CHAPTER SEVEN
The next morning, Fern didn't know why Pen wanted to be at the shop so early. They didn't do anything except eat breakfast tacos and drink coffee until the staff started to arrive.
She was glad Pen let her work on a proposal without interruption. Whatever he was doing, he was totally engrossed in it. She just hoped it wasn't bad news for her future. He wouldn't sit at a desk just a few feet from her and work on plans to get rid of her, would he? Finally, it was time for her to leave for her luncheon. She handed Maria the proposal and asked her to type it.
Fern had looked forward to hearing the speaker at this meeting, but she found her mind wandering to Pen. She'd forgotten he depended on her for transportation, and there was no place to eat within walking distance of the shop.
She told herself to stop this ridiculous train of thought. He was a grown man, perfectly capable of finding a meal. And if he didn't, it wasn't her problem. He was her boss, not her responsibility.
After the meeting adjourned, she found a pay phone and called the shop. She cringed when she heard Maria answer, "Thank you for calling Ultimate Plant Service."
She felt foolish calling to find out if Pen had eaten lunch. "I . . . uh, I just wondered if anyone needed me to bring anything on the way back."
"Nope, everyone's fine here."
Fern mumbled a goodbye, hung up, and walked to her car. After she cleared the congestion of the parking lot, traffic was light and she made good time back to the office. She arrived earlier than she had planned, but Pen was waiting for her in their office.
"Good, you're back. I just got back from lunch myself. Can we go ahead and meet now before either of us starts on something else?"
Fern nodded. "Do you want to meet here or in the conference room?" She wondered where and with whom he went to lunch, but she didn't ask.
"The conference room. We're less apt to be interrupted there, aren't we?"
"Yes." She picked up a notebook and pen. "What else do I need to take with me?"
"Nothing." He led the way to the conference room.
She had dreaded this since Tuesday night in the restaurant, but she wanted to get it over with as much as she wanted to avoid it. Whatever the future held, it would be better to know than to wonder. Surely he'd give her a chance before he fired her.
Pen closed the conference room door behind them and motioned her into a chair. "We started off on the wrong foot." When she opened her mouth to speak, he shook his head. "Let me finish."
She bit her lip and nodded.
"That's forgotten." He grimaced. "Well, maybe not the pepper, but everything else. This is strictly business-there are no personalities involved."
He wanted to believe that. It had always been true before. Why was everything so different with Fern? He still couldn't believe the business with the sign. Normally, he would have told the sign installers to haul the old sign to the dump without even looking at the person who'd owned the business before. Somehow he was attuned to Fern.
Though it was something that had never happened to him before, he could understand the chemistry. Her body called to his with an intensity he'd never experienced. He'd been attracted to plenty of women in the past, but this was more powerful than anything he'd felt before.
Physical attraction alone didn't explain his sensitivity to her feelings, though. Why should he care if she had tears in her eyes over some silly sign? She'd made the decision to sell her business. No one held a gun to her head or made her an offer she couldn't refuse. So if she had regrets, she had nobody to blame but herself.
"I have to ask you some questions about the business." He cleared his throat. "We gather this information on every acquisition. Some of it will seem repetitious-the corporate development guys asked you this before they made an offer. But I need to consolidate all the facts to transform this business from an individual operation, Fern's Fancies, to the San Antonio branch of Ultimate."
"I understand," Fern said. "I'm prepared for changes. It's just ?" She took a deep breath. "Fire away."
Pen found himself taking more time than usual in his questioning. Not only did he watch her reactions carefully, but he mentally reviewed each question or comment before he spoke to consider if Fern might be offended by it. More than that, he enjoyed watching her and listening to her.
Her love for the business was obvious. Her eyes lit up and she made excited motions with her hands as she described business successes. Pen thought she sounded like a proud mother bragging on her precocious child.
He enjoyed even more her accounts of some of the amusing incidents that had occurred through the years.
"You know how a spath plant wilts completely when it's too dry? Well, on Maria's first day on the job, she got a phone call from a client who said, 'My plant fainted!' Poor Maria pictured a plant falling out of its pot in a dead faint."
He smiled at the sound of their mingled laughter, then asked his next question. "What happened here," he pointed to the screen on his laptop computer, "when you obviously were in a cash flow bind?"
She jumped up from the table, knocking her chair over. She clenched her hands into fists and her voice rose. "What happened was that I bought plants, containers, and materials for a job, and then I didn't get paid for six months. I'm not exactly Ultimate mega corporation with zillions of dollars in reserve, you know. If I don't get paid on time, I get behind on my bills."
Pen frowned. "Well, why didn't you take out a short-term loan for operating expenses instead of letting your accounts go past due?"
Fern forced herself to take a deep breath and count to ten. She righted the fallen chair and sat it in. "Obviously you have never been a single woman trying to borrow money for a small business. It just doesn't happen."
"Fern, Fern, Fern. You'd been in business for eight years then and your financials were good. No reason you couldn't have got a short-term loan," Pen said.
"No reason except I'm a woman in a business with a perishable product. The banks wanted better collateral than plants that would die if the borrower wasn't there to take care of them."
