“Can’t you do that by talking to me?” he asked. “I’ve told you more about myself in five minutes than most people learn about me in years.”
Adele cocked her head to one side. “Really? Me, too.”
“How is that possible?” he asked. “You told me about your company. That’s about all you told me about yourself.”
“If you were CFO of Chase Manhattan,” she replied, “then you know a lot more about the corporate world than most people. And I told you I started my company from nothing. That tells you just about all you need to know about me. Most people don’t know that. All they see is the shiny exterior and the flash lifestyle I’m living now. The only people who know where I come from are my family and my closest, oldest, friends.”
He nodded. “You’re right. Most people have no idea what it takes to start a company from scratch. They don’t know how much work it takes and how focused and driven you have to be. My apologies. You did tell me a lot about yourself in a very short time.”
She wagged her finger at him. “And don’t you forget it.”
“So what’s your meeting about?” he asked.
“We’re meeting the reps from a company in Japan who want to import our products,” she told him. “I’m brushing up on my Japanese so I don’t look like such an idiot when I meet them.”
He raised one eyebrow. “You speak Japanese?”
Adele nodded. “I started learning about two years ago, when our products first launched in Japan. I thought, since we were doing a lot of business with Japanese people, I ought to learn the language. It sort of snowballed from there, and now I conduct most of the negotiations myself.”
Sam whistled. “Now that is impressive. That’s much more impressive than doing an art show in Seattle.”
Adele dropped her eyes. “Stop it.”
He smiled. “I’m sure you’ll do fine this afternoon. I’m sure you’ll wow everyone the same way you’re wowing me.”
“I know I will,” she replied. “I’m taking along one of my closest colleagues, who is Japanese, just in case there are any blanks. She’s the one who originally started teaching me. Besides, I’ve got our corporate contract attorney and another certified interpreter, just to make sure everything goes according to Hoyle.”
“What are you doing all that for?” he asked. “If you're taking along an interpreter, why don’t you just let the interpreter do their job? You don’t have to do the negotiations at all.”
“It’s not like that,” she replied. “Most Japanese businesspeople speak better English than you and I do. It’s the thought that counts. They see I’m making an effort to learn Japanese so I can communicate with them in their own language. It really makes an impression to make an effort, especially in Asia, because no one thinks anyone from the States is going to bother learning their language. But hey, listen to me. I shouldn’t be teaching grandma how to suck eggs. Right?”
He shook his head and smiled. “I’ll tell you something. I don’t miss any of that corporate stuff at all. Just hearing you talk about it makes me realize how lucky I am to be out and free.”
She grinned back at him. “Are you really so lucky if you’re a penniless clod who can’t make a living? Wouldn’t you rather have the security of a guaranteed salary?”
He closed his notebook and slid the pencil into the spiral binding. “Not for all the money in the world.” He put the notebook away and shifted toward the edge of the couch.
Adele put out her hand to stop him. “Where are you going?”
He cocked his head to one side. “Back to my studio. I’ve got a lot of work to do before next week.” He gestured toward her computer. “And so do you. I’ll see you around.”
This time, she laid her hand on his arm. “Not so fast, dopple-ganger. You don’t think we’re going to meet here in the Twilight Zone and just waltz out of each other’s lives, just like that... do you? We might have some cosmic destiny to fulfill together. What if we never meet again?”
He stared back at her. “Cosmic destiny? Like what?”
Adele hesitated. How could she explain why she didn’t want him to leave? “Well, I don’t know. I just don’t want you to walk away, not after we’ve just met. Can’t you stick around and talk a little longer?”
He tossed his notebook on the table and leaned back into the couch. “All right. What do you want to talk about?”
Adele floundered in confusion. “I don’t know. It just seems a little abrupt, don’t you think, to walk away from each other when we just met. Here we are. You just told me your whole story, and I told you my whole story. You can’t just leave.”
He laughed. “I didn’t tell you my whole story. Not by a long shot. There’s a lot more to me than that.”
“Well, there you go,” Adele replied. “Tell me that. What else is there to you?”
“Lots,” he said.
“I’m sure,” she replied. “So tell me.”
“I couldn’t,” he told her. “It would take years.”
She leaned back in the couch next to him. “I’ve got time.”
“What about your meeting?” he asked.
“That’s not until three o’clock this afternoon, and anyway, I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be. I can take some time to hear about you.”
“What about me?” he asked. “I’ve got work to do, and it can’t really wait. I better get going.”
“Well, can I at least see you again someday?” she asked.
He rounded on her. “Are you asking me out or something?”
“What if I was?” she asked. “It’s allowed in this day and age, you know. What do you say? We could get together for dinner tonight. You’ve got to eat sometime, and I’m sure a starving artist like you could use a good meal.”
“I eat just fine, I’ll have you know,” he replied.
“Come on, Sam,” Adele urged. “Have dinner with me tonight. We can talk about fulfilling our cosmic destiny together.”
He laughed. “I don’t know about that, but as long as we don’t talk too much about the corporate rat race, I’ll be happy.”
