“Fine,” Davis said tersely. “You seem to have it all figured out. I’ll leave it to you.”

“Davis, enough!” Mason snapped. “Annajane didn’t hire Donnell Boggs because she wanted to party with a bogus celebrity. You did. Now stop with the pissy attitude and let’s get this fixed.”

Davis stood abruptly and dumped his nearly full Quixie can into a metal trash can, where the sound of metal meeting metal made a hollow clang.

“You can’t fire me,” he told his brother. “And you can’t stop the inevitable. You can slow it down, but only until next week, when old man Norris gets off his ass and tells us how the trust works. But we both know how it’s gonna go down. Mama’s tired of watching this company slide into the dumper. She’ll vote to sell. And when that happens, you’ll be out. I guarantee.”

*   *   *

Mason watched his brother’s exit with a pained expression on his face. He turned to Annajane. “Fun times, huh?”

She winced. “That was pretty brutal.”

“At least we cleared the air,” Mason said. “No more of this bullshit passive-aggressive radio silence. He knows how I feel, and I definitely know where he stands on things. Also, it’s gonna be expensive, but at least we’re shed of that slime-dog Donnell Boggs. I knew that guy was trouble the minute I laid eyes on him.”

“I guess we’re just lucky he got arrested before the new campaign rolled completely out,” Annajane said.

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Mason said. “I’ve had a private investigator following him for weeks. As soon as he saw Boggs pull into the motel parking lot with that girl yesterday, he called me, and then he tipped the cops.”

30

An unfamiliar woman’s voice on the other end of the line asked, “Is this Annajane Hudgens?”

She glanced at the caller ID screen on her phone, but it said UNKNOWN.

“Yes,” Annajane said cautiously. “Who’s calling?”

“My name is Katie Derscheid. I’m a friend of a friend of your friend, Pokey Riggs. I understand you’re interested in knowing something about Celia Wakefield and Gingerpeachy?”

Annajane’s pulse quickened. She got up from her desk and closed and locked her office door. Just in case. She’d been working furiously all day, trying to rebuild and rebook the summer Quixie promotion, had even worked straight through lunch, so she’d fortunately managed to avoid Celia. But she wouldn’t put it past Celia to be lurking somewhere nearby.

She sat back down at her desk and straightened her shoulders. “Hi Katie. I was actually going to call you today, until I got involved in putting out assorted forest fires around here.” She lowered her voice til it was just above a whisper, and still deliberately avoided saying Celia’s name out loud. Just in case. “So … you do know her?”

“Ohhhh yes,” Katie Derscheid said. “She’s, uh, not a friend of yours, is she?”

“No,” Annajane said, a slight shiver going down her spine. “Definitely not.”

“Oh goodie,” Katie said. “Now we can really talk girl to girl.”

Annajane laughed ruefully. “She’s a bit of an enigma, isn’t she?”

“She’s a scorpion,” Katie said. “Absolutely deadly. And not in a good way. She screwed my former company, Baby Brands, big-time.”

“Interesting,” Annajane said. “The company I work for, Quixie, hired, um, that person, as a consultant, based on her reputation as a sort of girl genius with branding and business development.”

“Yeah, what’s genius about Celia is her ability to totally bullshit her way through life,” Katie said.

“Did she really sell her company for ten million? That’s what we all heard. In fact, I think she kind of alluded to that herself.”

“The purchase price was actually just under half that—five million,” Katie said. “The deal was structured so that Celia would be paid in staggered amounts. She did take Baby Brands for more than a million in cash, but she’ll never see another dime of their money—not if their lawyers have their say.”

“Oh my,” Annajane breathed. “So … what happened?”

“Smoke and mirrors,” Katie said cryptically. “That was the essence of her company. When Baby Brands bought Gingerpeachy, they were told she had millions in orders from several chain retailers—Gymboree, Pottery Barn Kids, Macy’s. We bought everything—the name, the outstanding orders, the inventory. And all of it was bogus. The order numbers were wildly inflated, and as for inventory—there was none. A couple bolts of fabric and a ton of factory seconds that were unsalable as far as we were concerned.”

Annajane’s eyes widened. “How did she manage to pull that off?”

Katie’s laugh was the deep, throaty chortle of a woman who’d seen a lot. “Celia Wakefield has ESP—extrasensual perception. She meets a guy, and within a couple hours, he’s begging her to ‘beat me, hurt me, make me write bad checks.’”

“And that’s what happened at your company?”

“She met the president of Baby Brands, Reeve Sonnenfeld, in the lobby bar at the Mansion at Turtle Creek, in Dallas, during the Winter Mart week. Celia was repping her own line in a little showroom at the time.”

“I think I know where this is going,” Annajane said. “She met my boss in the exact same way.”

“Gotta love a gal who trolls hotel bars, right?” Katie said with a chuckle. “She’s one step up from a whore, that Celia. Anyway, she strikes up a conversation with Reeve, tells him she’s got this great line of dresses, reversible, all cotton—she even whips a sample dress out of her purse to show him. And then she acts all surprised when he tells her he IS Baby Brands. They have a couple more drinks; then Celia gives him her business card and takes off, leaving Reeve begging for another look, if you know what I mean. Of course, they meet later that night, after Reeve’s wife Sandee has gone back to the suite.”

“Right there in the same hotel with his wife?” Annajane asked.

“Oh, it was all business,” Katie said. “At first. Reeve came back from Dallas raving about this brilliant young entrepreneur he was going to ‘mentor.’ It was revolting. I mean, she’s two years younger than his daughter, for God’s sake. Pretty soon, he’s flying off to meet Celia in Atlanta and LA for Marts there, only those times, he made sure Sandee stayed home. Everybody in the company knew what was going on with those two. Everybody but Sandee.”

Annajane leaned back in her desk chair and looked out her office window. It was getting late in the day. The parking lot was emptying out. She got up and walked over to the window. If she stood at just the right angle, she could see Celia’s parking space. It was empty. She exhaled noisily.

“Hey, are you still there?” Katie asked.

“I’m here,” Annajane said. “What happened next?”

“The inevitable,” Katie said. “Reeve got the brilliant idea to buy Gingerpeachy. As soon as the deal was inked, Celia and Reeve were history. And we were left holding a big bag of Gingerpeachy crap. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. You know what the economy’s like.”

“Is Baby Brands in trouble?” Annajane asked.

“They’ll survive,” Katie said drily. “Of course, it meant some belt tightening. Which meant I lost my job.”

“Oh, wow, I’m sorry,” Annajane said. “So, how does she get away with something like that? I mean, isn’t what she did fraud or something?”

“Or something,” Katie said. “It’s all been kept pretty hush-hush. But yeah, I think Baby Brands has started legal action against Celia.”

“You mentioned Celia met your vice president at a hotel bar,” Katie said. “Are they having a fling?”

“No. Davis was infatuated with her, but strictly on a professional basis, as far as I know,” Annajane said. She was somehow reluctant to reveal to this stranger that Celia had targeted a much bigger fish at Quixie, in the form of Mason. “He brought her into the company as a consultant, based on what he thought was her marketing expertise and, of course, because of her track record starting and selling a successful retail business like Gingerpeachy.”