Chapter 1 #4
“Barnum. Skip the niceties with them and dive straight into numbers. Sherwood can be trouble sometimes. They’re not as keen on us after the last director.” He didn’t mean to say that, but there it was. Connor straightened his tie just to give his hands something to do.
Thinking about Devore was one thing. Having to talk about him was another.
But Nate was looking at him, something strained in his expression, more so than Connor was used to seeing when the subject of his former boss came up around Alarie.
“Yeah. I, uh, heard a bit about him,” Nate said in a low voice, like he knew he shouldn’t be talking about his predecessor.
How much? Connor wondered, before deciding that whatever it was, it wasn’t nearly enough. Alarie only had some of the picture of what Devore had been like behind closed doors.
But he didn’t think much more about it.
“You need to connect your phone to your Duo Account so I can manage your incoming calls and messages,” Connor explains, not skipping a beat.
Nate gave him a questioning look.
“You want to look at my phone?” He asked, wary. Not that Connor could blame him.
“I’m not looking at your phone, Mr. Santos. I’m managing your incoming calls, messages, and any scheduled appointments.” Connor hesitated for a moment before adding, “You’ll be able to see my location through the app. I’ll show you how to do that.”
“What, like a stalker?” Nate blurted out before catching himself, perhaps embarrassed. “Well, it’s a little over the top.”
Connor silently agreed. Not that he’d ever admitted that before.
“It’s a large building, almost six floors,” he said simply. He didn’t say that he was used to having executives keep tabs on him.
A notification window appeared up in the lower left-hand side of Nate’s screen, warning of the upcoming investor meeting in less than an hour. Nate hovered over the heading with his cursor, glancing back at Connor.
“Investor Introduction Meeting? Sounds important.”
Connor nodded.
“There’s a slide deck in the Meetings folder on your desktop.
We’re splitting this up into two meetings, a couple institutions at a time.
You’ll introduce yourself, they’ll introduce themselves.
They’ll have questions. I’ve prepared a memo for answering anything they’ll ask you.
Everything there was approved through Public Relations, so it’s something you can fall back on if they’re asking you details you can’t speak to just yet. ”
He watched as Nate clicked through the documents, reading them, twin lines between his brows furrowing in concentration. He even reached for a notepad and began to scribble a few points down. That was a good sign. Connor couldn’t say every executive cared enough to read through pre-meeting memos.
“These projections,” Nate hovered his cursor over one of Connor’s notes about quarterly earnings, “That’s what I’ll be presenting to them, right?”
“No. Finance prepared those. They’ll already have these numbers going into our meetings.”
It was a strange question, he thought, before dismissing it. Maybe Nate’s last role had him reporting revenue directly to investors. It wasn’t unheard of in Investor Relations. Different principals had their own way of doing things..
“Okay, just making sure.”
Nate didn’t have much else to say to that.
He went back to poring through the memo prepared for him, clearly playing aloof and unaffected.
It made Connor feel sick. Not because he was furious, bu It was as if some kind of alarm bell was sounding, one Connor couldn’t hear but could sense imperceptibly through the airwaves, the hairs at the back of his neck standing straight up.
Danger.
But where was it? What exactly was the danger here?
There wasn’t any. Connor was just nervous–well, he wasn’t used to feeling nervous. Fuck, he was hoping he might feel more reassured than this by now, but he had no idea how to read Nate. He fiddled with the cuffs of his shirt a moment.
“Would you like me to give you some time to prepare?” Connor offered. Maybe that would be better. He could give Nate some space to get up to speed, and a walk around the building would do his nerves some good. “I can bring you coffee, perhaps.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be great,” Nate answered, not looking up at Connor. “Uh, taking requests?”
“Not much of a barista, but I can try.”
That had Nate looking up, looking embarrassed.
“Yeah, no–uh, I didn’t mean to–obviously you’re not a barista–I mean, you’re a real–uh, professional–”
“It’s okay, I can get you coffee,” Connor cut in, a little amused by how Nate seemed to feel like he’d insulted him by accident. It was far from the worst thing a director had ever said to him. “What’ll you have?”
He watched Nate’s expression soften, that smile of his returning. Of course, that had Connor pulling out his phone, just to have something else to look at that wasn’t his new principal's face.
“Espresso, if you can,” Nate said. “Black if you can’t.”
“Espresso,” Connor thumbed in. “Got it.”
“Man, I can see why they spoke so highly about you,” Nate said, unprompted. “You’re really on top of things, you know?”
Oh, did he know.
This was what Connor did, the extent of his usefulness. He got the coffee. He made the memos. He organized the meeting prep. He stayed in the background.
“Let me know if there’s anything else I can get for you. You can track me on your phone,” Connor said simply, not acknowledging Nate’s comment.
And when he turned to leave, he pretended not to notice the dark eyes that followed him out.