Executive Perks Read Free Page B

have looked more at home on a beach poked itself shyly around the half open door of her office suite. “I have it on the highest authority from several sources that you stormed in here and are prepared to eat alive anybody who has the audacity to disturb you.” Her brother Brendan hung dramatically on her door as if fearful to enter farther and deadpanned, “So I thought I’d come over and say hi.”
    “Come on in, you idiot.” Virginia laughed in spite of herself. She rose to get them both a soda from her office refrigerator, handing her brother a can and then joining him on the overstuffed leather sofa.
    Brendan whipped a cellophane-wrapped packet out of his shirt pocket and offered it to Virginia. At her blank look, he clarified, placing it in her hand, “Marketing sent this up. It’s a new cracker BFD is going to carry. Go on. Try it.”
    “No thanks.” Virginia reached over to put the cracker back in his pocket. “Meeting Aaron Winston this morning made me lose my appetite.”
    “So I take it that the big bad wolf, Mr. Winston, is not just going to go away?” Brendan asked, taking a swig of the soda and crossing his long legs in their perfectly pleated gray pinstripe onto the low glass coffee table.
    Virginia took a drink of her own soda, buying time before she had to answer, finally saying, “I don’t know, Brendan, I think this guy is definitely on some kind of a power trip.”
    “Tell me something I don’t already know. But what’d he do today?”
    If it had been any one of her sisters sitting across from her, Virginia might have been tempted to give an honest accounting of Winston’s completely unexpected, unsolicited and unwelcome pass at her. But since it was her little brother, such full disclosure was out of the question. The impetuous Brendan would probably charge out to beat Winston up and end up with his surfer-boy good looks spoiled by a broken nose. Virginia didn’t stop to analyze why she assumed that Winston would win any such imagined fight. There was a toughness in him that she may have sensed or just automatically attributed to him in view of his rags-to-riches background in contrast to her brother’s privileged upbringing.
    From what she’d been reading about Winston in the last few days to educate herself on her adversary, he was an orphan who had built his lucrative and predatory company from the ground up, as he’d more than hinted at with his sneer about types that inherited their fortunes.
    She hedged Brendan’s inquiry as to the specifics of the meeting. “He seems completely unpredictable. Our meeting accomplished nothing. I finally just walked out.”
    Brendan seemed poised to pump Virginia for details when her secretary buzzed on the intercom.
    “It’s your attorney on line one. He says it’s urgent.”
    With Virginia’s nod of assent, Brendan rose to turn on the speaker phone on her desk. “What now?” Brendan began the conversation. “Did Winston dig up some Beckett second cousin in Peoria that wants to sell him some shares?”
    Virginia smiled, grateful that Brendan made such an easy joke of Aaron Winston. She had the feeling he was becoming less and less laughable to her.
    “On the contrary, my boy,” James Minlow boomed. “Virginia, are you there too?”
    “I’m here, James.”
    “I was a little skeptical, I must say, when you walked out after your informal meeting with Winston.”
    Virginia ignored her brother’s raised eyebrow in inquiry.
    “But whatever you said to him privately must have been quite convincing since I’m holding in my hands a very respectable draft of a six month standstill that Rye and I have worked up and Winston has agreed to sign. My secretary is emailing it to you as we speak.”
    Just as Minlow finished his sentence, Virginia’s secretary brought in a single-page document that Virginia and Brendan immediately hovered over, scanning, as Minlow continued. “There’s a right of first refusal, as well, so if he tries to sell