Stoned: A Billionaire Stepbrother With Benefits Romance (My Brother's Keeper Book 1) by Cynthia Sharon

CHAPTER ONE
     
     
    “This is bullshit!” Ralph said, throwing the
sales figures on the table. He was fuming with his cheeks turning
an unflattering shade of purple and the smoke from his cigar
encircling his head like a wreath.
    Allison Shepard coughed, choked up by the
nicotine stench. However, Ralph McDonough was the senior partner at
Vision Marketing, Inc., and the health codes for New York City
buildings didn’t apply here. He’d been an avid stogie smoker for
years, and Allison had learned to deal with the assault to her
allergies and, alas, the secondhand smoke filling her lungs.
Besides, it calmed him down. If McDonough was this pissed already,
then she was grateful for anything that managed to calm him
down.
    “I’m so sorry,” her assistant, Kristen
started.
    Allison stared at the younger girl and hoped
she’d take the hint. Her assistant had only been at the firm for
two years, and she didn’t understand yet that Ralph was like Mount
St. Helen’s. Once he started erupting, it was pointless to try and
stop the spread of his rage. He just had to burn himself out.
    Ralph glared back at both of them, and
Allison’s cheeks flushed, feeling the scrutiny of him focused
completely on her in front of the entire senior staff of the
company. “Do you want to repeat that, Karen?”
    “It’s Kristen,” she added, and Allison
definitely needed to explain to the other girl about not burying
herself deeper. That was, of course, assuming that either of them
still had a desk here after the meeting. “I just meant that we
thought it was a slam dunk.”
    He shook his head but focused his laser sharp
attention on only Allison now. “You lobbied me, Allison. You
lobbied me for three months to have the Schmidt’s Lager account,
and I let you have it because you’ve done such great work in the
past. I thought you had enough vision to make up for that fact
that, frankly, women don’t know how to market to men.”
    She swallowed but kept her focus directly on
him. As terrible as his lambasting was, it would only get worse if
he thought she was avoiding him. “I thought the ‘Life’s a Beach’
campaign would work. It had everything---exotic locations, breaking
free from authority, and of course we had the requisite swimsuit
model in the background.”
    “Exactly,” he said, cueing up the DVD player.
“This is already making the rounds for people in the know. This is
what Stone Advertising has already come up with since Schmidt’s
fired us last week for low sales. Pay better attention.”
    Allison bit the inner side of her cheek to
keep herself from shooting her mouth off. She hadn’t spent six
years working up the ladder to rise to the bait of a hothead like
McDonough. As the test footage for the first new Schmidt’s Lager ad
rolled, she had to grimace. It was the frat brother, sexcapade mess
that she expected from a company like Stone. There were tons of
women in cocktail dresses so short it was almost pornographic at
some uptown bar and more than a few innuendos were exchanged
between the leads of the commercial. It was both puerile and
something that couldn’t air in certain markets before eight at
night.
    “Now that’s already testing amazing from what
I hear with their focus groups, and that’s exactly what we should
have given them!”
    “That’s filthy and you know that thirty
percent of Schmidt’s consumers are women. They don’t like something
that makes that Carl’s, Jr. ad with Paris Hilton and the carwash
look like a damn rerun of Full House. I didn’t think we were that
type of company,” she said, her voice rising a little, despite her
best efforts. The dreck that Stone Advertising came up with did
that to her. No art to it, little actual thought. Why bother if you
could use boobs?
    “Well, it was a brilliant enough lure for one
of our biggest clients away from us, and for my baby…the company
I’ve built up for thirty years to be on damn life support.”
    Everyone around the table