by Lexi Cross
Our individual success was going to be a competition. I could feel it already. The more successful she was, the more successful I was going to strive to be. And I only hoped that as she saw me gain more success on and off the field, she would fight for the same on her side.
I wanted to see her succeed, and I wanted to see her climb higher and higher by reaching the top and taking her company up with her. Scott Enterprises was a huge multi-national corporation, and they worked within several industries. I didn’t even know everything they had their hands in, but the company owed it all to her father’s determination to get out of the gutter.
By the time I met Brooke in high school, he had been successful for a number of years already. From what she told me, though, it hadn’t been that long since they were at the bottom. They started with nothing but a few dollars in her father’s pocket and a dream to create something that would continue to support his family for generations after he was gone. He had done just that, it seemed.
I found that I wanted to do the same. I wanted to be able to support a family through a career built around the sport I loved. And I had Brooke to thank for that drive. She had inspired me to find something to do off the field.
I got a shower and dressed for work, wearing khakis and a dark blue button-down shirt with a wide collar. I wasn’t going to be on the field, so I didn’t need my uniform or anything like that, but I wasn’t ready to start dressing down for work just yet.
Despite the fact that I was getting married, and the tabloids were well aware that I was with one woman now, I still had a reputation to uphold. I had a lifestyle to portray to my teammates, especially the guys in the network with me, who had been keeping their distance since my injury.
I figured I would try to call a meeting soon, to see where we were and make sure everything was going the way we had planned it for this season. If anything was going differently, we needed to change our outlooks within the network to make sure the money was going where it was supposed to go regardless of what was really happening out on the field week after week. The money was supposed to be coming to our pockets, regardless.
It was hard to get motivated for work when all I really wanted to do was to drive up to Brooke’s office and convince her to take the rest of the day off, or find the boardroom and take her on the table, preferably not in front of the board, but if they were there and interested in watching, I wouldn’t have stopped them.
I took it easy when I arrived at work. I found that I was itching to play, so I walked out to the practice field to watch the rest of the team as they ran drills and practiced for the upcoming game. Practice was a daily ritual. We ran drills, had meetings to focus on the previous game and the next team we were facing at the next game. We ran plays when necessary and watched films of past games to study what worked and what didn’t.
Spending so much time in the office, I had been briefed on what the owner was looking at with us. Mr. Clark had put all of his trust into Coach Hawkins to make sure we were ready game after game for a championship season, but he was really focusing on the press and the public opinion of our team.
There had been a few scandals over the past few years, a couple of them involving the three of us in the network. Lucky was the worst. He didn’t care about what kind of trouble he got into. Sometimes I couldn’t tell with Harley if he cared or not. And, of course, I had already begun working on improving my image. Apparently by being the first one on the team to show a change publicly, I had created a buzz around myself. I hadn’t realized it on my own because I never really saw it, but I had drawn a lot of attention, making me a kind of celebrity among my teammates.
Celebrity worked in my favor both publicly and in the higher ranks of our team ownership. I had caught the owner’s attention, in a good way, which meant that when it was time to promote players publicly or for endorsements, I was working my way up front. Of course, Harley would always be in front of me as the quarterback, but I could always position myself closely behind him.
In the marketing and PR fields I wanted to enter with the team, name recognition made a huge difference when making arrangements with promoters and event organizers. I was learning that. Hopefully, I wouldn’t be doing it much longer. Hopefully, I would be back on the field soon. That was the plan.
Chapter Nineteen
Brooke
My big meeting, the one I had told Jake about that morning before leaving his house, was with the board. My father had been talking with them about my decision to marry to fulfill the conditions for him to surrender the company to me, and they called a meeting to discuss the process and make sure I fully understood the condition as it had been approved by the board.
Of course, the board meeting was first thing in the morning. As soon as I arrived, I met Hollie, my legal representation for this process. I had called her on the way to the office and explained to her that the board had sprung a meeting on me at the last minute, and that I was more than a little concerned that they were going to try to weasel me out of the company, even with the pending marriage that would have otherwise met the requirements they had set before me.
“You ready?” she asked as I walked through the glass doors at the ground floor of my father’s building. She carried a briefcase and wore a black suit with a white blouse underneath. She looked severe and powerful.
“I hope I am,” I replied. We didn’t even greet each other. We just teamed up immediately and took the elevator up to the board room, entering side by side to take our seats at one end of the table.
