I smiled. I did my best to modify my voice just enough that it wouldn’t sound faked but would hopefully fool my father. I’d practiced this with Adrian, but in my panic, I used a British accent instead of the slightly sultrier voice I’d worked on.
“I was in the right place at the right time,” I said.
“What part of England are you from?” my father asked. “You’ve got quite the unusual accent there. It sounds a little posh and street rat at the same time.”
I started to sweat. I knew my father well enough to know that almost nobody ever got something past him. He was shrewd to an absolute fault.
I could do this.
“We moved all around when I was a young… bloke,” I said. Dammit. I suddenly wished I’d watched way more British TV dramas. I could feel Adrain as tightly strung as a bow beside me.
My father’s mouth twitched into the suggestion of a smile. “I see. And how did you find your way to the States?”
“I interned for a business leadership program.” I made sure to pronounce “program” more like “pro-grum”. To my untrained ear, I sounded very British, but I could see the suspicion in my father’s prying eyes. “It wound up getting me connected to a man who was able to fly me over for a summer interning at Coleton in North Carolina. It went well enough that I decided to come make the change permanent.”
“So you worked for Adrian at his North Carolina position?”
Shit. We’d specifically talked about not letting that little fact come to light and I’d just handed it to him.
“No, actually,” Adrian said. “She didn’t land the job with Coleton. She got hired at a place across the street, and we kept running into each other at the coffee shop between both buildings.”
That was good, I thought. But my father regarded Adrian icily. “When I ask someone a question, I expect the person I ask to answer. Don’t interrupt us again.”
My skin went cold. This was bad. My father suspected something and he had just risked pissing off Adrian. I halfway expected Adrian to burst out angrily, but I was surprised to see he looked completely calm and collected.
“Well,” I said. “I think Adrian liked me because I had a head for business like he does.”
“Is that so?” my father asked, laughing. It was clear from his tone that he thought the idea of a woman being able to contribute anything meaningful in his world was a grand joke.
“She’s brilliant,” Adrian said, risking my father’s wrath.
My father stared him down. I’d seen that stare a thousand times, and it always ended with the person on the other end studying the ground in defeat after a few seconds at most. But Adrian held his gaze, refusing to back down.
After several long, uncomfortable seconds, my father laughed again. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.”
As if some silent test had been passed, my father relaxed and started working on the fried bread appetizer the cook had set in front of us. The bread was broken into little chunks and drizzled with a peach-colored sauce and a dark, sticky sweet sauce.
Adrian met my gaze, then winked. He slowly stirred up a conversation about business, and I listened in utter amazement as he worked his magic again. Except this time, it was my father he was charming, and I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone make a good impression on my father.
“It was honestly genius,” Adrian said, wiping his mouth with the napkin and setting it down. “That was when I knew I wanted to be a Coleton man. Any company with that sort of leadership was where I needed to be.”
My father sat up a little straighter, looking pleased with himself. “The business world isn’t so different from the animal kingdom. Some people don’t see that. They think there’s room for us all to co-exist. But at Coleton, we are the lions. We use the carcasses of their failed businesses to grow more dominant. We will take any advantage we can to keep expanding and increasing our grip on the market.”
Adrian nodded, even though I could imagine the rage he probably felt boiling inside at that sentiment. “Exactly. It’s too bad Pulse is still out there.”
My father’s lip curled. Pulse was Coleton’s main competitor. They were a similarly minded company that had branched out into hundreds of submarkets. At the moment, they weren’t as large as Coleton, but they were growing faster than Coleton was and I’d heard my father rant about wanting to take them down dozens of times.
“Pulse is nothing,” my father said.
“I agree. But I know a guy who works there near the top. By the end of this month, they will be publicly traded.”
My father scratched his chin. “You’re sure about this?”