Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

Right now, it was all she could do to stay in one place, but if she kept walking long enough, she’d begin to inch forward. It would take some time, but it would happen.

She would make it happen.

Chapter Forty-three

Twelve faces stared up at him from their places around the mahogany conference table.

Tell us the plan, their expressions said. Tell us what’s next.

Sean had seen this before, this blank expectancy, but he’d never really thought about it. Surely this wasn’t how a board was supposed to work, with one man leading and all the others following. He must have done something wrong, taken too much power onto his own shoulders somewhere along the way to have ended up with this imbalance.

Tell us the plan, the faces said, and for the first time he wanted to say, Figure it out yourselves.

But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t why he was here.

He picked up a stack of stapled handouts and tapped them on the table, lining up the edges unnecessarily before dividing the pile in two and handing it off to the men on either side of him. Mike took the second stack and gave him a confident grin.

Showtime.

Sean couldn’t be more ready. He’d finished the presentation on the plane and polished it up with Mike this morning. He would begin with the market report on the first page, covering all the doom-and-gloom numbers before he eased into an introduction of the solution he’d devised. Then, later on, Mike

would present the offer that had come in from Syntek, and the board would reject it. No need for it, because Owens has the situation under control.

The shiny way forward, Katie had called it.

But he couldn’t think about Katie.

Sean took a sip of water. He looked around the table, meeting each set of eyes. Carl, his marketing director. Kelly, the CFO. Eight board members, six of them men, two women. Ray Richardson the oldest, the man who’d helped Sean snag his first major capital investment in the days when the company was just a vision and a dog-eared proposal Sean was flogging all over town. And next to Ray, Carol Piaskowski, a trim woman in a red suit who was Sean’s favorite person on the board.

His people, hand-picked and capable.

“Good morning, everyone.”

Another sip of water as they waited. Tell us.

“Customer surveys show that our clients are losing confidence in us. The gap between what they think we can do for them and what they think our competitors can offer is closing, and we’re seeing it in the numbers. Three major canceled contracts last month, and a dozen in the past four quarters. These are clients who are going to SafeSoft and Huckabee and Bishop Price, where they’re getting exactly the same service we offer at a lower cost.”

He retrieved the remote from the table so he could bring up the first of his slides. “If you’ll take a look here, you’ll see the numbers over the past three years, and a slow but steady downward slide …”

Sean walked through the presentation without having to think. It was easy. The mantle of power had slipped over his shoulders, and he wanted to grin at all of them. Follow me. I can do this.

He kept himself back, though. They wouldn’t recognize him if he grinned. He didn’t have a reputation for smiling.

“Now take a look at this one,” he said. “These are our three biggest competitors. There’s really no question, if you look, that they’re closing the gap. Bishop Price had a great quarter …”

As he spoke on autopilot, he picked up his pen off the table and began flipping it. The board was used to that, too. One of his tics, a trick he’d developed to keep his head in the right groove.

He dropped the pen.

“Excuse me,” he said, and ducked down to pick it up.

Two dozen shoes under there. Black and brown loafers, red and navy heels. They gave him a strange feeling, a prickling unfamiliarity that he had to shake off.

It wasn’t the first time he’d felt this way. Since he got back, he kept having these moments. His bed was too big and too empty, and all those months in Ohio had turned California into a foreign land. The brightness of the manicured lawns seemed wrong for the desert. His sprinklers had come on in the middle of the night and woken him from a fitful sleep. The news on the drive to work warned of coyotes eating house cats.

He stood up and clicked quickly to the next slide.

“Okay. So. Where does that leave us? That’s the big question. How is Anderson Owens supposed to respond to these changes in the marketplace?”