Allison Leigh - Beyond Business - Falling for the Boss / Her Best-Kept Secret / Mergers & Matrimony

Spying was such an ugly word.

Meredith preferred to think of herself as brokering information that would benefit all parties involved.

She was an investigator , not a corporate spy.

Still, as she crept around the offices of Hanson Media Group by the fluorescent semilight of 2:30 a.m., jumping at every tiny noise, she felt like a spy. A sneak.

A liar.

Yes, she was doing what her employer had hired her to do. This was, in reality, her job. And she’d do it well; she always did. But this time it was personal, and that made all the difference. Instead of gathering sensitive corporate information from one company and handing it over to another, she was gathering sensitive information about Hanson Media—a name that had invoked various strong and conflicted feelings in her for over a decade—and providing it to a company that potentially wanted to take over and push the Hansons out entirely.

Meredith didn’t know what her employer’s ultimate goal for the company was: it wasn’t her job to know.

It was her job to collect pertinent information and pass it along to her boss.

The ignorance of what would then happen because of it should have been bliss.

She wouldn’t let her trepidation stop her, though. It was just raw emotion, and this job had no room for emotion. Emotion was a liar. It made a person believe things that might not be true. Whatever she felt, she needed to soldier on and get the job done.

Just as she’d always done.

So she proceeded. Her heart pounded with the fear that someone—some weary soul who wanted to get his work done before taking his family to Disney World, or some ambitious soul who wanted to impress his boss with work done early—would show up around one of the quiet corners.

But the only sound was the hum of the building air conditioner, whooshing cold air through miles of air ducts.

Meredith went to David Hanson’s office first. With any luck she’d find everything she needed there and she wouldn’t have to dig around in anyone else’s files.

With a quick glance to make sure no one was standing in the shadows watching her, she turned on his computer to look for the files he’d told her about earlier in the week.

“You can see our recent performance history broken down by day, week, month and year,” he’d said, proud of a former administrative assistant’s elaborate spreadsheets. “It’s like forensic science. I can tell you how many newspapers were sold in lower Manhattan by 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 13. I can tell you how many people listened to Garrett Pinchon’s Gospel Hour every Sunday morning from 1998 to last November.”

This was just the kind of information her boss wanted to look at.

When the operating system on David’s computer came up, she typed in the password she’d watched him enter earlier.

Bubby.

Whatever that meant.

The system beeped and rattled through the rest of its processes and produced a desktop background photo of David’s wife, Nina, and his kids—Zach and Izzy, he’d told her proudly—smiling at the camera and giving Meredith a twinge of guilt.

Pushing the negative thoughts away, Meredith quickly maneuvered her way through the system, finding the files David had alluded to earlier. She zipped them into a single file, then saved them to a thumb drive she’d put into a USB port. Once upon a time this had been the stuff of CIA espionage. Nowadays, every college student in North America could carry the equivalent of every paper they’d written since elementary school on a device no bigger than a child’s thumb.

It worked for Meredith, who was currently saving spreadsheets that would have sucked up all the memory and then some on an older computer. Even now it wasn’t an instantaneous process. She tapped her fingers impatiently on the desktop while the large files took their time being converted and transferred.

At one point Meredith thought she heard a sound like a cough in the distance. Immediately her hand flew to the monitor button, and she turned it off, waiting breathlessly in the dark to see if a security guard or, worse, another employee would come to investigate the quiet hum of David’s hard drive as it did her bidding.

She waited a good five minutes in the dark, holding her breath nearly the entire time. Finally, thinking it must have been her imagination, she crept to the door and peered around the corner, down the hall. She braced herself for a shock.

Nothing.

With a sigh of profound relief, she went back to David’s office. The computer had finished saving. She pocketed the thumb drive, erased her virtual footsteps on the system and shut the computer down.

Still cautious, she listened with the paranoid awareness of a lone wolf at night as she made her way through the maze of halls.

She saw no one. Heard no one. But she had the most disquieting feeling that someone else was there. Maybe it was surveillance cameras. Or building security out in the main hall. Or the constant hum of countless computers hibernating or showing Star Wars screensavers to no one.

For one crazy instant Meredith thought about going to Evan’s office. Something about the still of the night and some long-dormant knot of emotions called her there. As if she could go and breathe him in … and breathe him out. And maybe get rid of the memories that haunted her still, once and for all.

But there was no time for that. She’d done what she needed to do and now she needed to get the heck out of the building before anyone figured her out.

She opened the main door and, after a surreptitious glance out into the hallway, she stepped away, letting the door to Hanson Media Group close harder than she’d intended.

It was a careless mistake, but it didn’t matter. She’d proven to herself time and again that there was no one there.

No one but the ghosts of a man who once meant the world to her and whose name now meant only a biweekly paycheck, excellent health and dental insurance and a dull ache in her heart that she almost couldn’t bear.

Evan Hanson woke to a bang.

He sat bolt upright in the converted sofa bed before he had even a moment to think, his body tensed and ready for fight or flight. For one crazy, disconcerting moment he couldn’t remember where he was, then it came back to him. He was sleeping in his office. Unable to commit to staying in Chicago—or even admit to himself that he’d come back—he’d been camping out in the office, using the executive washroom for bathing and either eating out or ordering food in.

What point would there be in getting an apartment to keep a job that he knew wasn’t going to last long? He was no ace executive but he could see the writing on the wall—Hanson Media Group was going down. If he could do anything to help stop it, he was willing to give it a hundred percent, but at the same time he wasn’t going to bet his life that it would work out. Not that he wanted to come out and say that to anyone still working there.

Either way, there was no way he was going to be in Chicago for the rest of his life.

He missed the sun of Majorca. The fresh regional produce he’d come to enjoy picking up at sunny outdoor markets across Europe. Already he felt like one more quickie takeout meal would kill him.

Helen’s hopes for the company were admirable. Noble, even. But impossible. Anyone could see that. Offices that used to be filled with enthusiastic employees, reflecting the prosperity of what was once one of the most powerful media groups in the United States, were now half empty. There was little laughter, less water cooler talk, and almost no optimism on the faces of the employees he saw every day.

Most of Hanson’s best employees had left a while back, knowing their résumés would look better if they reflected tenure at a successful company than if they showed a tenacious grip on a ship that was going down faster than the Titanic. It might not stay down—he was fairly sure some other company would snatch it up at a bargain price—but it was going to go down long enough for those onboard to suffer. Unless they were brave enough to hold on to their stock options until the price went up.