The Money Man (The Consultants #1) - Nancy Herkness Page 0,1

Only four had an accounting issue.

That meant Alice was the problem.

Now the panic began to close up her throat as she felt the foundation of her world crack under her feet. If she could no longer count on her skill with numbers, what could she count on?

She pushed past the knot in her throat and tried to consider the situation with some calm. If there was a software problem, it should have a thread on the help forum for BalanceTrakR. Yesterday she had searched through all the questions and answers posted online. None touched on her problem.

So, swallowing her shame, she had posted her problem on the support forum. No one had responded yet.

Dropping down into her ergonomic desk chair, she typed in a more general search query, looking for bookkeeping advice. Maybe someone with a fresh perspective might find her problem.

She clicked through several sponsored ads that offered nothing useful. The next entry was affiliated with the KRG Consulting Group, a powerhouse firm based in New York City but with a worldwide reputation. She couldn’t imagine what sort of help such an elite group had to offer a local bookkeeper. But her sanity was on the line.

She slipped off her wire-rim glasses to rub her tired eyes before seating them back on her nose and clicking on the link. The tagline read: Are you a small business owner with a problem? We want to help—free of charge. The introduction went on to say that KRG Consulting Group had started small too so they remembered the struggle. They had met with success and now offered to lend their fellow entrepreneurs a hand through their Small Business Initiative. All she had to do was fill out the online form and KRG would be in touch.

“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” Alice said to Sylvester, who had leaped off the cat tree to walk across her keyboard. She stroked his sleek black head as she stared at the website.

It wasn’t a marketing ploy to draw in new customers, since no small business owner would be able to afford KRG’s services. So either it was genuine—in which case she might end up looking like an incompetent idiot when one of their genius consultants took three minutes to figure out what she was doing wrong—or they would just ignore her request because it was so far beneath their high-level abilities.

She weighed the two possibilities for a moment before gently setting Sylvester on the floor and starting to type.

Derek Killion sat down at the conference table and braced himself as his partner Tully Gibson strolled over, his big, athletic frame encased in a charcoal suit.

“Good job on bringing in the Argon International assignment, partner,” Tully said, giving Derek a hard congratulatory thump on the shoulder before heading for his usual chair at the end of the table.

Derek rolled his abused shoulder under his suit jacket, while Tully sat down and pulled off his handstitched Lucchese boots before propping his sock-covered feet on the table. He’d once put his boots on the expensive zebrawood surface, but Derek had put a stop to that by threatening to deface them with a permanent black marker.

Tully tilted the chrome-and-leather chair back, making it creak under his solid muscles. “That’s quite a coup for KRG, beating out two of the biggest accounting firms in the world, but you have your work cut out for you.”

“It’s going to entail a lot of travel too. I’m heading for Asia in two weeks to hit their Tokyo and Singapore offices,” Derek said. Not because the project required his physical presence in those places but because top Argon management wanted to see the face of the founding partner who’d promised them his special attention in order to win their business.

He’d gone after the Argon International project with every resource at his command because it was a huge feather in the cap of KRG Consulting. A lot of major corporate players had set their sights on the Argon business so it was a triumph when he’d won it, capturing a revenue stream that would make this a banner year for the firm. However, the sense of accomplishment was fading under the weight of the short deadlines and the complexity of the task.

The third KRG partner, Leland Rockwell, strolled in, wearing his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, and slid his laptop onto the table. “I hear we are taking on the foreign-currency hedging issues of Argon International, thanks to