There was still a beignet on his plate. “Are you going to eat that?”
“Nah, saved it for you.”
I leaned against the table—I had too much energy to sit down—and immediately bit into the beignet.
“Oh, it’s good. Still warm and fresh.”
He laughed. “I thought you said you only ate them on special occasions.”
I shrugged. “Changed my mind.” Though, to be fair, today did feel like a pretty special occasion.
CHAPTER 22
PIPER
The week started with a bang—Ihad five back-to-back client calls on Monday and zero time to do any actual work in between. Days like those didn’t occur often, but when they did, they exhausted me. In the evening, I’d intended to go over my presentation for Beckett but ended up curled on the couch with a book instead.
When I entered the meeting room at LeBlanc-Broussard on Tuesday morning, I was expecting to see the marketing team and Beckett—but all the LeBlanc brothers were here too.
I blinked several times. Beckett immediately rose to his feet.
“Good morning,” he greeted me.
“Hi.”
“My brothers insisted that they wanted to know more about the commercial as well.”
“Fantastic!”
“Yeah, we all want to see the progress on the commercial,” Xander said. “Considering the budget.”
“Ah, you’re the CFO, right?” I asked.
Beckett started to laugh. Anthony was also very amused.
“Yes, I am,” Xander answered without missing a beat.
“Don’t worry, Xander. I’ll show you that it’s worth the extra money.”
As everyone sat down, I plugged my computer into the projector. The screen in front of the table immediately reflected the content of my presentation.
“All right. So, here’s where we are right now. We wrote the script, and this is a play-by-play of the imaging.” It was all drawn cartoon-style. We’d use actors for the end product, of course.
I looked around the room. Everyone was truly focused on my presentation; no one was idling or playing on their phone. The LeBlancs were all very involved even if they didn’t run this particular business.
After I finished, I looked straight at Xander. “What do you think?”
He nodded. “It’s very promising. Of course, we’ll only know if it was worth the extra cost after the results start to roll in. That’s going to take a few years.”
“Brother, loosen up,” Zachary said. “Sometimes you have to take a leap.”
Xander stared at him. “That’s not how I make decisions.”
“Yes, we all know that,” Anthony replied jovially. “I, for one, am sold. This has got much more life in it than the last few commercials we’ve had. It’ll be popular for sure.”
“I think so too,” I replied.
Xander glanced at his wristwatch. “I need to get going.”
