Double Dealing (15 page)

She really knew how to screw up a man’s plans. Perhaps she
was a shrewder businesswoman than he’d thought!

***

Jeff Ingram paused outside his boss’s office and adjusted the
subtly striped tie in the mirror wall which lined the deeply carpeted hall of
the executive suite. Jeff’s personal taste in ties tended toward the more colorful.
His taste in suits tended toward styles with a European dash in fabric and
shape. But he wore a conservatively cut suit and the quiet tie because that what
Buchanan wore. One of the basic precepts in the corporate world was that a man
who wanted to move into the executive suite should dress like the men who already
inhabited it.

Jeff Ingram fully intended to wind up with a penthouse office
that had a view of the ocean. Just like Buchanan’s. He raised his hand and
knocked on the heavy wooden door.

After the polite knock he opened the door and walked straight
in. His appearance had already been announced by the secretary in the outer
office. Buchanan didn’t shout permission to enter through his office door.

“I have the update you requested on the Phoenix project,
sir,” Jeff began at once as the other man glanced up from a file on his desk.
Buchanan did not waste time in office pleasantries, so Jeff always made a
practice of corning straight to the point when he made appearances in the head
office.

Buchanan was capable of such pleasantries, of course, Jeff
reflected wryly as the older man nodded him toward a chair. He’d personally
witnessed Buchanan’s enormous personal charm on several occasions. It was phony
as hell but brilliantly effective. Jeff knew he still had much to learn in that
direction. The Buchanan charm was on display at social functions and chamber of
commerce meetings. There one saw the gracious, clear-eyed, community-minded
Drew Buchanan. Someday that was where and how people would see Jeff Ingram.

Buchanan was nearing forty now, but the thick, tawny hair
hadn’t thinned, and the flecks of gray at the temples made Jeff envious. That
distinguished look worked magic on women. It also served to reassure the men who
might otherwise have found Buchanan’s open, handsome features a little
worrisome. The brilliant “you-can-trust-me” smile also seemed effective with
both sexes, young and old. Jeff practiced a similar smile every morning while
shaving.

The trick wasn’t so much in imitating the smile, Jeff had
decided, it was in learning how to make it slice through an opponent like a
knife when the occasion demanded. Buchanan was good at it. The man was a bastard
and someday, Jeff promised himself, he would be an even more successful bastard
than Buchanan.

“Excellent. You’re really quite dependable, Jeff.” Drew took the folder from the younger man’s
hand and flipped it open to the summary page. “You’ve started closing on our
options?”

“This week. We’ve got the big parcels tied up. Now we go
after all the little bits and pieces of Phoenix that we’ll need.”

Buchanan frowned thoughtfully. “What’s left that we haven’t
covered?”

“An apartment complex and a restaurant along with a couple
of small shops. Nothing difficult. I’m not anticipating trouble from any of
them, so I left them until the last. The shop owners have already indicated a
willingness to relocate, and the restaurant owner is thinking of retiring. We’ll
have one of our brokers make him an offer soon.”

“It’s the apartment houses which are always so damn difficult,”
Drew noted politely, waiting.

“Not in this case, sir.” Jeff hid his inner smile of satisfaction.
He’d worked hard to anticipate Buchanan on this. “I’ve done some research on
this particular building. The owners are in a bind and more than happy to take
a cash offer.”

“And the tenants?” Drew questioned softly. “It’s not like
the old days, Jeff, when one could just go in and evict or quadruple rents and
force people out. These days one must keep the corporate image in mind.” Buchanan’s
mouth twisted faintly over that sad fact.

“The place hasn’t been renting well for the past two years
because the owners couldn’t afford to maintain the building properly,” Jeff
informed him smoothly. “No cash flow and a lot of unhappy tenants. The ones who
are left will be more than willing to move into that new complex on the
outskirts of Phoenix, especially when we guarantee them three months free rent.

“The Maitland Maneuver?” Buchanan’s brow arched with wry
interest.

“Yes, sir. It’s very effective.” Although I’ll be damned if
I can figure out where you got the name for it, Jeff thought silently.

