Page 6 of Her Alpha Bosses

I glanced back at Sawyer who was watching me intently. “What do you say, boss?” I grinned.

Sawyer didn’t say a word and my heart skipped another nervous beat.

“Anyway.” I turned back to Kane, preparing to excuse myself. “The costs take you by surprise. I think that’s the biggest issue. The biggest scare too, because no one prepares you. You want to do everything you can for the people you love but when you’re hindered by bills you can’t pay and medication you can’t afford?—”

I caught myself before I rambled on too much about my feelings, then clasped my hands together.

“Please, enjoy.”

“You should stay.” Kane drinks deeply, eyeing me over the top of his cup.

“Excuse me?” Sawyer finally pipes up from behind and I turn so I can see the both of them. The air thickened around me and it suddenly felt like I was right in the middle of an invisible battle.

“Surely you don’t mind,” Kane said smoothly. “It would be a great help, for me at least, to have someone impartial to the business side of things. After all, who could provide better insight than someone in our target market?”

3

CALLIE

Kane wanted me in the meeting?

Beyond what I’d picked up from Sawyer over the months, I certainly wasn’t qualified enough to sit in on a meeting as important as this one for anything other than taking notes, and Sawyer was often against a paper trail like that.

As I forced a polite smile, ready to decline, Sawyer beat me to it.

“Alright,” he said. “She can stay.”

I could stay?

I sent him a glance, trying to get a read on what he was thinking but his face remained as impassive as ever, and his attention was solely on Kane. There seemed to be a secret conversation happening that I wasn’t privy to. Ideally, I wanted to crawl back to my desk and scrape by the rest of my shift before going home and drowning in some wine, but they clearly had other ideas.

“Do you want me to record anything?” I asked Sawyer, unsure what other value I could bring to something like this.

“Just listen,” was his only reply.

Great. Excellent notes, boss.

Taking the only available single chair around the small coffee table, I settled in to observe whatever it was Kane decided he needed my insight into, and prepared for what was sure to be a boring pissing contest between two Alpha men unwilling to back down even an inch for the other.

It turned out, I was pleasantly surprised.

Sawyer jumped right in and began detailing the new, affordable Alzheimer’s drug he had been helping to develop. He learned about it a year or so ago and has been investing heavily because while it’s not a cure, it can give a lot of ‘better’ days to those affected. However, despite his efforts, he didn’t have the means to get this drug into the hands of patients without raising costs.

Kane was utterly enthralled throughout Sawyer’s entire speech, and then a knowing smile crossed his face. The distribution problem required his company, Golden Dove, to step in. Golden Dove had excelled at giving back to the people for years, and if anyone knew how to absorb the costs as a company rather than passing them onto the customer, it was Kane Lewis.

I was amazed to watch them talk, discussing numbers of money I could only dream of. Kane’s desire for my insight became clear when he wanted to know rough numbers of how much I was forking out for bills, medicinal and otherwise. Keeping the real numbers close to my chest – I didn’t want to spill that kind of info to a man I hardly knew – I provided him with a few estimates.

Even when Kane explained why the costs were so high, it really came down to corporate greed because those with money were more than capable of absorbing some of the monetary stress if it meant saving lives. That seemed to be the one thing that both he and Sawyer agreed on, and it became the baseline for the rest of their discussions. Working together, they could do amazing things to keep this drug as low costing as possible while helping more and more people.

It was the first time I saw Sawyer speak about his work with any kind of passion. When he took over Crane Enterprises from his father a few years ago, there had been a swift change in direction, and it seemed Sawyer was committed, deep down, to doing the right thing with the company he now had.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” I explained to Bianca a few hours later on the bus home. “They were sitting across from each other like Gladiators and neither of them moved unless the other did. It was like they were mirroring each other while looking for some kind of threat.”

“Men,” Bianca chuckled down the line. “What’s threatening about a man in a suit?”

“We will never be rich enough to know,” I sighed, staring out the fogged window at the passing city. I kept my breathing shallow so as not to break in the musky stink of the bus, and my mind replayed the meeting over and over.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Bianca groaned.