Pen looked at her in surprise. She was serious. "You mean you tried to borrow money?"
"Of course I tried to borrow money. You don't think I liked getting "past due-please remit" stamped on my bills, do you? I tried to get a loan, even though I'd been turned down before every time I tried to get financing."
Pen tapped a pencil on the computer screen. "You mean you've never had any financing for the business?"
"That's what I mean. Bankers aren't exactly falling all over themselves to hand out money, you know. Maybe you think I'm irresponsible or careless or who knows what you think, but-"
"I didn't mean to imply you were irresponsible or any of those other things. I simply asked for an explanation of a particular item I noticed in the financial history of the company. We're talking business-don't read anything more into what I say."
Fern took a deep breath. "Okay."
"Is the lack of financing why you usually sell the plants instead of lease them? Corporate policy is to lease whenever possible because a lease is more profitable."
"I know a lease is more profitable. I'm not totally stupid." She shook her head. "But it's only profitable if you can afford to finance it in the beginning. I couldn't afford it. That's one of the main reasons I sold-Ultimate has the financial resources a small company like mine can never have."
Although Pen realized a small company couldn't compete with the fiscal assets of a giant corporation, Fern's financing difficulties came as a surprise to him. He admired her business success even more when he realized the additional obstacles lack of financing created.
"It looks like you managed to overcome the cash flow crunch in a few months even without outside funding. Business took a big upturn right here." He pointed to the computer screen. "What happened?"
"One of our clients expanded into two more locations." Fern described the client's facilities and the plantscape designs she created to enhance them. "B
oth installations were large jobs and they were done only a couple of weeks apart."
Relieved to see her enthusiastic again, Pen spent more time than he intended on this successful period. He hurried through the rest of the questionnaire. Fortunately everything else was routine and didn't elicit any strong reactions from Fern.
"It's nearly five o'clock. Ready to go home?" he asked.
"Five o'clock already? Yeah, I'm ready." She stood and picked up her unused notebook.
Pen followed her from the conference room, still wondering how he was going to keep his mind on business with her sitting next to him in that office. Of course, he'd be traveling much of the time, but he needed a base of operations. This branch was the logical choice for all the reasons he'd explained to Fern, but he had to figure out a way to create separate work spaces.
Instead of turning right toward the office, Fern turned left toward the warehouse. "Have you seen this file room?" she asked.
"Files aren't exactly high on my priority list," he answered. "I'm more interested in employees and clients."
"I'm not showing you the files." She opened the door and flipped on the light switch. "I'm showing you the room."
He looked around and shrugged his shoulders. "It's just a big room full of metal file cabinets."
"A big room. About the right size for an office, would you say? Full of metal file cabinets that could just as easily be stored in the warehouse, maybe?"
Fern knew the minute he realized what she was suggesting. That cocky grin lit up his face, and he started to pace off the size of the room. "Looks like it's the same size as your office. It has good fluorescent light. Need to get a phone and a computer terminal, but otherwise it's perfect. Great idea, Fern."
She basked in his unexpected praise. He must not realize how much she dreaded them sharing an office, or he probably would have insisted on keeping the present arrangement. "Which office do you want? This one will give you more privacy but my old office will put you closer to Maria and the fax and copy machines."
"This is perfect. Will Lee and Toby have time to help me move this stuff tomorrow?"
He's in a big hurry to do this. Can he be as eager to get away from me as I am to get away from him? "I need to double-check the schedule, but I'm pretty sure they can. Let me get the schedule now."
Pen didn't even acknowledge her comment. He walked around the room, muttering under his breath, and periodically stopping as if to visualize a mental furniture arrangement. He was still absorbed in his task when Fern returned.
"They only have one work order that's been promised tomorrow, and they should finish that by midmorning. The rest of the work orders are routine and can be rescheduled for next week."
His answer was so slow in coming that she thought he was ignoring her. Finally he turned and started toward the door. "Great. This is perfect. By the end of the day tomorrow, we'll have this room turned into the new regional office."
Pen seemed lost in thought as they walked to their joint office. Fern got her purse from her desk drawer and asked, "Are you ready to go now?"
"Huh? Okay, let's go. I'll plan this out tonight so we'll know exactly what to do tomorrow." He picked up his briefcase with his computer and started out the door.
They called out goodbyes to the employees still in the building. At least he hadn't insisted on being the last one out of the building as well as the first one in. Dare she hope that they could start at a more reasonable hour in the morning?
Pen talked all the way back to the hotel, but he wasn't talking to Fern. He was muttering to himself about his office arrangement. That seductive voice muttering words she couldn't hear activated her nerve endings.
"You know some people say talking to yourself is a sign of insanity?"
He finally looked at her. "That's their problem. I find talking to myself a valuable tool. I think better out loud, and my ideas have more impact and are easier to remember if I say them instead of just think them." He rolled his pen between his fingers. "Of course, talking to yourself can be harmful too. Haven't you heard of what the psychologists call negative self-talk?"
She nodded her response. Not only had she heard of it, sometimes she was a master at it. Is that what she was doing when she imagined the worst from everything that Pen said or did?
Was she talking herself into failure? Maybe so. She decided to change to positive self-talk now.