She waved his concerns away. “I promise I won’t talk corporate with you. You can tell me all about your art career.”
He broke into a smile. “All right. It’s a date. Where should I pick you up?”
Adele looked around mimicking a pantomime search for something. “You mean you actually have a car?”
He jerked his thumb toward the front door of the coffee shop. “Believe it or not, it still runs after all these years. Amazing what you can learn from a book. Oil changes, engine tuning....”
Adele shook her head. “No. I think I better pick you up.”
“Let me guess,” he returned. “You’ve got a gleaming black Bentley with a chauffeur?”
“No way,” she shot back. “I drive myself. I always have, and I always will. And I drive a Mini Cooper. Now tell me your address before I change my mind and be ready for seven-thirty.”
Chapter 2
Adele thanked her instincts, because she knew Sam’s place wasn’t going to be an easy find. She must have driven around the block looking for the address he gave her a thousand times before he finally came out and met her on the curb.
She examined the numbers on the mailboxes. “This isn’t the number you gave me. How on earth was I supposed to find this place?”
He slid into the passenger seat. “My place is back behind those bushes. You can’t see it from the road.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” she asked.
He buckled his seatbelt. “Let’s not worry about that... Now, where are we going for dinner?”
Sam’s effortless charm sluiced over her and as quickly as it had risen her irritation vanished.
Adele drove to her favorite Italian restaurant where the waiter expertly escorted them to a secluded booth in the back.
“The usual, Miss McQueen?” the waiter asked.
“Thank you, Sergio,” she replied. “And a bottle of
Pinot Gris, please.”
“Certainly, Miss McQueen.” He bowed and vanished.
Sam gazed after him and then studied the surroundings. “I’m guessing you come here a lot.”
Adele nodded and smiled. “It’s the best in town, and they have most fantastic wine list.” She flipped her napkin open and laid it in her lap.
He picked up his napkin, but didn’t open it. He put it over his leg and turned to the menu. He scanned the pages and put it down. “It’s kinda high-end, isn’t it?”
“Don’t worry,” she replied. “I’m paying. Get whatever you want.”
He put his hand out for the menu again, but let it fall onto the table instead. Sergio came back with the wine and two glasses. He poured for both of them, after Sam had politely declined to taste it and left a basket of bread in the middle of the table.
Adele took a sip of the wine and sighed. “That is so good. Try it.”
Sam shrugged and cracked one of the buttered bread sticks in half. “I’m more of a beer man, myself. I never really went for wine.”
Adele watched him demolish the bread stick before moving on to the rest of the bread in the basket. By the time she finished her glass of wine, the basket contained nothing but crumbs as Sam glanced around for the waiter.
“So how did you get on with work today?” she asked. “Are you going to be ready for your exhibit?”
Sam nodded. “That reminds me. I finished a few pieces today, so if you’re still interested in seeing some of my work, you could come by after dinner and I’ll show them to you.”
“I would love that,” she exclaimed. “You must have had a good day.”
“Not so good,” he replied. “My landlord raised my rent, and my refrigerator blew up. I don’t have the money to get it fixed, and I don’t have the money to pay the rent now, much less another hundred and fifty dollars a month. All in all, I’d say it was a rotten day.”
“So what are you going to do?” Adele asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I haven’t sold any pieces in a while, even though I’ve done all these shows. Maybe I shouldn’t be an artist after all.”
“What would you do instead?” she asked. “I thought you said you were happy doing this.”
“I am,” he replied, “and I wouldn’t want to do anything else. I suppose I’m just on edge about money.”
“There must be something you can do,” she told him. “Where there’s life, there’s always hope. That’s what my grandmother always used to say.”
He waved his hand. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. What about you? How did your negotiation go?”
“The negotiation went very well, up to a point” she replied. “We didn’t finalize the contract the way we thought we were going to. One of the negotiators on their team used to work in the Japanese Ministry of Education. He told us that it levies a different tariff on educational materials from outside Japan, and we would have to pay some ungodly import duty on every unit sold. He said the import duty takes the form of an increase in the exchange rate between the dollar and the yen, and the Bank of Japan would have to be notified of any contract we negotiated.”
Sam cocked an eyebrow. “That’s the first I’ve heard of anything like that.”
“I don’t understand it myself,” Adele agreed. “We’ve been importing into Japan for five years, and we’ve never had a problem before. We’ve even sold the books directly to the Ministry of Education, and they never mentioned it.”
Sam nodded. “I think your man might have been blowing smoke out of his ass. Maybe he wanted the negotiation to fail for some other reason. When I was at Chase, my specialty was yen conversion. If the Bank of Japan really applied this levy to imports, I would have heard about it.”
Adele’s face lit up. “Hey! I just had a brainwave. Why don’t you come on board with us as a consultant? You can help us through this contract negotiation.”
Sam held up both hands. “Hold it. I wasn’t suggesting anything like that. I don’t want to get mixed up in the corporate world again. I only mentioned it because I know a lot about yen conversions. I don’t want to go back to doing it for a living.”
