Claim Me Now - Lea Nolan Page 0,1
it wasn’t for this week,” Kelvin assured her.
“On that, we agree,” she answered. From the looks of it, @HighwaytoKel and his buddies had had one Kel of a week. She hoped the Gametronics boys had enjoyed their party. The ten percent penalty was going to sting.
“Come on. Give us a break. We just need another day or two, three max.” Kelvin had resorted to groveling.
“But then you’ll be rewarded for being late. As an executive officer, I have a fiduciary responsibility to the company. I can’t authorize that kind of allowance.” It wasn’t exactly true, but she wasn’t about to reward Gametronics for their incompetence and lying. She addressed the email to Kelvin and added a note: These servers don’t look out of commission.
“Seriously?” Kelvin’s voice took on a nasty edge.
“Yes. Seriously.” Raven couldn’t help but smile as she hit send.
“I can’t believe you’re gonna bust our balls like this.”
She’d had enough of this guy and his shit. “Before you say another word, how about you check your email,” Raven said, as cool as a winter wind.
A few long, silent moments followed. Raven imagined Kelvin choking on his own tongue as he viewed the images of him and his bros doing shots off waitresses in a casino bar, getting lap dances from strippers, and throwing what looked like a passed out buddy into a fountain.
Kelvin cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. So we’ll finish that beta testing report right away.”
Damn straight you will, asshole. “Excellent. I trust there’s nothing wrong with our data or your mainframe and servers.”
“It’s all good. Safe and sound.” His voice was clipped, like a puppy who’d been neutered.
“Perfect. Do you have an estimate for delivery?”
“ASAP. And if we’re late, that’s on us, of course,” Kelvin said.
“Of course,” Raven answered brightly.
“Thanks for your understanding,” he said.
“Not at all. You have a lot to do, so I’ll let you go.”
“Right, okay.”
Just as he was about to hang up, Raven added, “Oh, and Kelvin?”
“Yes?” His voice trembled faintly.
“You thought you could lie to me. That was a very costly mistake. You’ll be assessed a five percent penalty on your next invoice.”
“Gotcha.”
Raven hung up, then sank back in her chair and rubbed her throbbing temples. Devious people sucked. Kelvin’s little stunt had done more than potentially hurt Gametronics’s bottom line. He’d broken Raven’s trust. If she couldn’t rely on him to tell the truth about his team’s progress, how was she supposed to depend on the integrity of their work?
Since coming on board at Paulson Diagnostics, she’d made lots of small fixes that had helped shore up the company’s short-term debt issues, but this initiative would ensure the company’s long-term survival. There was no room for failure.
Her executive assistant, Mariana Hernandez, poked her head through the doorway of Raven’s office. “That was a thing of beauty.” Mari always eavesdropped on Raven’s conversations. Not that Raven minded. She viewed them as mentoring exercises. Mari was smart and ambitious. With the right kind of support and training, one day, she could be an executive, too.
Raven popped two migraine busting pills from the industrial-sized bottle in her desk drawer and washed them down with iced green tea. “No, that was an example of brains over stupidity. And a contractor’s unbelievable arrogance and entitlement. Look at what they were doing while they were supposedly fixing their broken mainframe.” She spun her monitor around so Mari could see @HighwaytoKel’s account.
Mari stepped closer and peered at the screen. “What a liar. And ew, gross. Seriously, Vegas, strippers? How cliche could they get? What were they thinking, traveling across the country in the middle of the week?”
Raven shrugged. “They probably figured they had everything wrapped up, left town to party, then got back and realized something was screwed up. If he’d just been honest, I might have given them time to fix it. But he chose to lie. Now it’s going to cost them a whole lot of money.”
Mari laughed. “I love it when you’re ruthless.”
Raven shrugged. “They brought this on themselves.”
The intercom on the phone buzzed, and a high-pitched, faintly familiar, female voice ordered, “Raven, come to the board room immediately.”
Mari’s eyelids stretched wide. “Who the hell—”
“Was that . . . Tiffany?” Raven asked.
Tiffany Paulson was the youngest child and only daughter of Paulson Diagnostics’s CEO, Billy Paulson. She’d recently graduated from Drexel University with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. Raven had sent flowers and a check for her graduation and had yet to receive a thank you card for either.
“Maybe? I haven’t seen her