“Well…” I sucked in a breath, staring out through the window, the gentle waves of the sea seeming to wash something away as I did so. “Neither of us is getting paid based on outcomes, right?”
He smiled slightly at that.
“We can lead these horses to water, but we can’t make them drink. With this, if they get all stroppy and are like ‘I’m so thirsty. I want water. Why didn’t anyone think to get me some water?’ we can go…” I gestured theatrically at the computer screen with both hands.
His grin widened, illuminating his face, just like last time.
“All right, let’s pretend my brothers know their arse from a hole in the ground and get this party started.”
We were onlytwo people with specific skill sets, so there was only so far we could get with it, but there was something satisfying and daunting about plotting out the scope of the project. There was so much work to be done, and we’d need multiple contractors, no question about it. Lucien might be a controlling jerk, and I suspected Tobias was too, but they’d have to come around to the idea of outside help or cancel.
“We can’t cancel,” Max said, his smile fading when I mentioned this. “If we cancelled…” His lips became a thin line. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but we’re facing push back from our board. We sold a lot of shares to fund some of the future ventures we’re focussed on, and that’s given them a lot more power and say over what we do. We were pressured by them to host the symposium in Australia this year and to be the ones to organise it. If we can pull it off, it’ll boost our profile internationally, which is where we want to push next, now that our domestic markets are stable, but if we don’t get this off the ground…”
His hands reached for his laptop, but the answers weren’t found there, somehow we both knew.
“They want greater control of your company,” I said. I didn’t know that, but it’d probably be what I’d want, if I were buying lots of shares in a place like theirs. Plus, there’d have to be some seeing these apparent tensions between the alphas, wanting to exploit just that.
“We built Dacian on exploiting low-cost solutions to environmental problems,” he said, his eyes shining as he spoke, any of the slightly self-effacing man gone now. “We’ve made our money from the solutions themselves and the carbon credits we earn from having carbon neutral or carbon reducing products, but the board… It wants to reign that back, focus on some of the less effective but more lucrative options.”
“Money over the planet.” I nodded then. “And the only thing standing in their way is succeeding with this symposium?”
“They’ll come up with something else to try and destroy confidence in us if we succeed at that,” Max grumbled. “But yeah, this is the thing they’re focussed on right now.”
I looked at the daunting array of tasks and sub tasks, seeing work, so much damn work there, and stakeholders who were either not invested in the process or openly opposed to it.
Lucky I was up for a challenge.
“We can do this,” I said, my hand gripping his arm as I swore a vow I would no doubt regret later. “I’ll get each of your brother’s input, and then you can help me to manage this side of things.”
Only Max didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on my hand, on the place where I was touching him.
16
“Max?” I went to pull away, but his hand slapped down over mine, keeping me right where I was as his eyes went pure silver. “Max?”
“Why do you…feel like that?”
Max wasn’t here right now. His wolf was peering at me through his eyes, as evidenced by the way his head tilted to one side, then the other.
“Feel like what?” I asked, my voice becoming all high and thready. I tried to jerk my hand away, making several attempts to get it free, but that didn’t help.
“And the way you smell…” That came out as a feral growl, one that sent shivers up my spine as he leaned in close, almost grazing his nose along my neck. “What is that?”
“Black Opium,” I said brightly, jumping to my feet and then backing away. “It’s quite pretty and—”
“No.” He rose as well, but with an animal kind of grace. “That’s not it. It’s you. It’s like flowers—”
“It does have floral notes.” I backed away, fishing out my phone from my pocket and then clicking furiously through to the messages, bringing up Lucien’s work number.
“It’s vanilla and…something else—something you.”
“Yes.” Lucien answered the phone with one crisply uttered word.
“Can you come up?” I asked. “It’s Sage.”
“I can hear it’s you, Sage,” he replied. I heard something in the background muttered in a harsh tone. “You sound…flustered.”
“Your brother.”