Over my dead body, thought August.
Beside Jim Bruton was a young woman named Tabitha Crewe. Recently hired from Stanford Law School, Tabitha was attractive in a neat, regular-featured, hair-pulled-back-in-a-ponytail sort of way. Apparently she’d started and sold a small dot-com while at college and made herself a little nest egg, hence her assignment to the team. August looked at Tabitha’s impassive, makeup-free face and found it hard to imagine her having the get-up-and-go to start a washing machine, never mind a business. She seemed so…blank. Especially when she sat next to Lexi Templeton.
Now there’s a chick with a fire in her crotch. If she weren’t so obsessed with her prick of a cousin…how much would I like to screw all the haughtiness out of her? Sexy, opinionated, stuck-up…
“Mr. Sandford. Are we boring you?”
Jim Bruton was staring at August, a wry smile playing across his lips.
Yes, you’re boring me. You’re all boring me stiff.
“I apologize.” August returned the smile. “What was the question?”
“Mr. Webster here is proposing we make a formal submission to the board, asking for a bigger budget with which to make acquisitions. Ms. Templeton disagrees. Harry and I were wondering where you stood on the matter?”
August opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by Lexi. Her deafness made her speech slower and more deliberate. She also had a habit of moving her hands when she spoke, unconsciously signing her words. August watched her long, slender fingers perform their delicate dance and found himself wondering what they’d feel like wrapped around his cock. He started to get hard, which irritated him even more.
Lexi said: “I’m all in favor of expanding our online reach. What I’m not in favor of is throwing money at a random bunch of start-ups before we’ve done our due diligence. My cousin seems to think that no economic fundamentals apply to Internet companies. I disagree.”
“So do I,” said August.
Max glared at him. Jim Bruton and Harry Wilder followed suit. Both had clearly decided that the chances of a deaf woman taking over Kruger-Brent were slim to none, whatever Kate Blackwell’s will might say, and were pinning their colors firmly to Max’s mast.
If I had any sense, I’d do the same, thought August. I don’t even like the girl, so God knows why I’m defending her. But the fact was, Lexi was right. Max was talking out of his ass, jumping blindly and greedily onto the Internet bandwagon like every other Harvard Business School groupie.
“Any acquisition proposal we make to the board needs to be specific and backed up by hard data.” August stood up to leave. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I have an important lunch appointment.”
That night in the bath, Lexi Templeton thought about August Sandford.
He’s not the ugliest man in the world, she conceded grudgingly, picturing his thick chestnut hair, strong jaw and almond eyes, offset by a butterscotch tan acquired, no doubt, on the beaches of East Hampton this past summer. Lookswise he was the exact opposite of Max. Brad Pitt to Max’s Johnny Depp. Or so August probably thought.
He’s almost as good-looking as he thinks he is. Not half as smart, though.
Lexi knew scores of August Sandfords at Harvard. Handsome, rich, well-educated, chauvinist pigs. Take one rampant ego, sauté lightly in wealth and privilege, top with a blue-chip business card, and voilà! August Did-I-Mention-I-Was-at-Goldman? Sandford. Yawn.
The bright young things at Harvard bored Lexi, but they served a purpose. She slept with all of them. Ever since the night of her sixteenth birthday party, when she’d lost her virginity to Christian Harle, Lexi had been haunted by the thought that her childhood abuse might have ruined her for sex as an adult. Having worked so hard to overcome her deafness, it was terrible to imagine that the pig might have won after all. That he might have turned her into some sort of sexual cripple. Determined not to let this happen, Lexi threw herself into college sex with all the single-minded fervor of a sailor on shore leave. Harvard was an education on every level: algorithms by day, orgies by night. Threesomes, bisexuality, sex toys, role-play; Lexi wanted to discover it all. To prove to the world and to herself that she was not a victim, that the pig had not defeated her. It was an open secret on campus that Lexi Templeton was the best lay at HBS. But an unspoken code of loyalty prevented her classmates from spreading rumors in the newspapers. Harvard was a closed world, a safe place to explore one’s wild side. Outside the college walls, it was a different story.
At Kruger-Brent, I’ll have to be more careful.
Lexi brought her thoughts back to August Sandford. At least he’d stuck up for her against Max today, which was more than those other stuffed shirts had done. Lexi was well aware that 99 percent of Kruger-Brent’s senior management had written her off. Kate Blackwell’s will favored her over Max for the chairmanship, but then Kate Blackwell had never known that Lexi would grow up to be deaf. In any event, a unanimous board decision could see Max usurp her position. Most people at the company, including Max himself, not to mention Lexi’s own father, seemed to view this as a foregone conclusion. It drove Lexi wild with rage.
How dare they write me off? My GPA has always been higher than Max’s. I’m smarter than he is, I have more business sense. Okay, so I can’t hear. But Max can’t listen. That’s the real handicap. He loves the sound of his own voice too much.
Lexi rubbed soap under her armpits and breasts with a sponge. Men were all the same. So impressed with themselves, beating their chests like baboons. August Sandford, Jim Bruton, Max…they were just grown-up versions of Christian Harle and the other Andover jocks. They patronized Lexi, the way they patronized all women, only in Lexi’s case her deafness seemed to make it worse. That and the fact that she was beautiful, rich, famous and smarter than all of them combined.
August Sandford might have thought he had his poker face on today. But Lexi could see the envy in his eyes.
He hates me because I’m better than he is. He hates me because he wants to sleep with me and he can’t. He hates me because-
A flashing light on her PC screen in the living room caught her attention.
New message.
Grabbing a towel, Lexi leaped out of the bath and ran, dripping, across the polished walnut floor of her apartment. Unlike mommie’s-boy Max, who still lived at home with Eve, Lexi had her own place on the Upper East Side and reveled in her independence. A sleek, modern two-bedroom in a classy building on Seventy-seventh Street, between Park and Madison, it was decorated in neutrals and whites with huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. A delicate Christopher Wray chandelier in glass and stainless steel hung from the living-room ceiling above a cream pony-skin rug. In the far corner, perched on a Danish Modern desk was Lexi’s white Mac-her portal to the hearing world. She’d often wondered how on earth the deaf had managed before the advent of the Internet and thanked God she’d been born in the age of the text.
Scrolling past e-mails from Robbie and her father, her Harvard professor Dr. Fairford, and countless lovers, Lexi said a silent prayer.
Please be from him.
Finally, she reached the new message. Clicking it open, her heart gave a little leap of excitement. The subject heading read:
I’ve found him.
Tommy King did not like Thailand.
There was only so much Asian pussy that one man could enjoy. Once you’d seen the first hundred girls fire Ping-Pong balls out of their assholes, smoke cigars with their pussies, and exhaust the rest of their repertoire of bizarre sexual party tricks, it actually got kinda tame. And then what were you left with? Fried bugs, stinking hot weather and friggin’ dysentery, that’s what.