Bait by Karen Robards

glimpse of the deep marine blue of the Gulf of Mexico, where it met the azure sky. Blue sky, blue water, blue steel—all that blue was a good match for her mood, Maddie thought glumly. Glancing around the conference table again, waiting with bated breath for a comment, any comment, that might give her a little badly needed encouragement, she realized that no one was meeting her gaze.
    Uh-oh. Bad sign.
    The quartet of suits, which was how she’d quickly come to think of the four sixtyish, buttoned-down businessmen who actually ran the company, appeared underwhelmed. Howard Bellamy, Brehmer’s Pet Food’s tall, distinguished, silver-haired president and chief operating officer, was fiddling with his pencil. Emil White, the bald, hook-nosed executive vice president in charge of marketing, who was sitting beside him, had turned sideways in his seat and was staring past his beach ball-sized belly at the shiny tip of his cordovan wing tips. Lawrence Thibault, executive vice president in charge of product development, who was seated across the table from White, was already typing something into the laptop that rested on the table in front of him and appeared completely oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the room. Forget trying to decipher his expression, Maddie thought despairingly. He was slouched so far down in his chair that all she could see of him over the laptop’s monitor was the top of his head, which was covered by an expensive-looking jet-black rug. Seated beside Thibault, stocky, grizzled James Oliver, executive vice president in charge of finance, pushed his wire-rimmed glasses down his nose, steepled his fingers under his chin, and looked at Bellamy. From the beginning, he’d made Maddie think of a basset hound with his worried frown and small, sad brown eyes, and he was looking sadder than ever now, which could not be considered promising. Standing not far from Maddie, Susan Allen absently chewed a fingernail and frowned as she watched Mrs. Brehmer, who was, of course, sitting at the head of the table. Following Susan’s gaze, Maddie decided that the old lady looked a lot more formidable on her own turf than Maddie remembered her. Of course, they’d met only once previously, three months before at an awards banquet sponsored by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, where Mrs. Brehmer, herself a former winner, had presented Maddie with the St. Louis Young Woman Business Owner of the Year Award. It was at that dinner that Maddie had suggested to Mrs. Brehmer that hiring Creative Partners might be the solution to the growth problems the old lady was complaining that her company was experiencing. Today’s meeting was the result of that conversation.
    But if Maddie had been expecting that, because of their mutual ties to St. Louis—all Brehmer’s manufacturing was still done there, at the plant that had served the company for half a century, and Mrs. Brehmer retained the original family home there—Mrs. Brehmer would be inclined to look on Creative Partners favorably, she was discovering that she’d been sadly mistaken.
    Mrs. Brehmer alone met Maddie’s gaze. Her eyes were a soft, faded blue—and as sharp as twin knives.
    â€œIs that circus thing it?” she barked in her hoarse smoker’s voice. A tiny, stooped woman, she was dwarfed by her oversized black leather chair—the largest at the table. A triple strand of pearls circled her neck, and she was dressed in a powder-blue suit that Maddie wasn’t sure, but suspected, was a genuine Chanel. Her hair was white, short, and perfectly coiffed. Her skin was almost as white as her hair, with the overly taut look that came with too many plastic surgeries. In fact, it had been pulled so tightly that it seemed molded to the bones beneath. Heavily made-up, with lashings of mascara and blush and a bright scarlet mouth, she reminded Maddie irresistibly of the Joker in the Batman movies. Only, Maddie