passion can make you lose your head and…” he shrugged again, making me want to force his shoulders back in place, “lose your cases. An associate with our firm needs to be tough. A shark. You’re a fine researcher, but you’re not quite…”

  There it was, another shrug.

  I gaped. He tried to smile at me, but I was still processing his words. Too emotional? I’d cried once, and he hadn’t even been there to see it. Sure, I had a tendency to go on a tear about cases that affected me. And yes, I remembered getting a little… incensed, maybe, in Roger’s presence, once, when I saw someone tossing a candy wrapper on the ground when there was a garbage can five feet away. But what the actual fuck?

  “I can be a shark,” I told him desperately and came close to gnashing my teeth together in demonstration. Thankfully, I managed to keep from humiliating myself in such a way. I took a deep breath. “You just haven’t seen me work it. If you let me—”

  He was already shaking his head in a very final way. “A shark goes for what it wants, without feeling. You go after what you want, without thinking. There’s a difference. I’m sorry, Atlee.”

  I bit my tongue. Not a shark? At that moment, I wanted to rip him apart and feast on his blood. I’d show him shark.

  Something tickled deep inside my head. Maybe he was right. It was the reason I got so stressed out about this stuff to begin with. I wanted these injustices to be righted, sometimes so badly I went a little blind. And I flew off the handle. I didn’t always think with my head.

  But that didn’t mean I didn’t belong there. Didn’t mean I didn’t deserve to leap onto the next stepping stone of my career, to one day have my name on the wall. “But I love this job. I’ve given it everything I have for three years now.”

  “And we’re glad to have you here. Like I said, you’ve been an asset to us.”

  A superior asset. But not an asset that deserved to be an associate. More like an asset who was good at preparing presentations and stapling reports. Hell, as Brinkman could attest, I wasn’t even very good at stapling.

  I swallowed hard, forcing all the emotion back down my throat. “There’s nothing I can say to make you change your mind?”

  He pressed his lips together and shook his head.

  It wasn’t a check-back-with-me-in-a-couple-months kind of shake. It was a never-gonna-happen shake.

  “Then I quit,” I heard myself say, surprised that the words had escaped my head.

  His eyes widened. “What?”

  When it was out there, I realized how irreversible it was. Scary, yes. But it also felt right.

  “I’m sorry. I have to.” With shaky fingers, I pulled my ID badge over my head and handed it to him. My smiling, naïve twenty-year-old face from my first year in law school looked up at me. Back then, I’d been so sure that my future was at SS&F.

  Stupid me.

  These past three years had only been a waste of my time. If I wanted to advance my career and really start making a difference in environmental law, I needed to shake things up and take risks, a la Erin Brockovich. I needed to get out.

  “Wait, now…” He shuffled his backside on his high leather chair.

  I waited expectantly. I wanted him to fight for me. To tell me how much I meant to the firm and beg me to reconsider. I wanted him to offer me that damn associate job. If he did that, I would’ve not only stayed, I probably would’ve jumped into his arms and kissed him.

  But instead, he pushed the ID over to me. “I think you need to give this to HR.” He lifted his phone. “I’ll call security to have them escort you out.”

  Tears pricked the corners of my eyes, but I refused to cry. After all, it sounded like it was those stupid tears that had gotten me in trouble in the first place. I swiped the ID into my palm and threw open the door.

  “Good luck,” he called after me, but I couldn’t bother to respond.

  I didn’t need luck. Luck was for suckers.

  I had talent, as I’d been told all through school. Talent, smarts, determination to succeed. I’d graduated high school at seventeen, gotten my bachelor’s at twenty. Just a few months past twenty-four, I was a bona fide lawyer with a law degree to prove it.

  I’d go be a superior asset to someone else and make my mark in environmental law. People would say, Roger who? But me? I’d be a household name.

  Growing more incensed, I stalked to my cubicle and started throwing my things into a cardboard box. Brinkman watched me, a question mark painted on his pimply face. He was still chewing noisily on something, sounding like a cow. Or maybe Stapleton thought he was a shark.

  “So, you are crying?” Brinkman said, his tone more superior, more told you so than sympathetic. “Are you going somewhere?”

  I hefted my bag onto my shoulder and lifted the box in both arms, then swept past him, muttering, “See you later, asscrack.” It was partly to the offending body part, but mostly to the whole guy.

  As I walked, my steps grew more determined.

  I had a resume on a flash drive somewhere in my tiny apartment that just needed to be tweaked. Then I’d blanket Greater Manhattan with it and find my dream job.

  I’d show them all what kind of a shark I could be.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wyatt

  One month later…

  I looked out onto the East River from the thirty-eighth floor of Six Wall Street, wondering how my lifestyle had gone from freewheeling to serious-as-a-heart-attack so quickly.

  Actually, it was a heart attack — not mine, but my father’s — that had a lot to do with it.