“But you just said you didn’t know how you were going to pay your rent. You could work as an independent contractor. You wouldn’t be an employee or anything, and you’d be free to go back to your art when this negotiation ends. You could buy yourself a new fridge, and the deal would be done. What do you say?”
“No way,” he shot back. “I’ll find some other way to pay the bills. Just listening to you talk about it gives me a stomach ulcer.”
“But if there’s something you’re really good at, why not do it just to pay the bills? Why should you make yourself suffer in poverty when you could be making a real contribution to the world?”
“I am making a real contribution to the world,” he replied. “I’m an artist. I wouldn’t do that kind of work again if I was starving in the street! To me, all that corporate blood-sucking is the worst kind of slavery I can imagine, and it sucks the life out of anyone connected with it; right down to your customers. No. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
“It doesn’t hurt the customers or anyone else,” Adele snapped. “I get emails and letters every day from customers --even from little kids-- thanking me for writing the books. They tell me how great it is that someone makes learning and reading and doing math problems so fun and easy. I’ve gotten letters from parents whose children were in Special Ed classes, even on their way to juvenile hall, and now they’re achieving and looking at going to college, all thanks to my books. That’s not blood-sucking!”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Sam shot back. “All I know is I can’t go back to the corporate world, not for a new fridge, not to pay the rent, and definitely not to help you negotiate your contract. That’s the last thing in the world I want to or am going to do.”
“If that’s how you feel then I guess you don’t want to have anything to do with me, either, do you?”
“I didn’t say that,” Sam said.
But Adele wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easy. “This corporate world is my life. I fought tooth and nail to get where I am today, and no one is going to make me feel guilty about it. I’ve earned every penny and if I can walk into a store and buy a new fridge whenever I want one then I will and no one is going to make me out to be a blood-sucker. You don’t want to talk about my corporate life? Well, I guess that doesn’t leave us anything to talk about, does it? You obviously don’t want to hear about my negotiation, and you think I’m doing the worst thing anyone in the world can do. Maybe I better take you home right now and we can forget we ever even met.”
He held up his hands again. “Now, come on, Adele. You don’t have to fly off the handle. I’m just saying I don’t want to get mixed up in the corporate world again. I did my time, and I’m finished with it.”
“But don’t you see?” she said. “If we don’t talk about it, and you don’t want to get involved with it, then you don’t want to get involved with me. You don’t want to hear about me, so there’s nothing left to talk about.”
He grinned at her. “Sure there is. We can talk about my art, my life. You want to hear about that, don’t you?”
Adele stared at him. Then she burst out laughing. “You said you didn’t want to talk about that, either. You don’t give a girl many options.”
He ran his hand across the table and laid it on top of hers. “Don’t get mad at me. It’s our first dinner together, and I had a bad day. Can you forgive me?”
The warmth from his fingers radiated up Adele’s arm and melted the tension in her shoulders. “Sorry. I guess I’m still a little on edge from the negotiation falling through. I thought we had the deal in the bag, and then he sprang that business about the tariff on us at the last moment. I don’t understand it.”
He squeezed her hand. “If I was in your place, I would look into his background. I don’t think he worked for the
Japanese Ministry of Education at all. If I had to guess, I would say he probably gets a kick-back from one of the other producers of educational materials inside Japan. He gets paid to sabotage negotiations on imported materials. If you can unmask him, you’ll have your contract.”
Adele pointed at him. “This is why I, no, why we need you on our team. You just gave me a high-value consultation for free. I should pay you a consultation fee for having dinner with me.”
He let go of her hand and pulled his arm back. “Consider it a gratuity for now. Now where is that waiter of yours? I’m starving, and he hasn’t even taken our order.”
“He won’t take orders,” she told him. “This restaurant serves family style. They bring the same food to everyone. See, look. Here he comes with the first course. Pasta Parmesan and seafood marinara. Thank you, Sergio. Oh, by the way, Sam, did you want to order a beer?”
Sam’s cheeks went red and he dropped his eyes to the table. “No. I’ll stick with the wine.”
“Are you sure?” Adele asked. “They have really good beer here, and you haven’t touched your wine. Just tell Sergio what you want.”
“No,” Sam replied. “I don’t want a beer.”
Sergio disappeared again, and Sam and Adele bent over the food. For a long time, neither of them said anything. After a while, Adele wiped her face with her napkin.
“So,” she began, “how long have you been working as an artist.”
“Four years,” Sam replied.
“And how have you been supporting yourself in that time?” she asked. “Did you always have trouble making the rent?”
“I had savings from my time at Chase,” he replied. “I left with a huge package of shares and options, and I’ve been living on them ever since. This is the first time I haven’t had the money to cover my expenses. But I’m sure something will pop up.”
“Yeah,” Adele remarked. “Me.”
Sam made a face and forked another load of pasta into his mouth. “What about you? Did you have a background in education before you wrote your first book?”
Hang Em' Up: A Bad Boy Sports Pregnancy Romance Page 47