I was surprised to see my father sitting at the other end of the table. He rarely ventured into the office, but I figured he felt he had enough reason to be there to actually put some effort into his position.
“Miss Perry, so nice to see you,” my father said, almost sarcastically, as he stood to greet us.
“You, too, Mr. Scott. I hope you all understand the reason I am here today. My client, your daughter, the future head of this company, has asked me to be present during any proceedings concerning her promotion to the retired CEO’s former position, which is currently open,” Hollie explained, reminding the board of their precarious position as a corporation operating without a head.
“That’s just a technicality,” one of the smug board members commented, to the amusement of the others. The room filled with the uneasy laughter of the executives.
“It is a technicality, but it is one that may, in fact, bind some of the hands in the room if anyone decides to get greedy,” Hollie continued.
“Thank you, Miss Perry. Now, if we could get down to business, I have a lunch date, and I would like to be out of here in time,” protested my father.
“Yes, please,” I said. “I do have a company to run.”
“Great. Now that we’ve agreed upon a plan for today, please turn your attention to the packets in front of you on the table,” my father instructed us.
We each had a packet of papers stapled together. I flipped through and recognized it as the official procedure my father was going to use for turning the company over into my name after his retirement.
Well, he had already retired five years ago, so I wondered why he had taken so long to mention the marriage stipulation. Scott Enterprises had been running without a legitimate CEO for five whole years. It had also occurred to me that there might have been laws and regulations against letting the company run blindly like that for so long. I had taken for granted, of course, that his legal department had already handled all of that.
Thinking about it again, I pulled out a pen and jotted my concern down on the front page of the packet to show Hollie later. It would have been something to consider using against him to get the company without meeting any arbitrary conditions to humor the old man.
I loved my father. I really did. Despite some of the problems we’d had when I was growing up, I knew that he loved me. He had his own special ways of showing it, but he was a busy man, a driven, ambitious man. I may have been number one in his life, but
that often meant having to settle for a number two spot behind his work, because I understood that what he was doing was for me. Eventually.
Taking over behind him at the company he had built, however, threatened to drive us apart, and it had. We hadn’t always been the closest family, certainly. There was no denying that simple fact. But working together, I realized that the company had, to some extent, actually replaced me as his number one priority. By the time I rose to the top of the ladder, he was no longer running the company for me. He had begun running it for himself at some point, working for the sake of seeing how far he could take the company.
While I continued to admire his ambition, I had begun growing bitter over the fact that I was an afterthought compared to his work. Things were really starting to fall apart between us now that it was time for him to turn the company over to me and he was doing everything in his power to keep that from happening.
It was time, I thought, to start finding ways to attack his credibility and get around his ridiculous stipulations. But that was before he even told me what was in the packet we were looking at. What I thought I understood about the transition was not true, and there was another reason why he wanted me to marry, beyond just presenting a stable and responsible image of myself to the board.
“This document details the transition process by which my daughter, Brooke Scott, will inherit the company once she is married, and not before. If you will turn to page three, the third paragraph on that page details the way in which ownership will transfer over. I will give everyone a moment to read the paragraph before I paraphrase,” my father continued.
That was when I realized why I needed to be married. The company wasn’t really transferring to me.
“Basically what this is saying,” my father explained after giving us a moment to read, “is that the majority of Brooke’s share of the company will actually transfer over to her husband. If things go the way we are planning currently, the company will be transferring to Jake Hall, which is not a bad choice, actually. He will own more of the company than Brooke, but Brooke will be the new CEO. The position will automatically transfer to her unless she decides to forfeit the position and allow the board to vote in a new CEO.”
I looked at Hollie, who seemed to be rereading the passage quietly to make sure that was, in fact, what it said. I wanted her to speak up and tell them that they couldn’t do that. I wanted her to tell my father he was full of shit, but she didn’t say anything.
Instead, I said something. “Why didn’t you explain this to me at first? Is it because you decided to add it once you realized I was actually going to go through with a marriage? Is this because you don’t want me to have the company? And if that’s the case, why the hell not? I thought the plan from the beginning was to build a corporate empire that I would eventually inherit once you stepped down. You’ve been down for the past five years, and I’ve been here every day, running this company by myself while the rest of the board shows up for the occasional meeting.” My words escaped my mouth before I realized what I was saying. All of my thoughts were simply spilling out onto the table in front of my father and everyone.
