Page 8 of The Dreidl Disaster

“I didn’t do very much,” she said with a laugh that made his insides gooey. “But what I will tell you is that there’s a town meeting happening in the next few days, and you’re expected to be there.”

“Of course,” he said as she dropped a folder full of paper on his lap. More reading material. Right. “I intend to be there. What kind of questions do you need me to address?”

“All of them,” she said. “Every single one of them. They’re coming from people who had a dream, an idea and a hope that the team you’re representing crashed quite publicly.”

“Right,” he said. “An idea very reminiscent of something someone saw on a HeartPix movie.”

“Yep. And unfortunately for you,” she said with a grin, “our story begins at the crisis point of that movie. A Hanukkah celebration turned to shambles because someone didn’t understand what the holiday was or needed, for that matter.”

Interesting.

Olivia Nachman seemed to have a sense of humor. Better and better, and yet so horribly worse all at the same time. “So you expect me to…present like I’m a developer who’s trying to convince the town that they’ll supply the funds to make the town festival better than it’s been in a long time?”

“Right now,” she said, “you’re the understudy for the corporation who made big promises and ended up giving the town residents less than nothing to celebrate.”

Getting a larger picture of the situation and the way Olivia Nachman’s mind worked was an asset he was going to use as best he could. Humor, but this was serious. “So,” he suggested. “I’m going to be a punching bag or sitting on a bench, waiting to be dropped into a dunk tank.”

“Either, both,” she replied in a nonchalant manner that did not suggest she was holding back laughter. “But I’d hope nobody brings tomatoes to this meeting.”

It was his turn to act like there was no laughter in his arsenal. “No flying fruit. Got it. And no transparent linen shirts either.”

There was a bit of a pause between his reply and hers, and he wondered if she was going to get the reference to the famous scene in a literary adaptation.

“Especially considering in this town, sculptures of you would be made in a less…well, comfortable substance than marble,” she said.

“Less permanent I’m thinking, right?” He paused, ran a hand through his hair. Reference nailed. “Is there anybody you think I need to talk to in advance of the meeting? Any central heavy hitters who you think need to be spoken to first?”

“You mean any business owners whose feet you haven’t stepped on already?”

“Uh…”

Which meant he was sitting and trying to figure out what had gone so, so wrong, before he found himself remembering Paul Levitan’s prophetic words.

He was in trouble.

*

Instead of thegorgeous fixer who had walked into her office, the man who she was trying to forget she’d bumped into on Sunday, Liv was now facing a man who had forgotten how to speak. Against all odds, she waited for him to fill it with some…platitude or something.

Nothing.

Which meant she had to take up the agenda. “It seems you don’t know the first thing about Briarwood. Your Sunday travels ring a bell?”

He put his palms out in what seemed to be a gesture of surrender, if not apology, before clasping one hand in the other. “I’m sorry,” he said, as if he’d been suddenly reminded of what he’d done. “I tried to do some advance scouting to make the most of my time, and yours, frankly, but it seems I made a mess of things. My apologies.”

Ten points for earnestness, but zero for anything else. Which wasn’t enough, especially for someone who had to come in and clean a pretty big mess.

He needed to be aware of his surroundings and learnquickly. Because this event, this proposal, needed to be successful, without the second individual the Empires had sent having to hold her hand the entire time. “Were you born in a barn or an industrial complex?”

“Excuse me?”

The wording of the question was out of left field, but the subject matter wasn’t. She needed to jolt this man into reality and fast. “What kind of city-slick fixer are you that you can’t understand the implications of the fact that you’re being called in to fix a mess that offended a lot of people?”

He blinked. “My job is to keep things from getting worse.”

“And you thought that randomly wandering into a bunch of places without an introduction, and asking about Hanukkah, was the first step toward making a horrible situation better? As opposed to what you actually did, which was to ruffle a few feathers?”

He didn’t have an answer.

---