Page 17 of Due Dilligence (Takeover)
Chapter Five
For Fazil, the rest of the day moved both quickly and achingly slow. More meetings, some of them utterly pointless. Like a second meeting in the afternoon to discuss what the team had accomplished that day. The process they claimed to use should have one meeting, in the morning, not two. That killed the productivity the process was supposed to foster.
Plus, boring meetings didn’t keep Todd out of Fazil’s head.
Kissing him had been idiotic. But so very hot. He’d forgotten how Todd felt and tasted and—he shifted and was grateful there was a chair in front of him as they stood around the conference room table.
Nathan droned on and Fazil made a mental note that this had to change. The whole point of the agile style of development was to work on small bites, with fewer meetings, and foster cooperation with team members. Not waste time with endless reports. But every job he’d ever worked at, save at Sam’s, there’d been this need for management to control all parts, regardless of the development style.
He’d chafed under that foryears.
There’s a process, Fazil, for management approval. You must work within it.
The process is shit. Let me do what I need to do to fix this!
That was one of the ways his jobs had ended. The other had to do with too many allusions to deserts, towels, and camels. Even if he wasn’t a practicing Muslim, the digs sank in after a while.
Right now, though, the only person who needed more control in this room was him—over himself. Everything Todd had done, down to dangling the cute Turkish guy in front of him, turned him on. It was like Todd knew his buttons.
Todd did. Maybe better than anyone, since he knew their foundation and pressed them all. Then dumped him for other people. Then mapped out their futures. Then dumped himagain.
Todd seemed certain they had a different view of that past, though.
Fazil knew what had happened. He’dbeenthere.
The meeting finally broke up, five minutes after it should have, and with no more information passed around than before they’d entered. Yup, this was on Fazil’s cutting board.
He returned to the conference room he and Eli shared. Inside, Eli stared at his laptop, a look of distaste curling his lips.
“That bad?” Fazil flopped into a chair and started typing up the notes he couldn’t take during the meeting.
Eli leaned his head back. “There are problems. Issues Ryan hid from me.”
Fazil’s heart sank. “Are we done here, then?” If Eli pulled the plug, there’d be no weekend with Todd.
His expression smoothed out. “No, not yet. It’s notthatbad.” He leaned back and stretched out his legs. “It’s fixable. But I do need to talk to Sam. You?”
Fazil rested his elbow on the armrest of the chair. “What’s been written up is good. But there’s a lot that hasn’t been, and they don’t follow their procedures. Lots of wasted time due to micromanagement.”
Eli grunted. “Too much chaos on the financial side—not enough in engineering.”
Something like that. There needed to be freedom and creativity in development and testing. “Wrong kind of chaos.”
Eli folded his arms. “Speaking of issues, how’d lunch go?”
He’d managed to get Todd out of his mind. All of it came flooding back, including how hard Todd had been while rocking against Fazil’s erection. Heat flooded his body and he focused on his laptop. “It was interesting.”
Eli chuckled.
“How about I tell you over a beer tonight?” He needed to talk to someone and Eli was all he had at the moment. “I may be making a colossal mistake.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Eli murmured. “But yes. Your treat.”
“Done.”
First they had to finish the workday and then endure another dinner with the executive staff, this time in downtown Seattle. By the time they returned to the hotel, it was nearing nine.
“Still up for that drink?” Fazil asked. The hotel doors slid open.