  Just a month earlier, Ryan and I had been planning on taking the trip of a lifetime, a six-month backpacking excursion through the Australian Outback. We’d wanted to do it since college, but college had bled into business school, which had bled into starting our careers, and suddenly, I’d found myself at thirty years old, soon to be tied down to my family’s company forever.

  Back then, I’d only been Vice President of Accounts, so I didn’t have half the responsibility a CEO would have. I’d told my dad the idea, and he’d been all for it. He’d encouraged me to take all the time I needed. “Go, have an adventure or two before you’re an old man, chained to a desk like I am.”

  And now? In twenty minutes, I’d have my first board meeting as CEO of Watts Enterprises.

  Watts Enterprises, or WE, the ball and chain that had weighed my father down and finally nearly killed him. He’d had a heart attack five weeks earlier, where else? Right behind his desk.

  After that, he’d retired, and the company — and likely his fate — was mine.

  I wiped at my brow, finding it damp with sweat. Sweating all over the boardroom wasn’t the way to convey control. I should’ve been in control, damned if I hadn’t spent most of my life being bred for this position.

  But I had a different outlook on things than my old man.

  Taking a deep breath, I adjusted my cufflinks and strode out of the office that used to be my father’s. It was as comfortable a place as my own home. I’d even spent time as a kid playing under the d
esk while my father worked, a la JFK Jr, when my mother wasn’t taking me along to one of her good causes. By the time I graduated from business school, I’d divided my time equally between board meetings and every soup kitchen in the city.

  “Hey. You ready?” Ryan said to me when I appeared outside the boardroom. He was my best friend and one of the few guys I trusted, which was why my first order of business when I took the reins was hiring him as my Director of PR. Believe it or not, Watts Enterprises was so antiquated that before then, they didn’t even have a full PR department. But my dad was Stone Age, stuck in the seventies, and I intended to bring WE into modern times, kicking and screaming if necessary.

  Ryan and I brought the average age of all board members down to about sixty-five.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I answered, adjusting my tie and giving him my cockiest grin.

  Ryan had always been my wingman. I’d had the responsibilities of the family company looming over me, practically since I was born. But until I became CEO, weekends were my own, and Ryan and I spent them freely. Clubs. Drinking. Women.

  I already missed it. Big time.

  “That’s good. You’ll need to be. Enter the wolf pit,” he said, throwing open the doors.

  I nearly choked on the heavy cloud of cigar smoke, New York State Clean Indoor Air Act be damned.

  Wolves? Not really. Just a bunch of stodgy old assholes who were so set in their ways, they were almost statues of themselves. No women. This was a boy’s club. No smiles. This was all business. And while WE’s official motto was Making lives better, one smile at a time, the real motto in here? Money: Good. More money: Better.

  I’d prepped Ryan for this meeting, so he knew what I was up against. He was my defense, my backup, and as my longtime wingman, he fit the role well. This time, our target was far from a hot woman I wanted in my bed.

  Far from it.

  I needed all the help I could get because I knew that what I had to say wouldn’t become company policy without a fight.

  “All right,” I said, walking in and circling the table. I stopped at the chair at its head, which I still thought of as dad’s chair. It felt wrong to sit there, so I folded my hands on the back of it, going for a calm persona. “I know there’s been a lot of turmoil in the past few weeks, but we shouldn’t let that deter us from taking steps to secure our future.”

  “Our stock has dropped ten percent,” a man with a pockmarked, bald head, a ruddy nose, and a perpetual wince shouted from the end of the table. “Calming those jitters should be our main concern.”

  Several of the men nodded.

  I’d expected that response and had a ready reply. “I understand how you feel. But our production methods and ingredients are way behind those of our competitors, and our public image has been taking a beating in recent polls. That needs to be addressed.”

  A tall man who was built a little like Frankenstein frowned at me skeptically. “And how do you plan to do that?”

  I strode to the window looking out over the financial district of Manhattan. Then I turned, making sure they saw purpose and confidence on my face. “We need to change it all.”

  The boardroom disintegrated into whispers. “We’ve been down this road before,” one person grumbled. “It’s a waste of time!” another said. Then there was, “Why mess with success!” and “If we don’t harvest the stuff, someone else will!”

  “Listen,” I said over the din. “I understand that it may cut into our profits in the beginning, but it’s the future. And it needs to be done before we have a public relations nightmare on our hands and profits plummet in a way that isn’t recoverable.”

  Ryan nodded, stepping into the fray. “I can point to a hundred cases where the writing was on the wall, and a company didn’t heed the call to modernize. Those companies were solid, multibillion-dollar operations that were household names and considered cornerstones of the industry… and they don’t exist anymore. We won’t stay the number one consumer products manufacturer if we don’t modernize, and we may end up tanking ourselves if word gets out that we don’t give a shit and we aren’t investing in sustainable ingredients and up-to-date production methods. All of our competitors are way ahead of us in this arena. We need to take advantage now.”

  “And slim our profit margins too,” Frankenstein said morosely. “Contrary to what the left wing bleeding hearts would tell you, not every consumer believes we have an environmental crisis on our hands. I, for one, think it’s bullshit.”

