Jacquie D'Alessandro
Your Room or Mine?
© 2011
This book is dedicated to Cindy Hwang. Thank you for including me in such a fun project! And, as always, to my wonderful husband, Joe, who makes anything and everything double fun, and to my terrific son, Chris, aka Double Fun, Junior.
One
“I have some great news, Jack.”
Jack Walker’s every muscle tensed. Uh-oh. The last time Gavin Laine, his boss and CEO of Java Heaven, had uttered those words, a month ago, they’d been followed by the decidedly ungreat news that Gavin had hired a consultant to make sure Jack and his accounting department employees all bonded with each other. Jack had been chief financial officer of the popular Southeast coffeehouse franchise for only a month at that point, and he’d thought the transition was going smoothly. Certainly as smoothly as one could expect for a department that had imploded just weeks before Jack was hired when the former CFO and controller had been arrested for fraud and embezzlement.
Good thing Jack loved nothing more than a challenge, because the department was in shambles, morale was low, and personalities were clashing. But after a rocky first few weeks, he’d hired a new controller and things were looking much improved.
Patience, however, wasn’t Gavin’s strong suit. He wanted everything done yesterday and had hired Madeline Price, consultant, to move things along and insure that the department bonded and resolved their issues. That was the day Jack’s Java Heaven job turned hellish.
Like so many consultants Jack had been forced to deal with over the years, all Madeline Price did while racking up billable hours was talk, talk, talk, blah, blah, blah, and take endless notes. No doubt an X-ray would reveal a pie chart where her heart should be. It wasn’t his style to sit around and blah, blah, blah. He much preferred to roll up his sleeves and take action.