4 The Billionaire's Seduction All That He Requires by Olivia Thorne Page B

you.”
    I frowned. “No.”
    “Yes.”
    “You quizzed me for, like, five minutes after that. Actually, ‘quiz’ is the wrong word. You were like the Spanish Inquisition for five minutes after that.”
    “That was to satisfy myself that you knew what you were talking about.”
    “Still – five minutes, not thirty seconds.”
    “More like two-and-a-half minutes. I just kept going because I was amazed you knew so much.”
    “You weren’t going to torpedo a buyout on the say-so of some little secretary in Exec Comp.”
    “No – that’s why I did my due diligence for the hour afterwards. But I had a gut feeling 30 seconds in that you knew what was going on. Two-and-a-half minutes later I knew my gut was right, and the deal was off.”
    I sat there, stunned. It seemed to me that was a pretty big decision to make after talking to a secretary.
    But, then again… one of us was a billionaire investor, and one of us wasn’t.
    “So what does this have to do with me? Sounds to me like you were the genius who connected the dots so fast.”
    “I’ve often found that you can gather your best intelligence at the lowest levels of the company. At the people in support, the ones who have to deal with the bullshit generated by the idiotic ideas of the MBAs and people in management.”
    “Not everybody’s me. There’s lots of crappy people at the bottom.”
    “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you compliment yourself, however indirectly.”
    I blushed.
    “But you’re right,” he continued. “Which is why I made sure you knew your stuff. You did. And I scuttled a billion dollar buyout on your opinion.”
    My mouth gaped open to hear it put so baldly. “That’s crazy.”
    “Not from my point of view.”
    “Why are we even talking about this?”
    “What if you ran a consulting firm where you went in and interviewed the low-level employees about what worked and what didn’t? Basically, you culled all the problems and all the suggestions from the people on the front lines? The good people. That would be half your work, separating the wheat from the chaff. But you’re excellent at grasping large-scale issues. You synthesize information rapidly. And you have six months of high-level Exec Comp experience. You basically did all the heavy lifting for an Executive VP. What if you could sell yourself as a consultant for smaller companies, with, say, more than 50 employees but fewer than 500? You go in, find out the problems… and then present the issues to management with suggestions, also pulled from the best employees. You’d basically be crowdsourcing the problems and solutions, but from the group of people who know the system inside and out.”
    I sat there for a long second, just turning it over in my mind.
    “…that’s kind of cool,” I murmured.
    “I know. I thought of it.”
    “Even when you’re trying to be helpful, you’re kind of arrogant, you know that?”
    “It’s not arrogant if it’s true.”
    “Whatever. But answer me this, Mr. I’m Too Cool For This World.”
    “What?”
    “Who in their right minds would hire me for my first gig?”
    “They would if I recommended you.”
    I was silent for a long moment.
    Finally I asked, meekly, “You’d do that?”
    “I have faith in you. Faith, I might add, that you’re sorely lacking in yourself.”
    “They would listen to you?”
    He gave me a look.
    “Okay, stupid question,” I said – yet couldn’t let it go. “But seriously… they would?”
    “If Bill Gates said he’d just used an incredible software debugger last week, and the person was a freelancer and anybody could get him on a job-by-job basis… wouldn’t you hire him?”
    “I don’t need any software debugged.”
    “Very funny,” he said, not laughing.
    “Yeah… if I had the money.”
    “The people I’d be recommending you to? They have the money.”
    “You’d do that?”
    “Like I said, Lily, I have faith in you. You should try to have a little in