Hollie’s firm hand rested on my shoulder. “That’s enough for now. We are going to look over your options to see if there is anything we can do to combat this ridiculous condition. In the meantime, stall your wedding with Jake. Do not get married until this has been sorted out,” she advised me in front of the room, basically letting them know she was going to challenge the board.
“Dear, I’m sorry. These stipulations were put into place when the board was first convened. We believed it necessary, as I mentioned before, to prove that you were responsible and stable enough to run the company. I never imagined that you would be stable and responsible enough on your own, as you are today, sitting here before us with your own legal counsel because you know how important this meeting is. However, at this time, the board has been reluctant to change the stipulation. They still think it is somewhat necessary, and that if you are as responsible as you seem to be, you will continue to play by the rules so that you will be able to change them yourself when the time comes,” my father explained.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My father, who had always raised and treated me as an equal, had actually looked at me as inferior at one point in my life. And as I grew up, under his careful watch, to be as strong and independent as he was, he never once thought to change that condition in his company’s charter.
“This is bullshit,” I declared. “I’m not buying it.”
“That’s enough for now,” Hollie cautioned me.
“Damn right it’s enough. I’m not going to settle for this bullshit.” I stood up to leave. Grumbles of disapproval made their way through the room as board members shifted uncomfortably in their chairs and cleared their throats, looking for my father to restore order to the meeting.
My father attempted to defend his position. “Brooke, dear, I’m sorry, but that’s the way it’s going to have to be.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way. It never did. I’m still not convinced you didn’t go behind my back and have this condition changed once you realized I was going to go through with the wedding you requested. But don’t worry, I’m going to challenge you one way or another. This is not going to happen. When you turn Scott Enterprises over to me, you’re turning the company over to me completely, not to my husband, who is not now and has never been part of this company. I am especially not going to stand by and watch you hand the company over to someone from the outside after I’ve been working for you for the past ten years, running it on my own for the past five while you pretended to retire.”
“No, Brooke. Come on,” Hollie protested, standing up to lead me out of the board room. “Don’t say anything else. We’ll figure out another way,” she said as we left the room.
I was shaking by the time we made it out into the hallway.
“Come on, let’s go talk about it over some coffee,” Hollie said, taking me by the hand and leading me to the elevator. We went to the ground floor and walked down to the coffee shop a couple of blocks from the office building.
“I know what I’m going to do,” I told her.
“Oh God, what?” Hollie asked in a cautious tone that told me she dreaded my answer.
“Remember the prenup? I want to add an amendment to it that once we divorce, Jake’s shares in the company will be transferred to me,” I said.
Hollie just laughed. “That was what I was going to suggest as the easiest way to remedy this situation.”
“Yeah, but there’s so much more I want to do,” I told her.
“Like what?”
“Like, let me think on it and I’ll get back to you. My father’s lack of faith in me really hurts, and I want to make him pay for it.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Hollie warned me.
“I know, but I’ll find a way to make him pay, and I will let you know what I figure out to do to him. Then you can let me know if it’s something we can do.” I closed my eyes and took a few slow breaths to calm myself.
“Sounds like a plan, but in the meantime, let’s enjoy some coffee. Take the rest of the day off, and I’m going to put that amendment into the prenup. But this means you’re going to have to get him to sign it,” she reminded me.
“I know.” I sighed. It also meant that we were going to have to go through with the divorce. I wondered if I would be able to convince him to do it just for show until we could get all of our legal nonsense squared away and remarry.
I wondered if Hollie would have gone for putting that into the prenup as well.
Chapter Twenty
Jake
Can we meet somewhere for lunch?
Sure, like where?
There’s a little diner a couple of blocks from the office. I’ll send you the address.
Apparently, Brooke’s meeting that morning hadn’t gone well. She texted me mid-morning asking to meet for lunch. I had this unshakable fee
ling that it had something to do with our arrangement, the marriage we were staging for her father so she could get the company. That was a pretty big deal, and as we got closer to the date we had chosen for the wedding, it seemed to reach the forefront of our minds.
I met her at the small diner near her father’s office building. It was a quaint, greasy little place full of suits from all the nearby offices. There were also a few folks from the street itself coming and going, grabbing small cups of drinks or soup.
Brooke had taken a seat by the window looking out onto the street. I sat down with her.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She just shook her head and let out a long, exasperated breath.
“Brooke, is it the message?” I probed.
