Wrong Side Of The Table
845 Words
Harlow City was grey and raining.
Elyn stood at the arrivals exit watching the downpour like it had personally decided to inconvenience her and was succeeding.
Her driver was seven minutes away.
She had an acquisition meeting in ninety minutes.
And somewhere behind her in the stream of departing passengers was a man she had just spent four hours pretending not to be aware of and she was not thinking about that at all.
She pulled out her phone.
Three missed calls from her assistant Dana. Two emails from the board. One text from her stepbrother that she would read later when she had the emotional bandwidth for nonsense.
She called Dana.
“You landed!” Dana’s voice came through like she had been waiting beside the phone with both hands clasped. “How was the flight?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Dana.”
“Okay okay. So the Harlow meeting has been moved to the Meridian Tower boardroom. Forty second floor. The opposing party just confirmed twenty minutes ago and apparently they’re.”
“Send it to my email,” Elyn said. “All of it.”
“Already done. Also your dry cleaning is at the hotel and I booked you the corner suite because last time you said the other room had a.”
“Dana.”
“Too much talking, got it, sorry, bye.”
The call ended.
Elyn almost smiled.
Almost.
Her car pulled up. Black. Quiet. Exactly on time. She slid in and watched Harlow City blur past the window in streaks of grey and wet light and went through the acquisition brief in her head point by point the way she always did before a meeting.
Numbers. Leverage points. Weaknesses in their position. The moment they’d try to lowball her and exactly how she’d respond.
She had done this a hundred times.
She never lost.
The Meridian Tower lobby was all glass and cold marble and the particular silence of a building that took itself very seriously. Elyn took the elevator to the forty second floor, nodded at the receptionist, and was shown to the boardroom immediately.
She was twelve minutes early.
She was always twelve minutes early.
She set her bag down at the head of the table, because she always sat at the head regardless of what the seating arrangement suggested, and opened her laptop.
The door opened behind her.
“Ms. Crest.” A small man in a grey suit appeared. “The opposing party is just arriving. Can I get you anything while you,”
“Water,” she said without looking up. “Still. Room temperature.”
“Of course.”
He disappeared.
She pulled up the brief. Read through her opening position one final time. Rolled her shoulders once. Settled.
She was ready.
The door opened again.
Footsteps. More than one person. The rustle of bags and the murmur of quiet conversation between people who had clearly been working together long enough to not need full sentences.
Elyn kept her eyes on her screen.
Professional. Composed. Completely in control.
The footsteps stopped on the other side of the table.
She looked up.
A team of three. Two women flanking either side of a man in the centre who was in the process of setting his bag down and straightening his jacket and hadn’t looked up yet.
Then he did.
Dark eyes. Sharp jaw. The most irritatingly calm expression she had ever seen on a human face.
Rhys Calder looked at her from across the boardroom table.
Then he looked at the head of the table where she was sitting.
Then back at her.
“Ms. Crest,” he said.
His voice gave away nothing.
Elyn closed her laptop slowly. Folded her hands on top of it. Looked at him with the flat steady gaze that had made grown men reconsider their entire careers.
“Mr. Calder,” she said.
One of his team members looked between them uncertainly. “Do you two know each.”
“No,” Elyn said.
“Briefly,” Rhys said at the exact same time.
Silence.
He pulled out the chair directly opposite her. Sat down. Opened his own file. And looked at her across the table with the unbothered expression of a man who had just realised something deeply entertaining and was deciding what to do with it.
Elyn picked up her pen.
Four hours on a plane. A card in her jacket pocket. And now he was sitting across from her in a boardroom holding the other side of a deal she had every intention of winning.
She clicked her pen once.
“Shall we begin,” she said.
Rhys leaned back in his chair.
“We shall,” he said.
And he smiled.
Slow. Deliberate.
Like a man who had just realised this was going to be far more interesting than he expected.
Elyn looked down at her brief.
In her jacket pocket the card sat quiet and warm against the fabric.
She had definitely forgotten it was there.
Definitely.
- Writer
