Seven Dates: A Different Kind of Hotwife Read Online Free PDF

bad novel, definitely felt out of control. Our problems had been building for a while. The move, my long hours, my reluctance to have kids yet had all contributed to the tension. My acknowledgement of some level of sexual incompatibility, at the margins surely, was enough to set her off.
    But good God, couldn’t she have picked a better time to snap than when my professional world was blowing up. And what was the right answer? More apologies? Denials that I had meant any of the things I’d said? She wouldn’t believe them anyway and it would just lead to accusations of patronizing her. No easy solution. I just needed her to calm the fuck down.
    I took a deep breath. The Joanie Situation would have to wait.
    The contract though… the problem was that the money was in a particular sweet spot. It was too much to ignore, and yet too little to make the company pull together and go to war. If we had to sue, we’d burn through the entire amount at stake in depositions. So I could see how the logic of the situation from Donald’s perspective was to either make me solve it myself or throw me under the bus for failing to do so. And yes… I should have caught the mistake. I needed to own up to that.
    The key, as with any negotiation, was leverage. I had none. Tanner knew that and wouldn’t budge. Unless I could find his initials on an incriminating document, ideally right beside the new language for II.C.8 I couldn’t force him to help me. But maybe I could find some way to encourage him to do what I wanted.
    It occurred to me that there might be another way around the third-party allocations issue. In theory, there were unlimited potential third parties, in practice just two. Briand, a French company, had a stake in the action, and so did XCOSA, a Mexican one. I wasn’t too worried about Briand. They had largely bid themselves out of the market anyway. Only EU regulations kept them in business across the Atlantic.
    XCOSA was more complicated, and my spreadsheet estimate of the cost of the contract error was, in fact, based on an early XCOSA bid. If they happened to sweeten their offer, there might be even more at stake. But if they raised their price… then suddenly the value of the third-party allocations would plunge and TKD’s interest in keep the clause would diminish, maybe even to the point where it wouldn’t be worth it to insist upon if it poisoned the well with us… or me at least.
    ***
    Tanner is an asshole, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. If I could figure out the XCOSA option, he could. Which meant I needed to point him in a different direction. I called him up.
    “Hey buddy,” I said pleasantly.
    “Hey man, I’m sort of busy right now.”
    “Yeah, I bet. Still drinking champagne on my dime?”
    “Look, I gotta go.”
    “Wait, I got a deal to talk to you about. You’re not retiring are you?”
    He laughed. “I wish. But look, I don’t know about you, but I don’t get paid to reminisce about old deals. I get paid to make new ones. ABC, baby.”
    Always Be Closing. I’d seen the movie too.
    “This is a new deal. Let me buy you a drink and we’ll talk.”
    “You’re buying? Okay, Sparkles at five.”
    “Sparkles? Really?”
    “Well, if you’re buying the drinks, then I wanna go someplace where I’ll get my money’s worth.”
    That doesn’t even make sense. “Okay, whatever.”
    Sparkles, of course, is a strip club. And that is something I definitely wouldn’t be mentioning to Joanie. Bad family history there. Well, she wasn’t expecting me home anyway, and she’d be out… somewhere… as well. So it should all work out.
    ***
    The day went by quickly. I locked my office door, drew the blinds and crunched on my scheme. So many moving parts, so little time to pull it together. Neither Donald nor the company lawyers pestered me, which at the time I was grateful for, but which struck me as ominous as I made my way to the strip club to meet Tanner.
    Sparkles is actually a pretty neat