Elizabeth Harbison - Beyond Business

She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. Had she heard that correctly? “Wait a minute. You’re saying you left because your father wanted to use us to gain access to my father’s business?”

Evan nodded slowly. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

It was the first time in her life Meredith had ever even thought about quitting a job halfway through. Her job description of corporate researcher had a lot of mutations, and while she wasn’t usually a corporate spy—or, as some put it, competitive intelligence agent —it wasn’t unheard of for her.

As long as she felt comfortable with the reasons for her research and believed she wasn’t breaching her own personal morals and standards she was able to do a good job.

This time, though, things were getting foggy.

She’d told her employer she might have a conflict of interest, and her employer had guessed right off that it might have something to do with her relationship with Evan.

It was hard for Meredith to explain that it did because of something that had happened a long, long time ago. How could she say that she’d just learned he’d once had the chance to do almost the same thing to her that she was doing to him and he’d opted not to?

It sounded so. unprofessional.

So she’d had to settle for explaining that she’d never before taken this kind of job with a company she had any personal relationship with—even a relationship as tangential and outdated as the one she had with the Hansons—and that she was finding it more difficult than she’d anticipated to completely fulfill her obligations to everyone involved.

Especially when the end result would be the hostile takeover of Evan’s company.

To Meredith’s surprise her employer had assured her that there was no hostile takeover in the works. That they were seeking a merger—a way to take two strong companies and put them together to make them both even more powerful.

Hanson Media Group wasn’t going to lose in this deal, Meredith was told—they were going to win.

That was believable, Meredith supposed. Hanson could accept an offer to share partnership instead of being subject to a hostile takeover and thereby having no choice.

“So are you prepared to stay on and finish the job you began?” her employer had asked.

The sixty-four-thousand—only in this case it was more like million—dollar question.

Meredith thought about it for a moment. Her instincts told her she could believe what she was being told, and in the past few years her instincts had become pretty good.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I am. You can depend on me.”

Evan was starting to have a hard time getting his thoughts straight.

Being at Meredith’s parents’ house the other night was just too strange. How many hours had he spent there in his lifetime, enjoying the company of the girl he had once been absolutely sure he’d marry?

It was weird to come back, now that she was a grown woman—a woman who had spent more than a decade growing away from him—and see her in that same environment.

It gave him a strange feeling, a combination of unease and melancholy.

Not to mention the all-new desire he felt for Meredith as she fit right into his life and his mind now. The way she’d handled Lenny Doss was amazing. More to the point, the way she handled everything at work was amazing. She was a perfect professional, always conservative but always right.

It was ironic that the very quality that had driven him crazy when they were dating—her unwillingness to take a risk—was the very thing he appreciated in her now.

After he’d spent the night in her guest room, he’d gotten up early, written a note of thanks and called a cab to take him back to his car at Navy Pier. It was better that way, he figured: no awkward morning talk, no uncomfortable silences.

He’d been at work for three and a half hours, with no sign of Meredith, when he finally decided to take a casual look around for her.

But she wasn’t in the PR offices, and David said he hadn’t seen her all day. So when Evan found her at a lone computer at the far end of the accounting department, he was puzzled.

He watched her for a few minutes from a distance, clicking on the computer keyboard, squinting and looking closer, then jotting notes down on a pad in front of her.

Now what was that all about?

He moved closer, hoping to catch a better glimpse of her work without making his presence so obvious that, if caught, he couldn’t say he’d just wandered in.

So very carefully he walked up behind her and tried to see what was on the computer screen.

Revenues. Debt. Balances.

Meredith was studying the entire financial profile of the company.

Why?

He backed off again, unnoticed, to contemplate his next move in the hallway.

Was Meredith a corporate spy of some sort?

No, that was too absurd. What had made him even think such a thing? Meredith was far too principled to be dishonest in any capacity, much less lie to someone’s face, as she would have to with Evan, David, Helen and everyone else she came into contact with at the office.

Come on.

It was far more likely that ever-responsible-and-forward-thinking Meredith was checking out the company’s vital statistics because she was interested in some personal investing, rather than reporting back to some supersecret source.

If anyone was bold enough to take a chance on investing in a company at rock bottom, it was Meredith. She’d see, as he did, that Hanson Media would rebound one way or another.

That was definitely more in keeping with Meredith’s personality, yet … Evan wasn’t quite sure. Something about this didn’t sit right with him. An investor would have plenty of ways to monitor the debt-to-income ratio and the viability of the company as a potential investment. There were books, Web sites, portfolios and, hell, people who dedicated their entire existence to providing that kind of information.

Still, the idea of Meredith checking the company information for some sort of nefarious intention was unlikely in the extreme.

He’d have to keep an eye on the situation. He’d keep Meredith close and see if he could figure out what she was up to without his ever having to ask.

* * *

Several days passed since Evan had stayed at Meredith’s house, and they never really talked about it again. His cut healed fairly quickly, she was glad to see. He’d probably been right: she was too paranoid in suggesting he needed to go to the hospital right away for stitches.

The strange thing was, he was barely talking to her.

Despite the great strides he’d made in the company—after getting Lenny Doss, he’d managed to secure contracts with three other famous names, including the Alleyway Guys, who had a popular, irreverent car talk show—his conversations with Meredith were brief and to the point.

She couldn’t argue with his professional decisions, so it wasn’t as if he had that to worry about. The Alleyway Guys, at least, wouldn’t be as great a liability as Lenny Doss could be, and the radio psychologist he’d hired had a reputation for being aggressively conservative, but that always ended up making for good listening, both because of the callers who disagreed with her and the callers who agreed.

So the radio division was shaping up. Despite the risks involved—and they were many—the acquisition of Lenny Doss would probably be a profitable one. Evan was smart to create an interesting but reliable mix of talent. All of them were proven talents with good, solid numbers behind them.

That would undoubtedly help with her employers’ plans for a merger.