  I reached down to the table and shoved a thick booklet over to the gangly man. “This is a report done by a nonpartisan source on the impact of our current harvesting methods on the rain forests in Malaysia and Indonesia. The palm oil we’ve been drawing from the region has caused a noticeable decrease in wildlife, putting many animals on the endangered species list.”

  Frankenstein snorted, flipping through the book without looking at the pages. “Fucking animals.”

  I gritted my teeth. “The land is being destroyed, and in case you aren’t listening, people love their animals more than other humans and will fight to the death for them.” I stared at each of them in turn. “Yes, it may cut into our profits in the beginning. But we need to at least make strides to address these issues.”

  I walked over to Frankenstein and tapped on the booklet, challenging him to read it and weep. But he stared at the pages like they were covered in maggots, then pushed it away and puffed on his cigar.

  I sighed. My father was just as hard-nosed. Of course, these men wanted to keep things the way they were. It had worked beautifully for them for forty years while they sat in their comfortable, narrow cocoons. Tonight, they’d go home to their expensive mansions, light up their cigars, drink their whiskey, and feel good about stopping the “young whippersnapper” from robbing the stockholders of their expected earnings.

  I gave Ryan a tired look and sucked in a breath.

  “Look. My father is responsible for forty years of WE’s growth. But while he was great at making us profitable, there are other things that need to be taken into consideration. I’m not saying this should be done to keep WE competitive,” I continued as the old men around me continued to squawk, “I’m saying that this must be done if you want Watts Enterprises to survive to see the next decade.”

  Didn’t matter.

  I wasn’t sure even one of my words invaded their craniums, not that I didn’t give it my best try. I went over the findings of the report and our expected decline in great detail, then endured about a half hour of complaints, trying not to hang my head in defeat.

  When the meeting ended, I said, “Thank you, gentlemen, for your input. Before we vote, I’m off to attend the Sustainable Palm Oil Roundtable in Malaysia. It’s in a few days, and though I know my father previously declined to attend, I think it’s important we do.”

  Twenty faces stared at me like I’d just announced I was going to do a striptease for them.

  “I think it will be worthwhile to determine whether this idea is even feasible. I’ll give a full report on it when I get back, and then we can put in a vote to make sure we’re all on board.”

  The men shook their heads slowly, and I could see the thought bubble over each of them: What a waste of company dollars.

  They all filed out, leaving me and Ryan alone at the table. Both over six feet tall with dark hair and similar backgrounds, we’d often been mistaken for twins, but probably never more so than right then. We both looked like we’d had the shit kicked out of us.

  He grinned. “Those guys were so ornery you’d think someone denied them their free senior coffee at McDonald’s.”

  I shook my head, then finally slumped down in my father’s chair. I’d made it through my first meeting as CEO, but it still didn’t feel like mine. Maybe it never would. “Talk about a bunch of hard-asses. Am I being unreasonable, or do those guys have their heads in the sand?”

  “Yeah, right? Who knew the blue-haired crowd could be so deadly? I half expected them to b
reak out nunchucks and go Kung Fu on your ass.”

  I frowned at him as he sipped his cold Starbucks coffee. “You know. I really miss our bar-hopping days. Why’d those stop?”

  “We grew up? Oh, and there’s the little matter of this company you inherited.” He looked just as mournful about it as I was. “Say the word though, and we’re there.”

  I had big things on my mind, so big that I’d neglected every other part of my life. I shook my head, and a vertebra popped in response. Damn, I was getting old. “No time.”

  “No time? Hell, Wy. When was the last time you were laid?”

  I stopped to think. I couldn’t remember. I’d been so horny at first, and then… I’d gotten used to it. It was a wonder my dick didn’t shrivel up and fall off. “I’ve got to deal with this potential mutiny. I think that’s a little more important than getting some.”

  Ryan chewed on his pen cap. “Debatable. Well, this is the way they’ve done things for longer than you’ve been alive. You really thought they’d let you turn things around and change them your first day?”

  No. I hadn’t thought that. But I had thought that my father would’ve primed them, softened things to make them more amenable to my suggestions. I’d barely gotten out the plans before they’d shut me down. Would it always be this tough? If so, how long would it be before they wore me down completely? “Maybe it’s time to do a clean sweep of the board and bring in new blood with fresher ideas.”

  “Probably,” Ryan said, tapping his pen on his pad, where he’d done nothing but scribble prismatic doodles. I knew he was thinking about the bylaw changes that would need to happen before I could get these dinosaurs out of there. “I don’t know how far you’re going to get with these assholes.”

  Yeah. I shoved a hand through my hair.

  In addition to the bylaw nightmare, getting fresh minds in the board seats came with another problem. I didn’t want to force anyone out. These men had served my father faithfully, and sweeping them would not only make me look like a weasel to loyal WE backers, it’d make me look like a wimp who couldn’t stand any backlash from my elders.