Executive Sweet (A Sample)

"And to further alleviate your qualms, I'm going to pay you ten percent of whatever profit you can squeeze out of these guys, which for this deal, means $60,000 for you. Not bad for a few hours of work."

Wait, what? Kay's mouth fell open and she wondered if she had heard him right. Did he just offer her $60,000 to tease a business adversary? Sixty. Thousand. Dollars! For that kind of money, she would gladly act like a sexy secretary. With that kind of money, she could start to pay off her college loans and even put something away to help her brother's upcoming college costs.

But she didn't get all A's in school just so she could act like a tramp in business meetings. This sucked in all kinds of ways. And one thing that really sucked was this deal. It didn't make any sense. No normal businessman would agree to such a change. "Tell me. Why would Jason Mack allow this fee? It seems like a deal breaker to me."

"Yes, you're right. But you see, there are actually two changes in this contract. The other change gives him a discount on parts from our Mexican plant. So that's the reason for the high closing fee: it offsets the Mexican discount." Dan smirked and leaned forward. "What he doesn't know is that we're closing the Mexican plant, so the discount is worthless."

"What?" She practically shouted and fought back her rising bile. "You're not only willing to seduce your business adversaries, you're also willing to lie to them?" Was Dan Avery an unusually scummy businessman, or were they all like this?

Dan pointed his finger at Kay and raised his voice. "I fight back with equal force! You should have seen some of the lies he was going to say about us in that smear campaign. Calling us racists, claiming that we torture the workers in our foreign plants. That's just not true. We're a good company. Hey, we're even leading the industry as far as our percentage of female executives, although I admit that the specialty truck industry doesn't do too well in that area. Still, fifteen percent of our executives are women."

"Your board of directors is all male."

Dan twisted his mouth and looked down. "Yeah, you got me there."

Kay shook her head sadly. "I really wanted to make a difference here, for myself and for all women. But under your plan, I'm going to make things much worse. This whole idea of distracting men is the very reason why women get so much grief. Why Islamic cultures force us to cover up completely and why religious Jews build a wall in the back of their sanctuaries to keep us out of sight. You guys can't think straight when there's a woman nearby. And now you want me to intentionally distract men, leading them on and tricking them out of their money. How is that going to help women?"