“We told your ex five months, so let’s stick with that.” He props his head on his hand and settles in beside me without removing his other hand from my stomach. “You don’t owe them any explanations or details. And technically, we aren’t lying. The more lies you tell, the more tripped up you’ll get, and then we’ll be outed, so . . . the fewer details, the better.”
“Why do you have to be so logical?”
I’m still looking at the ceiling, but I can feel the weight of his stare on me, and it’s making me self-conscious.
“I’m sorry it doesn’t have a porch swing?”
“What?” I ask and turn to look at him.
“The cabin. It doesn’t have a porch swing. You said you only did the mountains with a porch swing and wine.” He pats my hip. “I’m sure I can fix the wine problem, but the swing part might be a bit tough.”
“You’re too good to be true.”
And there it is. The thought I’ve been thinking is suddenly out in the open, and I feel like an idiot for saying it because I can’t take it back.
In perfect Slade fashion, he gives me a boyish grin before flopping onto his back. “Don’t hate me when I say this, but she wasn’t as bad as I thought she was going to be.”
“Who? Horrible Heather?”
“Mm-hmm. I think I expected a fire-breathing dragon who talks like a valley girl and spits out chewed nails, but she was seemingly nice,” he says.
“Of course, she was nice to the hot, young heart surgeon who sauntered into the room with a panache most would kill to have an ounce of.”
“Panache?” He starts laughing.
“If I had been in your shoes—interrupt her opening speech and walk in like you did—she would have treated me as if I were a threat.”
“It’s the good looks,” he says with a wink. My sarcastic groan has him laughing. “I’m confused. Why are you a threat if you want a different position?”
“It’s a long and uneventful explanation.”
“Isn’t that why we’re here though? I need more of an understanding of what I’m trying to tackle.” He nudges me with his elbow. “So, start talking, babe.”
“At Glam they have both a VP of sales and a VP of marketing position. They are supposed to have equally weighted responsibilities to drive the success of the products. We share the success, the failures, the bonuses.”
“As opposed to having an outside marketing company?”
“Exactly. It’s great in the sense that we have that whole side of our business working together, but it’s bad when the two leading positions are at odds.”
“And she’s the VP of sales? Who is the current VP of marketing and shouldn’t they be here at the retreat?”
“Debbie—the current VP—is retiring for health reasons. She’s a great lady, but she hasn’t been present much. We all knew she was hinting toward retirement before she got sick, but she just made the announcement that she’ll officially step down once the board has a candidate to take her position.”
“You, naturally.”
“We can hope.”
“Why does she have a hard-on for you?”
“Because she’s not as qualified to have the VP of sales position as she purported to be.”
“Then wouldn’t that make having someone like you with so much history and experience at Glam be the best choice to be her cohort?”
“You’d think that, but this is where the let’s-guess-what-Heather-is-thinking game comes in.” I sigh. “It could be she found out somehow I was offered her position and turned it down.”
“You were offered her position?” he asks with a lift of his brows. “Why would you turn it down?”
“Because face-to-face sales aren’t my thing. I like the process of studying a demographic, of packaging a product to appeal to them, and of making them see or hear our advertising and feel like I’m talking to them specifically. Sales feels too pushy to me.”
“I can understand that.”
“When you don’t know what you’re doing, the last thing you want is someone who does know seeing when you screw up. I’ve noticed her make mistakes and have called her out on a few of them. Right now, I’m ‘less than’ her in the company’s eyes—in clout, in influence—and that’s just how she wants it because then it’s her word against mine when she screws up.”
“Hence why you’re a threat.” He pauses for a beat. “Is she competent? I mean, when you get the job, how are you going to handle being her equal?”
“She could be competent if she put the work in, but I think she likes the shiny title and hefty paycheck more than the job itself. She won’t last long, and if she does, then she’ll have to make that learning curve of hers real steep.” I adjust the pillow beneath my head. “From what I hear, she’s trying to smooth talk Glam’s board of trustees into hiring the VP of marketing—ahem, her best friend—at the company she came from for the position. So, her constant cattiness is an attempt to make me look bad.”
“It makes sense. Bring over the best friend so she has one surefire person to have her back and cover her ass when she messes up.”
“Yeah, but she is forgetting that the board knows me and my track record, which means I’ll have a bit of an upper hand there in reputation. I won’t have to prove myself since I’ve already spent years doing so.”
“And she fears you’ll expose her inadequacies.”
I lift my hands. “It’s all a guess, but from the way she’s trying to push me out, I think it’s a pretty educated one.”
“So, we kill everyone with kindness and then you win, which means I also win. Easy.”
It’s my turn to prop myself up on my elbow and stare at him. “Why do you have to be so rational? Ugh.”
“Ah, but rational gets you a lot of places. I mean, all we have to do is convince the rest of your coworkers you’re valuable. That will turn the tide and get
