Mistress of the Game

I’ve beaten him.

I’ve won.

She imagined Max on top of her, inside her. She imagined them as one.

Kruger-Brent is mine.

She gasped, her body racked by a series of shudders as the orgasm ripped through her.

Oh God, Max. I want you.

From a pay phone at Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan, August Sandford bellowed at his secretary.

“It’s not good enough, Karen! I flew halfway across the world for this damn meeting, only to have Mr. Li tell me that the stupid hotel is no longer for sale.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sandford. I don’t understand how the wires could have gotten crossed. His secretary confirmed the meeting to me only yesterday. She said they had another bidder and it was vital that you fly out right away.”

August slammed down the receiver, too angry to speak. Thanks to this wild-goose chase, he’d had to cancel two important client meetings in Europe, not to mention his rendezvous with Lexi.

Then a strange thought struck him.

His secretary confirmed the meeting…she said they had another bidder.

August met with Mr. Li’s secretary less than an hour ago.

Mr. Li’s secretary was a man.

Eve called Max while he was driving.

“Did you see her?”

“Yes, Mother. I saw her.”

“You played it the way we discussed?”

“Yes.”

“And? Do you think she trusts you?”

Max thought about this for a moment. He remembered the way that Lexi’s pupils had dilated when he took her hand; the heat when their legs had touched. There was something new between them, all right. But he wouldn’t necessarily call it trust.

“I think she’s starting to.”

Eve sensed the hesitation in his voice. She asked him sharply: “You didn’t sleep with her, did you?”

“No, Mother. Of course not.”

“Good.” Eve sounded mollified. “You’ll have to eventually, of course. But not yet. It’s too soon.”

Max hung up feeling uneasy. He pictured his mother pacing their New York apartment in her silk robe, a caged tigress waiting for him to return from the hunt. Things had gone better than he’d expected with Lexi this evening. But still. His discussion with Eve last week was vividly branded in his memory. The tension in her voice, the pent-up rage coiled inside her body, ready to burst through the skin.

It’s your last chance, Max. Our last chance! That bitch is going to take Kruger-Brent from us. You have to do something!

I will Mother. Don’t worry. I will.

But would he? Could he?

What if he failed?

Swerving to the side of the road, he stopped the car and fumbled in the glove box. Pulling out a clear plastic pillbox and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, he swallowed four Xanax, washing them down with the raw, scorching liquor.

I won’t fail you, Mother.

I promise.

TWENTY-ONE

IT SEEMED TO LEXI THAT THE NEXT YEAR WENT BY IN A blink.

She had a natural flair for real estate. Kate Blackwell always believed that an instinctive feel for a market was worth a hundred MBAs. Lexi agreed. It wasn’t Harvard that had given her a nose for business. Business was in her blood. She lived for the high of clinching deals, thriving on stress and tension the way that other people thrived on eight hours’ sleep and regular meals. Kruger-Brent’s real-estate holdings were enormous and growing all the time. It was such an exciting sector, it was easy to forget that it was just one of hundreds of industries that the company was involved in.

As Max’s and Lexi’s twenty-fifth birthdays moved ever closer, Kruger-Brent’s ten-man board of directors decided that they should both spend some time learning the ropes of all of the company’s myriad business areas.

“It’s important that you feel intimately familiar with every aspect of the firm.” Tristram Harwood addressed his remarks to the two of them, but by this point, both Lexi and Max knew that “you” meant Lexi.

“I daresay you feel you’ve grown up here and that you know the business inside out. But you might be surprised by just how vast your empire really is.”

“Patronizing old fossil,” said Max as they left the office.

“He’s pathetic,” agreed Lexi. “Our empire indeed.”

But Tristram Harwood was right. Kruger-Brent was an empire. And Lexi was surprised. Flying back and forth across the globe like a deranged bat, visiting the company offices in India and Russia, Prague and Hong Kong, Dublin and Dubai, it dawned on her that to run Kruger-Brent she must be more than just a brilliant businesswoman. Much more. She must be a stateswoman. A diplomat. A general. She must lead, of course, but she must also delegate. Kruger-Brent was infinitely too huge to be managed by one human being. For the first time, she saw for herself just how important it would be to have a team of people around her whom she trusted implicitly.

August Sandford. He’s a pain in the ass, but I trust August.

And Max, of course.

Since Lexi’s return from Italy, there had been a sea change in Max. At work, he was helpful, respectful and relaxed. Where once Lexi would have gone to August Sandford with her problems, she now used Max as a sounding board. When she visited a microchip-manufacturing subsidiary in India and found that the managers there could not understand her when she spoke, despite their fluent English, she was mortified.

They looked at me like I had just landed from Mars. Lexi poured her heart out in a late-night e-mail to Max. I felt like such a fool. All these years people have been telling me my speaking voice is fine. But it’s bullshit. I obviously sounded like a deaf, slurring freak to these guys.