The Tycoon's Tender Triumph Page 0,27
“I don’t know any other way.”
He turned around and looked at her. “You’ll learn.”
Chloe ignored him and looked instead at the eggs on her plate. “This smells delicious. I didn’t know you could cook this well.”
“There’s lots about me you don’t know,” he replied and took the seat across from her. “I’m a great cook.”
“Why do you have Jessy then?”
“Because she likes to cook as well, I don’t always have time and she needed a job.”
Her fork was midway to her mouth when he said that. “You created a position for someone only because they needed a job?”
“No. I needed a cook as well. But she does a lot more than cook. She’s sort of the mother for all the ranch hands, bossing them around and making sure they stay out of trouble. She’s pretty priceless. Those cookies she gave you yesterday?”
“Yeah,” Chloe encouraged before swallowing the bite of scrambled eggs that were amazingly delicious. “They were fantastic.”
“She made over five hundred cookies yesterday, all of them brought down to the stables for the ranch hands.”
Chloe couldn’t imagine making that many cookies in her lifetime, much less in a day. “That’s a lot of cookies.”
“There are about fifty guys that run the horses on my ranch on a regular basis, plus more than come in during seasonal times during the year,” he explained. “She makes a birthday cake for each one of them. She’s amazing and none of the guys are willing to cross her and get out of line, knowing she’d come down on them like a ton of bricks. Not to mention what I might do to them.”
“Good morale.”
“Don’t you know it,” he replied with gusto.
If someone had told Chloe a week ago that she’d be sitting at her father’s breakfast table across from Sam Marchant discussing employee issues, she’d have laughed in their faces. But here she was and she still couldn’t believe it. The fact that Sam was too big for that chair didn’t help the image either.
“Finish up, we have a lot of work to do.”
Those words were to be remembered later that evening when she was still sitting in Sam’s masculine office, working through the details of her business plan. Although Sam was a financial genius which, in her mind meant he was good at the big picture, that didn’t mean he wasn’t thorough in his plans and very detail oriented. Each time she had an idea, Sam forced her to research the issues, get more information. He was generous with his advice too, but a tougher task master she’d never met.
Chloe had thought her marketing job in New York had been difficult. Those wimpy New York executives had nothing on Sam Marchant. He knew figures off the top of his head and challenged everything she suggested. Sometimes she was able to prove her ideas were valid. Other times, he came at her suggestions from an angle she hadn’t even considered and he was relentless at shooting it down, not letting her get into any detail that would swerve away from the goal of getting a solid business plan down on paper.
And the financial side of Sam’s planning was terrifying. She’d once thought the expense of repairing the old stable was overwhelming. She hadn’t even considered the cost of a marketing plan, the insurance needed, the travel that would be involved or the social organizations that would need to be tapped into in order to make her idea a success. Sam did though.
It took five straight days of working from early morning through midnight sometimes before Sam finally declared that her plan was solid. The only breaks he allowed her was a few moments in the morning and evening to talk with her father. Even lunches she was sitting in his office trying to figure out a solution to a problem he’d presented to her. Maybe it was a bit more difficult since she would only tell him that her idea was more creative and centered on the art world. As she gained knowledge with the industry and hurdles she might face, she was becoming more confident, but also more daunted by what she had to do to overcome those obstacles.
They hadn’t even started contract negotiations or coming up with the financing for a business. Sam offered to finance her venture but Chloe refused to accept his offer. Not just because she thought he was offering her charity, but also because she’d spent too much time in his company over the past week. And