Page 7 of Due Diligence

Six-second reset.

“What about my office?” I offered, tilting my head to the right. “It has blinds.”

Her eyes followed the path over the open desks to the other side of the front room, where my office was located. Cassie raised her eyebrow. “Don’t you need it?”

I hesitated before I said, “If I’m going to be in this room with you for the next two months, I guess not.”

She, too, hesitated with her eyes locked on the tabletop. I could pretty much assume what she was contemplating: If I gave up my office, I wasreallygoing to be in the fishbowl with her all day, every day—for sixty fucking days. She probably expected to have the space to herself, and I would pop in and work with her as-needed. I didn’t savor the idea of spending that much time with her, but for some reason it really annoyed me she felt the same way.

“Let’s check it out,” she finally suggested, which didn’t surprise me. She was a due diligence analyst, after all. I assumed she rarely made decisions without first carrying out a thorough investigation.

I led her across the front of the office, past the engineers’ desks. A few of them were seated there, watching shamelessly as Cassie and I passed. They knew what she was here for. All anyone on staff could talk about was the potential acquisition by Davenport-Ridgeway and how much it would hike up our stock. If this thing went through—and itbetter—nobody on staff would ever have to work again unless they felt like it. We were facing an all-stock deal, which meant Davenport-Ridgeway intended to buy out our shares, quick and painless.

Of course, the biggest winners would be Alex and me. We split sixty percent of Libra’s stock. At our current five hundred million valuation, that was a total of one hundred and fifty million dollars each.

Each.

When we got to the other side of the main room, I opened the door to my office and motioned for Cassie to enter. Immediately, she walked over to the leather couch that sat adjacent to my desk and she took a seat. That was a first. People usually stood at the threshold like they were afraid to touch anything, but she walked right in like she owned the place.

“This is nice,” she mused. She crossed her legs again and let one of her sharp-heeled pumps dangle off her foot—briefly. “A little smaller than I expected, if we’re being honest.”

I didn’t know why that felt like a personal attack, but something about her nonchalance really dug at me. I didn’t say a word. I simply stood by the door, keeping it open with my shoulder.

“And the blinds close?” she asked, nodding her head to the side where the glass wall opposite my desk faced the main room.

“They do,” I confirmed. I reached out and pulled the cord, which sent the blinds careening downwards until the metal part at the bottom collided with the cement floor. The whole thing ended up being a lot more sudden than I intended, and it was a split-second switch between us being in plain sight of the office, and being closed-in. I flicked on the light in the corner, illuminating the room. Cassie was staring at me unfazed.

“So, what I propose is this,” she said from her spot on my couch. “We designate your office as the on-site data room for the next two months. Once we make that decision, it’s important you don’t come in here anymore. You’ll have to take out anything you need and bring it to the other conference room. Would that be okay?”

“It’s not ideal,” I responded, “but I obviously want this deal to go through. If this is what the diligence process requires, so be it.”

So be it.

I may as well have tattooed that on my forehead. For the last ten years I had bled for this company—literally and figuratively. It was no surprise to me that this was how it would end.

“Great,” she declared brightly, even though this was far from great. “Let’s keep going.”

For the next five hours—not kidding; it wasfive hours—we talked about due diligence. By the end of the day, my eyes had practically glazed over. I caught a glimpse of myself when my laptop screen ran dark and I looked like hell. My eyes looked more red than green and I had dragged my hands through my hair so many times that it looked like I just finished a workout.

Conversely, Cassie looked perfect the entire time. Theentiretime. Again, I wasn’t kidding. Her blond hair stayed perfectly straight and her smile could flick on at a moment’s notice. When we broke for lunch, she primly ate a kale salad, didn’t have to reapply her lipstick, and got nothing in her teeth. I brieflytoyed with the idea that she might not actually be human—that she might be some top-tier corporate robot that Davenport-Ridgeway rolled out for acquisitions because no living, breathing human could maintain the same level of composure for so long. But then I remembered I knew her, and she was very much real. And her demeanor hadn’t changed much since we were in college, back when she sauntered into lecture with her spine straight, perched in the front of the lecture hall and listening attentively to the professor while she gracefully drank her coffee.

I had to hand it to her: She was a professional, which was a relief after her late arrival, her fixation with her cellphone, and the fact that ten years ago, she made my life a living hell.

To my relief, she closed her laptop and gave me a smile. Finally, I could exhale and release some of the tension that had been building in me for the last few hours. It was the most welcome respite in the world, and I was already counting down the minutes until I could go back to my office, put my head down on my desk, andmaybescream into my teeny, tiny garbage can.

“Well, I’ll head out now, but I’ll be back around eight tomorrow. Will you be here?” she asked as she put her things away in her expensive leather bag.

“I’m always here early,” I confirmed before I let out a yawn that I just couldn’t hold back.

“Sounds good.” She hoisted the bag onto her shoulder. “And how are you doing? Feeling okay about the next two months?”

“Honestly, yeah,” I admitted. “I thought we got a lot done today, which was a surprise after how it started.”

Fuck.

It took me a second to realize I was so damn out of it that my filter had failed me. That almostneverhappened to me. I was a lockbox—and the countless sarcastic, vitriolic, and downright skeptical things I was always saying to myself rarely escaped. This was one of those exceptional moments, and it couldn’t havecome at a worse time. This woman was basically the one thing standing in the way of me getting one hundred and fifty million dollars. To say she merely had power over me was borderline insulting to her.

She owned me.

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