Drew Buchanan studied his eager, anxious-to-please assistant.
He noted the conservative tie and suit. Ingram had his sights set high, and he’d
probably make it someday. That was okay by Buchanan. He understood Jeff Ingram,
which meant he could trust him. His behavior was predictable. Not like Samantha
Maitland, he realized dryly as Jeff’s mention of his scheme brought the name to
his mind.

“It is effective in situations like this,” Drew remarked. “Works
almost every time. Did you know that it was invented during the process of
obtaining the very chunk of land we’re sitting on, Jeff?”

Ingram’s eyes narrowed a fraction. He always got uneasy when
Buchanan got chatty. True, such times presented some interesting opportunities
to pick up a few inside pointers, but Buchanan in a friendly mood was Buchanan
at his most dangerous.

“No, sir, I didn’t know that,” Jeff allowed cautiously.

“The woman who once had your job developed it. I didn’t
approve of her efforts that first time, but when I realized how much easier and
more cost-effective it was to have people leaving willingly, I decided we would
make use of the procedure in the future where feasible.”

Buchanan saw the wariness in Ingram and smiled inwardly. It
never did any harm for people in Jeff’s position to know there were others out
there who had pleased Drew Buchanan. People like Jeff Ingram should occasionally
be reminded that they could be replaced. The idea of a shrewd predecessor
having once occupied Jeff’s position would give the younger man food for thought.
Keep him on his toes. The fact that it had been a woman would probably make the
lesson even more salutary. No man liked the idea that he could be replaced by a
female or that he had to live up to the performance of a female who had gone
before him.

Damned if he was going to dilute the small sting of the
lesson by going on to tell Ingram that Samantha had applied her effective
techniques out of a bleeding-heart concern for the tenants rather than any
realistic business rationale.

The high-rise office tower in Miami which housed the corporate
headquarters of the Buchanan Group had a view of the ocean. The former
structure on the very expensive plot of ground hadn’t been so fortunate. It had
been a three-story apartment complex, far too short to afford a view. The
inability to see the ocean over the rooftops hadn’t bothered the tenants of the
building, however. The average age of the residents had been sixty-eight, and
they had all been more concerned with their low rents and ‘the tiny gardens
allocated to each unit.

But Drew had realized the full potential of the land almost
at once. With a little pressure in the right places, he had gotten the zoning
laws changed for the neighborhood, and then he had set his intriguing new assistant
to work on securing the property.

Samantha. She’d had a real talent for the business world.
She’d also been endowed with a rather sweet ass. The combination had been very
appealing. When he’d realized who her father was, Drew’s interest had sharpened
into thoughts of marriage. The prospect of the Thorndyke money was a welcome
one at the time. Money had seemed the most important thing in life in those
days.

He’d recognized the weaknesses in Samantha right from the
start, of course. His ability to zero in on the vulnerable points of others and
use them to his own advantage was a skill he almost took for granted now. An
instinct.

Samantha’s flaws were easily summarized as far as Buchanan
was concerned. She had an underlying softness which would no doubt forever
blunt the necessary ruthlessness one needed to cultivate for the executive suite.
In addition, she had been stricken with a social conscience which was almost
amusing at times. That alone would probably have kept her out of the highest reaches
of the corporate world. He wondered idly if she’d ever overcome that particular
failing. And while her nicely rounded rear had been quite attractive, the tits
had always been a little disappointing.

But all of those flaws could have been dealt with, he decided
in retrospect. The social conscience could have eventually been quelled. And he
could have lived with the less than perfect
bustline
.
After all, there were plenty of women available for the times when he really wanted
to indulge his taste in that direction.

Yes, for the sake of the Thorndyke money, Drew could have
been reasonably content with Samantha for a wife. But there had been one other
nagging flaw in her character which he frankly admitted he’d never been certain
he could handle. It was the uneasy feeling that, even though he knew her
strengths and weaknesses, he still didn’t quite know Samantha Maitland.

You could only really be confident about someone when you
knew you had a handle on him or her. When you understood what made that person
tick. But Drew knew he’d never had that feeling of absolute certainty about
Samantha Maitland. There was a part of her he had never quite pinned down,
never quite been able to control. He couldn’t even put a name to the unknown
factor.

