The Big Boys' League: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings 3)

He’d clearly found a way to identify me by sight, too. “Axel Bennett?”

He was standing in front of the two of us now, shaking my hand. Aileen seemed frozen in her dismay; well, it was too late to just shove her off now. “Mal Cowen, this is Aileen Anderson, the daughter of one of my developers.”

Cowen was looking her up and down, but mostly up: her chest was more or less on level with his face. I really didn’t fucking want this guy staring at her tits. Come to think of it, I didn’t even want all those people who had gotten that fake photo of her staring at that and thinking they were seeing her tits. I wanted to get going right now and delete it off every device that had saved it. Maybe delete the eyeballs of anyone who had looked.

And none of this was what I was supposed to be thinking about right now.

“Definitely not one of your employees,” said Cowen, winking at me. The fucking creep. What century had he dropped in from where women with tits and arses and pretty dresses couldn’t also have functioning brains?

“Well!” Aileen drew his attention back to her face with her sharp voice. “It’s getting pretty steamy out here. Let’s head inside.”

So somehow I was left with no choice but to follow her and Mal Cowen, who was sticking very closely to her, back into my own house. Aileen was grinning as she schmoozed him up, probably felt like getting my head unscrewed over this was the best thing she’d ever been able to do. Well, it was up to her now to prove she hadn’t just fucked everything up.

She did stay mercifully unobtrusive when I led the way to my workshop and showed Cowen around my prototypes. He didn’t say much during my prepared spiel, just nodded and grunted sometimes, which left me pretty resigned by the time we’d done the rounds and he folded his arms and shot me a smirk.

“I mean, it all looks very nice, I can see you’ve prepared hard which I appreciate, but… what’s your point of difference?”

This was not a question I had prepared for. Couldn’t he see I was the fucking selling point of this whole thing? Once I got my start I’d be unstoppable, with a new killer product out every year. Two a year sometimes. I grasped for the thing that was foremost in my mind when I was planning to overwhelm someone with my ideas. “It’s educational…”

Cowen waved me off. “Every fucking outfit is producing something educational these days, you should know that. People are labelling bath bomb kits for girls as science education, for goodness sake. That shit’s full of glitter! As if any of the target market want a science education anyway.”

Aileen seemed to have missed Cowen ogling her earlier, but she definitely picked up on this new bullshit. The look she was giving him reminded me of Mum, when she’d decided that someone was in trouble. That was not a comparison I wanted to have to make, and this was not a situation I wanted to be in.

Aileen was moving forward. I could kiss goodbye to this deal.

Cowen was still waffling. “Honestly, the number of parents who come to my shops asking for educational toys has plummeted. They’ve all realised if they buy that shit for their kids, someone has to supervise them. Help them. Clean up the glitter. These days, they just say to me, ‘give us something that will let us ignore them.’ That’s the shape of parenting these days, that’s the industry we’re selling things in.”

Aileen scoffed. “It’s a phase. It’ll pass.”

Cowen turned on her like he was outraged her mouth had opened and it wasn’t to take his dick. Aileen stood firm. “Look, I have two little stepbrothers, and I know what my stepmum’s like about them. Yeah, she wants an excuse to ignore them some of the time, but she also feels terrible about that, like if she had something she could do with them that was easy, didn’t require her to go back to university to know how to use it, and let her dip in and out as convenient… she’s be all over that.”

Cowen still looked mad, but he was clearly having trouble completely dismissing good ideas, even when they came out of a cute little package like that. And I was suddenly certain that wherever Aileen was going with this, there was a good idea at the end of it. “With kids around the house, I guess you’ve got your finger on the pulse of that market.”

I knew she didn’t have those kids around the house all the time now, and I saw the way her lips dipped just a little. But she just said, “Haven’t found the right woman yet huh, Mr. Cowen?” and then went straight into listing some of the products her brothers had enjoyed over the past twelve months, closing that subject without letting him get a response in. And he was fucking smiling a little. This little brat knew how to make people like her.

“Here’s what I think the appeal of Axel’s product is.” Aileen had taken on a posture I didn’t see often with girls: she was standing tall, hands on hips, highlighting everything that was good about her in a womanly way as well as how confident she was in what she had to say. Most of the girls I spent my time around had plenty of the one but not necessarily the other. “Any claims of educational value? At best, minimal… at worst it’s unethical to advertise that way. But as a talking point, something parent and child can discuss without necessarily needing to understand? Why did it go that way? I was expecting it to do this and it did that… Brilliant!”

She was definitely onto something. My mind was already going. “A coffee table toy,” I blurted out, with somewhat less than my usual smoothness. “This is a product that will appeal to the sort of parent who has a coffee table and coffee table books. Something to add to the display that they can pick up alongside their child and all of them can feel a bit smart playing with it.”

“That would play really well with many of my customers,” Cowen remarked. “All the sorts of wankers who have coffee table books they never read and expect their kids to be little intellectuals.”

“I just have one design for the Coffee Table Companion in the pipeline at the moment,” I said, smooth like this had been the plan all along, down to the product name. “But if I obtain sufficient interest from this initial offering, there are many different directions I can take it in. It’s a line that can grow as much as necessary.”

Cowen glanced at Aileen, who gave him a look that would have said to me, “Frankly, I think you’re an arsehole.” And I could tell he loved it.

“I can see why Lucas directed you to me,” he said. “I think you’ve got a lot of potential.”

Something hit me then, a reality that had been in effect for days now, but one I’d been able to successfully ignore until now. Maybe it was Aileen’s presence making all the difference now. She had those no-bullshit eyes on, and I got caught too.

“I’ll order fifty to begin with, on the understanding that I’ll take more if they sell,” Cowen said, which softened it a bit, but not entirely. The reason Lucas had made me meet with this guy on my own instead of brokering it himself was because he didn’t really believe in me. He thought maybe I had enough potential that he was willing to put me in touch with his contacts, get a few dollars out of the deal if they materialised, but he wasn’t here endorsing me himself.

And as it turned out, he was justified, because I would never have gotten to this point without goddamn Aileen’s interference. I couldn’t believe how she was able to make that pig like her—and believe in her. She really had that entrepreneurial charm that you were supposed to possess to succeed in this business.

Maybe I’d just learned I didn’t have that in the necessary quantities.

Well I wasn’t going to think about that right now. We went out to see Cowen off. He tried to kiss Aileen on the cheek in parting, but she raised her eyebrow at him and said, “You going to try that on Axel as well?” and he behaved. Seriously, fucking incredible.

I wanted this woman who couldn’t be had by just any man. I also wanted to get her the hell away from me where I would never have to see her again, because she was trouble for sure. Any woman who felt that good to be around, who so smoothly moved into being a team with you, was a whole lot of trouble. I was meant to be a solo operator, not part of a team.