Chapter 27 They'd Sell Like Hot Cakes
“Eden, can you come in here?” Noah calls out through his open office door.
It’s late and for the most part the department is empty. Entering his office, I come to stand at his side. He’s standing with his back to the door, looking down at something on the desk. Laid out on his desk are the team’s design ideas for the replacement product.
“What do you think?” he asks without so much as a glance my way.
“About what?”
“Which do you like most?”
“Er… This isn’t really something I know anything about.”
“You made the right call last time.”
“I made a passing comment.”
“Yeah but it was right,” he replies, giving me a sideways glance.
“I like the hanging sofa,” I tell him eventually, “but if I’m honest, I keep thinking about the echo-friendly tents.”
“What about them?”
“It’s potentially a whole new market,” I tell him. “Clancy’s Comforts doesn’t do outdoors, for one thing. But also, if we can start a range of echo-friendly products, it could be huge.”
“Yeah, I think so too,” he says, rubbing his face thoughtfully.
“I’ve been thinking though,” I tell him hesitantly.
“About?”
“Design Team Two.”
“You’re not going to ask me why I’ve not reported them yet, are you?” he asks with a sigh.
I laugh slightly. As much as I don’t understand his decision not to tell Mrs Clancy just yet, I’m willing to respect it. The rest of the team are less willing to be patient though and have been complaining about his decision practically none stop.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I admit.
“Oh?” He looks like he doesn’t believe me.
“But I am intrigued why you’ve decided not to tell her.”
“I don’t want the wrong person to take the fall,” he tells me seriously. “I need more evidence than that one email. If I go to Mrs Clancy with that email, Stacey and Holly will get fired for sure. But the person most culpable will play innocent and he’ll probably get away with it.”
“Lewis Artie?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you being a bit unfair to Mrs Clancy? I thought she was idol or something and now you’re saying she can’t read between the lines.”
“Even if she does,” he tells me, “even if she believes everything I tell her, there’s no evidence and like you said, without evidence you can’t fire someone.”
He grins at me and it’s practically electric.
“So, you’re just going to wait for him to do something else?” I ask, trying not to let his smile distract me.
Shrugging his shoulders, he says, “to be honest, I don’t know. I’m just going to do my job and hope for the best. Besides, now I know I’ve got someone on my side that has the security team in her pocket. You still haven’t explained how you got that CCTV still…”
“And I never will,” I say jokingly.
He smirks at that before turning back to the designs on his desk.
“So, you think we should pick between the tents and the hanging sofa?”
“I don’t think we should pick. We should do both.”
“Both?” He turns once more to look at me, folding his arms across his chest as he waits for me to explain.
“Design Team Two are expecting another idea, right?” I ask.
“Yeah. They’ll expect us to have something new by the end of the week.”
“So, there’s a risk they’ll try to steal it again.”
“Uh huh.”
“Let’s run two new potential bestsellers and see what happens. Split the team in two; half work on the tents while the others work on the hanging sofa.”
“Even if they steal the design, they only get one product,” he mutters to himself, “mitigating the potential risk.”
“It also means that even if they only hear rumours, they won’t know what to believe because how could you have a hanging tent?”
We both laugh at that idea but then he gives me a scary look.
“I’d buy a hanging tent,” he says eventually. “That sounds awesome.”
His eyes are wide with excitement and I can almost see the ideas now running through his mind.
“We’re not designing a hanging tent,” I tell him seriously.
He looks momentarily disappointed before saying, “I think they’d sell like hot cakes.”
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