The evidence of the indefinable aspect of her nature was
most clearly apparent when she was at work, he decided in retrospect. Give her
an assignment and the job always got done. Sometimes brilliantly. But never in
a predictable or orthodox fashion. She worked with an intuitive logic that
managed to take him by surprise too many times. It was unnerving. Drew wanted
skill and creativity in those who worked for him, but he wanted that skill and
creativity to be controllable, similar enough to his own way of thinking as to
be thoroughly comprehensible. With Samantha it was almost eccentric in nature.
And highly unpredictable. Drew did not like unpredictable people around him. He
never wanted to be taken by surprise, even when it worked to his own advantage.

And it had worked to his advantage on more than one occasion,
he allowed with a wry sense of humor. Take the time he had indulged her and
allowed her to go ahead with her bizarre plan for relocating the tenants of that
old apartment building which had stood on the site of the Buchanan building.
Not only had the scheme saved him a fortune in time and court costs, but the all-out
effort to find substitute housing and provide several months of free rent to
the dispossessed tenants had made him look very good in the local press.

It was after the business sections of the newspapers heralded
his “socially responsible” approach to growth that he’d had the first stirrings
of interest in local politics. He owed Samantha for that, Drew decided
magnanimously.

She hadn’t lasted long enough, however, to learn of his new
interest. It had all come to a head the day Thorndyke had marched, unannounced,
into his office and told him flatly to forget any notion he had of marrying
Samantha. The order had been reinforced by the information that Thorndyke had
no intention of leaving anything to his bastard daughter if she married Drew
Buchanan.

All points considered, there hadn’t seemed much percentage
in hanging on to Samantha Maitland. There were other equally capable and far
more predictable assistants, and there were other potentially more useful wives.

Jeff Ingram swallowed the subtle warning about being replaced,
managing not to grit his teeth too loudly in the process, and leaned forward
earnestly to go through the rest of the data in the folder. By the time he had finished,
Buchanan seemed quite pleased with progress, and the younger man’s enthusiasm
was back in full sail.

“I’ll get on the last of the details this week. We’re buying
the larger parcels through the usual dummy corporations,” Jeff summarized briskly,
“and we’ll use a lot of small real estate brokers to pick up the remainder. Didn’t
want to send out any ripples of warning on this one, so we’ve been playing it
very low key, I see no major problems, sir.”

“And the restaurant?”

“The restaurant will be the easiest of all. As I said, rumor
has it that the owner wants to sell. We’ll make him a generous offer shortly.”
Jeff allowed himself the smallest of assured smiles. Buchanan didn’t like his
staff to be overconfident, but he did approve of a certain degree of assured
competence. Jeff hoped the smile was right. The son of a bitch could cut you to
ribbons for something as small as an overconfident smile. “No problem.”

With a nod of dismissal Drew watched Jeff walk out of the
office. Then he swiveled the padded leather chair around so that he could
contemplate the expensive ocean view. The Phoenix project was on line, which meant
he could turn his attention to other matters this afternoon.

Matters such as his date with Carol Galloway that evening.
The slow, half smile edged his mouth but never reached the tawny eyes. The
smiling eyes were saved for occasions when other people were around. Drew
Buchanan had the virtue of utter truthfulness with himself. He was deceptive
only with others. It was a crucial factor in his success, and he knew it.

Carol was beautiful. Blond, classical features, good legs,
and high, firm breasts. Much better breasts than Samantha had, Drew decided
objectively. Samantha had been much too small for his tastes. He really was a tit
man at heart.

Carol also knew clothes, and her well-bred grace and social
contacts were exactly what was needed in the wife of a man who had discovered
during the past three years that he liked mingling with the political elite
even more than he liked mingling with the corporate elite. The fact that she
was a little cold in bed didn’t matter; it was even an asset. He was weary of
too much passion in a woman. Passionate women inevitably demanded things like
love and passion and fidelity in return. He preferred light,
uncumbersome
relationships. Another reason why Samantha
probably wouldn’t have worked out well as a wife, he decided. He’d always had
the feeling she wanted too much from him.