“Well—” he began to cut me off before I held up my hand to stop him.
“But…if you insist, then please, for the love of God, send me some real help and yank the intern? My assistant is pregnant and sick all the time, and I can’t babysit an intern. We are a multi-million, possibly billion-dollar corporation. We can afford to hire me a professional to get through this—”
“I’ll get you whoever you need, but the intern needs to stay there for now.”
That brought me up short.
Shit. I had to get rid of this girl, but I couldn’t raise any suspicion that it was anything more than her being a waste of my time. “I’m going to be too busy to teach her anything.”
Adam looked away as if already bored with the conversation, which irked me, and had I not been semi-panicked, I would have said something.
“I owe her dad a lot, okay? He hired me at Sony Online. She wants to get into business school and having experience working in your office will be a golden opportunity for her. I have good reasons. Trust me on this, okay?”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at him. Typical. Adam had his own mysterious reasons for doing what he did and only occasionally shared those reasons with lesser beings—even his goddamn friend and business partner.
I gritted my teeth. “I’m not here to entertain spoiled little rich girls. Besides…you never even knew her name. You just called her Snow White. Now suddenly she’s your old boss’s daughter?”
Adam shrugged. “She looks like Snow White… Look, David Weiss, her dad, emailed me last year, asked if his daughter could intern here. I said sure and referred her to human resources. I had no idea until last winter, when I saw him at the Congressional hearing in D.C., that Snow White was his daughter. Which is kind of funny because Weiss means ‘white’ in German.”
“Yeah—hilarious—now about getting rid of her—”
He tensed. “I’m not going to do that. I know this situation has us all stressed out. I’ll hire whoever you need, okay? Just let her…I don’t know…shadow you, make you coffee, work under you for a while.”
Oh, that was rich. Work under me…right. There were several things I could think of that I would like her to do under me, but work wasn’t one of them. I studied him for a moment, taking in the way he gripped the edge of his desk. It was sometimes hard to read Adam, but I knew him well enough to know he was tense. It would be better not to push it.
“Fine, but I don’t have to be nice to her.”
Adam shrugged. “You’re a rat bastard. Everyone knows that.”
I flipped him the bird, and for the first time since seeing the goddamn video, he actually cracked a smile. Meanwhile, my mind was racing, trying to figure out how to worm my way out of this mess.
But another part of my brain wondered if this might not be a good thing. If April worked in my office, I could keep an eye on her, figure out her purpose in taking the video. If I had sway over her with a business school recommendation, then I had some leverage to keep her from using it for blackmail. At least I hoped. And that hope was the cold, sick ball of lead in the pit of my stomach.
I took a deep breath and let it out. “Fine, whatever. I promise you I’m going to handle this, but you have to have a little faith in me.”
His jaw tightened and he nodded. “I do. I will. Just…talk to the bankers. Get the lay of the land and find out if they are going to throw us under a bus or not.”
My arms stiffened with resolve. “No one’s throwing us under a bus. Over my dead body, anyway.”
He raised a black eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound promising.”
“Yeah, that was a shitty choice of metaphors.”
Adam checked his watch. “I’ve got a meeting with programming right now. But I need you to meet me over at R&D later—the new prototype equipment arrived. We’re testing it out and doing a little demo.”
“Ain’t nobody got time for that,” I quipped. “I’ve got fires to put out here.”
“Well, since you are going to be talking to the bankers, and this is the stuff we are trying to raise the capital to buy and develop, it would be good for you to see it in action.”
That was something that might actually be useful to my cause. “That’s a really good idea. I should get some pictures, maybe a little video. We could add it to the beauty contest.”
Adam frowned at me. “I don’t speak ‘business.’”
Ours was a partnership of Adam’s brilliant mind and imagination and my know-how with business. But I was as fascinated with the prospects of our new advancement as he was. It might not have been my sole motivator like it was his, but things like this still excited me—when I didn’t have the weight of the world on my shoulders.