I slammed my laptop shut with a grimace, suppressing a streak of guilt.
Now Adam only looked a hundred degrees of pissed off, instead of a thousand. His face had returned to a normal shade rather than the deep red he was sporting earlier. He moved toward my desk and sat on it, leaning back with his ankles crossed and arms folded over his chest.
I avoided his eyes, massaging the stiff muscles at the back of my neck. “Five minutes isn’t enough time for me to figure out how I’m going to handle this, you know,” I said.
He clenched his teeth and looked away, appearing every bit as frustrated as I felt. “Just tell me how bad this is—for real. You’ve been working with the investment bankers through all of this IPO stuff. What is this going to do to our bid?”
I bit down the first—and most honest—response that flashed inside my brain. It’s going to fucking tank it. Investment bankers and their army of underwriters were a skittish, superstitious bunch. The minute they got wind of a sex tape involving Draco employees going viral, they were going to pull out faster than an eighteen-year-old during sex with his underage girlfriend.
I cleared my throat and formed a more careful answer. “I don’t know. We need to come up with a plan for damage control. They don’t like scandal, especially sex scandals.” I took a breath and then released it. The manure I was going to have to spread in order to smooth things over with Adam was about to get thick.
“We need to find out who the guilty party is immediately. My next phone call will be to that Internet security firm I use—”
I held up a hand and tried to stifle the panic. “Whoa, pardner. I told you I’d handle it, and I will. Just leave it to me, okay? I’ll take care of it all. But…we also have to be careful about throwing accusations around before we have any solid proof. We don’t want to be guilty of sexual harassment. Might be time to contact our lawyer, too.”
Adam scowled. “Jesus Christ. Between last year’s murder-suicide case and this one, I’m going to have to start bankrolling him.”
I blinked, surprised that, in my panic, I hadn’t looked at this in context with last year’s events. A devoted player of our game had, in a fit of rage, driven over to his girlfriend’s house because she had meddled with his in-game progress. He’d pulled out a gun and shot her and then himself. The parents had blamed his actions on his addiction to Dragon Epoch, using the media to tell anyone who would listen. And, of course, they’d filed a lawsuit. These events, along with others, much deeper and more personal, had shaken Adam to the core.
And now this, which was my doing. What kind of shitty friend was I to add to his load?
“That might be a good idea, actually. You might just want to see what you can do about employing Joseph full-time,” I said.
He shook his head. “At least it’s not too late for us to pull out of this deal. We could wait ‘til all the shit blows over…hold out for a better time. We’ve filed the S1 form with the government, but companies back out of an IPO all the time.”
Over my dead body would we be pulling out of this.
Every muscle in my body tensed. I rocketed out of my chair and stalked to the window to stare out at that goddamn fountain. Long, deep breaths. In with the good—out with the bad.
I’d been working on this project for years, keeping meticulous books and documenting everything the company had done since its inception. This had been my goal since the beginning, and it had taken me at least a year of begging and cajoling Adam to go along with it.
Lord knew the last thing a control freak CEO wanted to do was to slice off a portion of his corporate pie and hand that power over to a board of directors. For the longest time, he’d wanted no part of it, even though the day we’d open on the stock exchange he’d become a billionaire.
But then he’d fixated on a new pet project—one he needed the liquidity in order to develop. And I’d seen that as my chance to swoop in and win him over. Finally. Finally, he’d agreed. Trust Adam to be motivated by his own ingenious imagination rather than fattening his bank account. It was an admirable trait, but one that I didn’t share with him. Which explained why we worked together well.
I had to play this carefully. The bankers weren’t the only ones who were skittish.
I glanced at Adam. “Can I ask you to give me some time to come up with a plan? I’ve been meeting with these bankers on a regular basis for months. I’ve been schmoozing, wining, dining, and charming the hell out of the lot of them. I don’t think that things are that dire.”