Gallagher reached for one of the pencils he kept in a silver mug on his desk and rammed it into an electric pencil sharpener. He sucked on the newly sharpened point as his tailor stammered a response. Gallagher let him get a few words out before he snatched up the receiver, uttered an impressive string of expletives, and slammed the phone down.

“Where is it?” he barked.

Jake handed him a neatly bound sheaf of papers.

“This had better be an improvement over the crap you faxed me last night.”

“We’ve made a lot of progress since then,” Jake assured him. He’d worked with Gallagher before and was one of the few people around who seemed unfazed by his complete lack of interpersonal skills. I, on the other hand, was gripping my chair’s armrests so tightly my knuckles were white. In an industry notorious for badly behaved people, Gallagher was in a class by himself.

He flipped through the pages, giving an occasional grunt. The presentation was flawless-we’d double-and triple-checked every detail-but he almost seemed disappointed when he didn’t find even a single typo.

“I guess it will do,” he said grudgingly. “Now, here’s the drill. Nicholas Perry, Thunderbolt’s CEO, will be here at ten. I do the talking. You guys keep your mouths shut unless I ask you a direct question. And you’d better know every number, every fact in here, backward and forward. There’s big money riding on this. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said. “But I was wondering about something.”

Gallagher narrowed his eyes in an expression that made him look even more like a ferret. “Wondering about what?”

“Well, Thunderbolt-” I winced every time I said the word-what sort of phallo-centric moron would name a company Thunderbolt? “-just doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate for a buyout. Its revenues have been declining, and the union’s making trouble so its labor costs are likely to increase, and-”

“Your point?” asked Gallagher. “Get to the point already.”

My grip on the armrests tightened yet further. “The point is that a buyout will add a lot more debt to Thunderbolt’s balance sheet. The company’s interest payments will skyrocket, and I don’t see how it will cover them.”

An LBO is sort of like buying an apartment by making the smallest of down payments and taking out a huge mortgage, all based on the assumption that you can generate enough money renting out the apartment to cover the mortgage payments. In this case, it was unclear that you could count on the tenant paying his rent on time. Or that you’d even be able to find a tenant in the first place.

Gallagher gestured impatiently toward the dozens of Lucite deal mementos lining his credenza. “See those? Each one represents a successfully executed LBO.”

Successfully executed, maybe, but more than a couple of the Lucites bore the names of companies that no longer existed, victims of a crushing debt load.

“I’ve been in this business a long time,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. So, why don’t you do your job, and I’ll do mine?”

“I was just-”

“Enough already! Nick Perry and I go way back-I’ve known him since Princeton. This deal is ours, and I’m not going to let anything screw that up. We do the work, we collect our fees, and everybody goes home happy. Can you get that through your pretty little head?”

Unbelievable. He’d actually said, “pretty little head.”

Pick your battles. That was what my mother always told me. Good advice, certainly, but not necessarily easy to follow. I opened my mouth to speak again but he cut me off.

“Dahlia!”

Dahlia Crenshaw, Gallagher’s secretary, hurried in. “Yes, Mr. G.?”

“I need some goddamn coffee in here. Pronto.”

Dahlia did not point out that technically her workday wouldn’t begin for another hour. Nor did she point out that getting coffee was not in her job description, however politely she was asked to fetch it. Instead, she smiled sweetly. “Sure thing, Mr. G.”

Jake and I exchanged another look. Gallagher had brought Dahlia with him from his previous firm, and the office gossips were convinced that, in the tradition of bosses and secretaries throughout time, the two were having an affair. That Dahlia bore more than a slight resemblance to Jessica Simpson only helped fuel the rumors. And putting up with Gallagher, day in and day out, was just too much to ask without some fringe benefits. Not that it was clear how an illicit relationship with Gallagher would be a fringe benefit.

“We’re done here,” he announced, dismissing us with a wave of his hand. “Meet me in the conference room at ten with copies.”

I was following Jake and Mark out when I heard his voice behind me.

“Rachel, not so fast.” I turned, and Jake turned with me. “Just Rachel,” said Gallagher. He motioned for Jake to leave and shut the door, which he did, but not before shooting a commiserating glance my way.

“Courage,” he said under his breath.

Gallagher put his feet, shod in well-shined Gucci loafers, on his desk. “We need to have a little talk,” he said, rolling a pencil between his palms.

“All right,” I said in an even voice, admiring my own self control. It was probably a good thing that I was so tired; if I had more energy, I would still be too angry to speak, given his cavalier dismissal of my concerns about the deal, not to mention the “pretty little head” comment and everything that had come before it.

“This is a warning. I don’t want to hear any more crap from you. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Because if you make trouble on this, I’ll be happy to find another VP to work on the deal. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to have you on the team in the first place.” “Why’s that?” I asked. This time it was a struggle to maintain my even tone. I was one of the hardest working bankers in the department, and the other partners thought highly of me.

“I demand a lot from my teams. Girls like you-they’ve got other things going on. Work doesn’t come first for them.” The only thing missing was a lascivious up-and-down once-over, but he’d gotten that out of the way on Saturday, along with a thinly veiled and equally lascivious proposition.

I felt my shoulders stiffen. I pulled myself up to my full height, painfully conscious that this was only five feet six inches even with the aid of high-heeled pumps, and bit back a number of retorts that would put this pathetic, rodentlike excuse for a human being in his place.

Bonus, I reminded myself. Partnership.

“I don’t think you’ll have a problem with either the quality or the quantity of my work,” I said.

“As long as we understand each other.”

“We do. We definitely do.”

T he one advantage to being among the few female bankers in the department was that I could always retreat to the ladies’ room when upset-or, in this case, enraged. It was a relatively safe place to get my emotions in check; the only other people I was likely to encounter were the administrative assistants on the floor. They were a sympathetic group, but it was still a relief to find I had the room to myself.

I ran shaking hands under cold water from the tap and bent forward to splash some onto my flaming cheeks. No matter how level I’d managed to keep my voice, my face always betrayed me. I didn’t need to look in the mirror to know that two spots of crimson were staining my usual late-winter pallor. I averted my gaze-I didn’t want to see my reflection; it would only drive home the overwhelming feeling that I was trapped, running toward a goal that proved ever more elusive. How many times had I stood before this same sink, trying to calm myself after a disappointment or confrontation?

Get a grip, I told myself. Don’t let him get to you.

But how dare he question my abilities? Much less my commitment? I’d been at it for eighty hours a week for years, but that weasel assumed, just because I was female, that I was some kind of dilettante, that I’d wandered into Winslow, Brown by accident and was sticking around on a whim. If anything, I was as ambitious as any of the men at the firm, perhaps more so-I’d dealt with so much crap- to borrow one of Gallagher’s favorite words-that I was determined to make partner, if only to prove that I was better than most of the men with whom I worked. Another few months and that partnership would be mine, or so the department head, Stan Winslow, had assured me. Not only would my income soar, I finally would be in a position to start doing things the way I wanted to do them.