21. Noah
21
NOAH
“ I want you right here.” I pointed at the chair next to where I was setting up for the town hall.
“Are you sure? Don’t you want Jim or Danny there?” Maddy asked nervously, glancing around the room.
I appreciated my two top agents, but there was no need to keep them close during my monthly status check meeting. And I wanted my team to understand that Maddy Malone was more than an assistant. Without her, we wouldn’t have signed Garrison, and I was going to make a point of making sure everyone knew it. Having her seated off in a corner wouldn’t do.
“Absolutely not. This is the first town hall since you’ve come on board, and I want to set a standard for the way everyone views your role.”
Maddy shot me a triumphant smile, and it took everything in my power not to sweep her into my arms for a kiss.
Everyone started filing into the conference room, and I noticed a few raised eyebrows when they spotted Maddy at the head of the table beside me. It certainly wasn’t a position where I’d have put my assistant in the past. But no one questioned it. They knew better. Everything I did was calculated, so they all seemed to implicitly understand Maddy’s placement was intentional.
Everyone but Beckett Tate.
He strode in the door two minutes before I was set to begin and stopped in his tracks when he saw her.
“Well, well, look who’s joining the big boys!”
Renata Tailor, another junior agent, cleared her throat angrily.
“Was that anti-feminist of me?” Beckett laughed. “Sorry, Renata. But wow, Maddy. Look at you!”
It was just like Beckett to speak the subtext. He was a hard worker and an effective junior agent, but I’d always found him to be abrasive, a little too confident that his charm was enough to close deals. And I hated the way he was looking at Maddy. There was something knowing in the way he was watching her, and it made me irrationally angry.
“We’re starting, Beckett,” I said, letting my displeasure seep into my voice.
“Sorry, boss man! I was on the phone with Lincoln Jones, and that’s not the kind of guy you want to rush, am I right?”
I sighed. He’d been courting Lincoln for months with no movement, so I wasn’t impressed with the excuse.
Instead of grabbing a chair at the far end of the room Beckett sauntered behind the rest of the agents already seated at the table and pulled a chair up right next to Maddy. He had the gall to give me a “go ahead” nod as he popped open his laptop. I glanced at Maddy and noticed she was leaning slightly away from him, her gaze fixed on her fingers hovering over her keyboard.
I pressed on. “Thanks for being here folks. Before we get started, I wanted to take a few minutes to officially introduce our newest team member. Most of you have already met my new assistant Maddy Malone, but what you might not realize is what she’s done for PSM in the brief time she’s been here.”
“ Garrison ,” a voice toward the back of the room hooted, and a few people clapped.
“Exactly,” I said, pointing to where the voice had come from. “Not only did Maddy pull a Hail Mary to get me a flight to the meeting at the last minute, she also cleared up a misunderstanding and made sure that Matthew and his mom June understood exactly what PSM stands for.”
People started clapping before I’d even finished speaking. I glanced at Maddy and saw she was flushing with pride.
“And that European scouting trip? Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have been able to cover half of it without Maddy’s attention to detail.” I paused and glanced at Beckett. “ That is why Maddy is here at the table with us. She delivers. Some of you could take a lesson from her.”
Beckett didn’t dare meet my glare. I let my words sink in before continuing with the meeting.
I sped through the rest of my points, eager to get to the point where my team could fill me in on where they stood with their accounts. I knew it made some of them uncomfortable to have to present to me in front of the rest of the group, but every agent knew when they came on board that I required team updates. I also didn’t mind that the meetings kept them on their toes.
I put Beckett in the hot seat first. “What else do you have for me aside from Jones, since he won’t commit?”
I hated to admit I enjoyed watching him squirm a little.
“Bud Watkins and I are considering a Malibu Nights Hard Seltzer deal that looks pretty good. They want placement on the hood of his race car, which works well since Radley Tools is stepping down at the end of the season.”
I frowned at him. “Does he still have the Lost Dog Light Beer deal?”
“Yeah, he does.”
“And did you neglect to consider the brand conflict presented by having him represent alcoholic beverages from competing companies?”
Beckett sputtered a little. “It’s not beer, it’s seltzer . Totally different.”
