Page 14 of When Ice Queens Collide
Chapter 8: Simone
Alexandra Vaughn had called her directly.
She didn’t go through her counsel or through the careful intermediary channels that two women on opposite sides of a billion-dollar proxy fight were supposed to use when they needed to speak. Alexandra had called Simone's personal number on a Tuesday afternoon, and her voice had been low and unhurried, giving nothing away. She'd said she thought it might be productive for the two of them to have a conversation without their respective teams in the room. Off the record, exploratory, to see whether there was a way to avoid the proxy fight neither of them actually wanted.
Simone had said yes before Alexandra had finished the sentence.
She'd hung up and sat very still in the temporary office for approximately thirty seconds, which was twenty-eight seconds longer than she usually took to regain her composure, and then she'd called Tess and told her to clear Friday evening fromthe schedule. Tess had simply said, "Done," with the particular absence of follow-up questions that meant she had several.
That had been three days ago. Simone had spent those three days preparing for the meeting: research, scenario modeling, and positioning strategy. She'd also spent those three days thinking about the fact that Alexandra Vaughn had personally called her, what that meant, and why it mattered that it wasn’t through the proper channels. Was the directness a tactical choice or something less calculated? She hadn’t arrived at a satisfying answer or anything she was willing to look at too closely.
She was looking at her open closet, still in her robe.
She owned half a dozen black options, well-cut and expensive and invisible in a way that served her. Who she was was the point, not the clothes. She'd worn some version of black to every significant negotiation of her career, but something about this meeting made her pause.
She reached past them and pulled out the emerald blouse.
It was deep green silk, the kind that moved when she moved and caught whatever light was available. She'd bought it in Milan two years ago, and she'd worn it twice, both times to dinners that had nothing to do with business. She held it against herself and looked at the mirror, and the woman looking back at her was decidedly not dressed for a high-stakes negotiation.
She put it on anyway.
The thin gold chain she never took off sat against her collarbone, and she adjusted the delicate necklace so it felt centered again. She refreshed her perfume—vetiver and black tea, a scent she'd worn for a decade—and caught herself doing it, the spritz at the wrists, and paused. She didn't refresh perfume for business meetings. She refreshed perfume for?—
She set the bottle down, not letting her mind finish that thought, and did her hair, which she left down, which she alsodidn't do for negotiations because loose hair was less controlled, more personal, more like a woman going to a casual dinner on a weekend than a woman going to discuss the future of a company worth several billion dollars.
Somewhere between the perfume and hair, she decided her strategy would be to convey calculated warmth. She would soften the adversarial frame before they sat down and signal a willingness to negotiate, and all this was just her looking the part.
The walk to Elements was ten minutes through downtown Phoenix Ridge, the streets still damp from the rain that had fallen most of the day and quit around four. The wet pavement caught the light from restaurant windows and storefronts and turned the sidewalks into something reflective and doubled, the city showing itself back to itself. Simone walked fast, her coat open despite the chill, and her mind ran the scenarios, her talking points, and the proxy timeline and what it meant for both of them if this conversation didn't produce something workable.
All of that was pressing and needed her attention.
But what also had her attention, underneath the preparation and running parallel to it like a second track she couldn't switch off, was that Alexandra had chosen a Friday evening. Not a Tuesday lunch or a Wednesday meeting over coffee in a neutral conference room. A Friday, at a restaurant, at an hour when the rest of Phoenix Ridge was sitting down across from people they'd chosen to spend their evenings with.
She could read that six ways. Five of them were strategic, and the sixth was the one she kept circling back to.
Elements was warm and golden through its windows, the kind of restaurant that cost enough to keep its dining room quiet. The maître d' led her to the private dining room at the rear, a table set for two overlooking the water.
She was twelve minutes early. In thirty years of negotiations, Simone had never once arrived early. Control meant arriving on time or slightly after, letting the other party sit in silence and wonder. She knew this, but still came early anyway. She sat down, adjusted the napkin across her lap, looked at the ocean through the rain-streaked glass, and waited.
The door opened at seven-thirty exactly, and Alexandra walked in. In an instant, everything Simone had spent three days preparing rearranged itself around the woman in front of her.
Alexandra wore a charcoal and ivory pantsuit, her Cartier watch catching the candlelight. She pulled out her own chair without waiting for anyone and sat down across from Simone with the same unhurried directness she'd brought to the boardroom a month ago, the kind of focus that landed like something with weight to it, that Simone had been turning over in her mind ever since with less and less professional justification each time.
“Thank you for making time,” Alexandra said.
“You called, and I was curious.”
There was the faintest shift at the corner of Alexandra's mouth, somewhere between amusement and assessment. They ordered wine—a Willamette Valley pinot noir—and Simone opened the conversation. She knew Alexandra hadn't called her for small talk, and neither of them was the kind of woman who pretended otherwise.
“I've been working on a framework, a merger that gets you a better outcome than a proxy fight would. I'd like to walk you through it before you tell me everything that's wrong with it.”
“That's generous of you, giving me permission to object.”
“I'm told it's polite.”
“You're told a lot of things. I doubt you listen to most of them.”
There it was, the edge underneath every interaction they'd had since the boardroom, the thing that wasn't exactly hostility but wasn't warmth and that turned what was supposed to be a business conversation into something Simone's body registered before her mind could categorize it. She'd been trying for a month to find the right word for what happened when Alexandra engaged with her directly, and she hadn't found it. And now, Alexandra was sitting three feet away looking at her with those dark, steady eyes, and finding the word was becoming less important than the thing itself.