I saw a few of my more seasoned agents grimace and look down at their laptops. Maddy was glued to hers as well.
“You do realize that Lost Dog’s parent company, Achen-Folds, makes a hard seltzer, correct?”
Beckett’s mouth dropped open.
“A Lost Dog –branded hard seltzer.”
“Uh…”
It was becoming harder and harder to keep from blowing up at him. “How long have you been working on this new deal?”
“Not long,” he said quickly.
“If you’re talking logo placement then it’s longer than you should’ve. Colossal waste of time.” The room was pin-drop quiet. If there was anything I hated it was wasting time, and my team knew it. I glanced around the room. “Who’s next? Anita?”
I saw the junior agent swallow hard. She knew she had to deliver something worthy after Beckett’s strikeout.
“Um, I’ve got a green light for a Katarina Swenkova partnership.” She’d only been working with the tennis player for a short time, but she was already doing some impressive positioning work with her. “The Lacoste contract is a go. We’re ironing out the specifics of frequency of use during practice and logo types before we send the contract to legal.”
“And that’ll be Katarina’s first official endorsement under PSM, correct?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
She sat a little straighter, beaming. “It will.”
“A round of applause for Anita, please,” I said, starting the clapping. The first deal for a client was always something to be celebrated, especially when one of my greener agents had secured it.
I started to move on to the next agent when Beckett spoke up.
“I thought you wanted us partnering with fashion forward clothing brands,” he said. “Lacoste is what old country club grannies wear.”
Anita started to respond, but I held my hand up to silence her.
“Lacoste is a legacy brand that’s synonymous with tennis.” I didn’t bother hiding the frustration I was feeling. “And Katarina is new to the circuit, so scoring attention from such a well-established brand is a major win. It shows they believe in her chances of going all the way. Putting them together shows that Anita did her homework. Maybe you could learn something from her.”
Beckett didn’t answer and didn’t even look at me, but then again, there was nothing he could say to save himself and he knew it.
“Who’s next?”
Senior agent Greg Landry took center stage and delivered a monologue about the golfer he was working with that flipped the mood of the room back to positive. By the time he finished the story about how he’d gotten his golf cart stuck in a sand trap, everyone around the table was laughing, even Maddy.
Everyone but Beckett.
I watched him lean close to her and whisper into her ear in a way that sent my hackles up. Whatever he said made Maddy gasp in shock then slam her laptop closed. My hands curled into fists as she pushed back from her chair and speed-walked from the room.
Beckett looked around the room and shrugged, wearing a stupid smile. “I guess the boss’s girl can’t take a joke.”
It was tempting as hell to punch him.
But that would be wildly unprofessional.
I could reprimand him for whatever he’d said—Maddy wouldn’t have responded like that if it hadn’t been totally out of line—but I’d need to actually find out what it was first. And I wasn’t going to press Beckett for it. Not when it seemed all too likely that having it repeated in front of everyone would be embarrassing for Maddy. That meant there was nothing I could do. The only option was to ignore him—for now. Once the meeting was over, I intended to find out what was going on.
“Folks, let’s get back to work. Good updates from most of you. The rest of you need to push harder. You know who you are.”
Beckett was nearly out the door when I called his name. He turned to me slowly.
“You’re done for the day,” I said, jabbing my finger at him angrily. “I don’t know what you said to Maddy, but it obviously upset her. I don’t want to see your face in here, got it?”
“Seriously?” He spread his hands and looked around the room for support—which he didn’t get, of course, with everyone remaining studiously ignoring him. “I was joking with her,” he whined. “Is it my fault she’s sensitive?”
“Get the hell out, Beckett,” I spat at him. “Go. And this isn’t a day off. I want your Q1 and 2 payee reports first thing tomorrow morning.”
His jaw dropped. The report was a complex spreadsheet that tracked every client endorsement payment and usually weren’t due until the end of the year. Asking for them now meant he was not only going to be working late into the evening, but I’d also wind up with a perfect snapshot of where he stood so far.
He opened his mouth to protest, but I shook my head at him.
“You’re on thin ice. Leave now and do what I ask—or don’t come back. Your choice.”
He made a frustrated noise and stormed out of the conference room. I took a few minutes to center myself, then went to go find Maddy.