When she’d left, Travis spoke. “Okay, how?”
“By going to Matagalpa.”
He choked on his first bite of steak.
“Need a Heimlich?” she inquired, stabbing a piece of spinach with her fork.
“No.” He coughed and set down his knife and fork. “You can’t possibly be thinking of going to Matagalpa.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head, opened his mouth, then closed it again. She eyed Travis’s steak sandwich. Medium rare, just how she liked it, glistening and juicy. The char-broiled smell of it wafted across the table to tease her nostrils. And French fries. Golden, crispy French fries. She looked down at her plate of raw spinach.
“Apparently Dad was going to talk to the farmers about the new pricing structure at the fiesta he attended.”
“Yes. He’d just left the fiesta when he got in the accident.”
She pressed her lips together for a moment as another wave of sadness swept over her. “So if he’d already presented his plan to the farmers, they can tell us what it was.”
Travis grinned. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. You would take their word for it?”
She frowned. “Why not? They’re not exactly sophisticated, conniving businessmen. They’re nice people. This Javier will tell us. If I can ever get hold of him.”
He lifted one eyebrow. “You’ve tried?”
She looked down at her meal. “I called a few times. But there was no answer at the number I have.”
“I have a bad feeling about why you can’t reach him.”
“If I went there, I could find him and talk to him.”
“That’s insane. You’re not going to Matagalpa.”
She carefully set down her fork and swallowed down the anger rising inside her. “Do I have to say it again? You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
He chewed on his lunch then reached for his water goblet, but said nothing. Because he knew she was right. With a lingering gaze at Travis’s plate, she stabbed at a leaf. She lifted her eyes to Travis and caught him smiling.
“Want some fries?”
She chewed her spinach. “No thanks.”
“How’s the salad?”
“Delicious. Nice dressing. Honey Dijon vinaigrette.”
Travis nodded, looking like he was trying not to laugh. “You’ve developed a taste for veggies over the years? I remember your mother begging you to eat something green.”
She pressed her lips together. “I was a teenager. Burgers and fries and Cokes were all I wanted. Now I know how to eat healthy.”
“Ah.” He nodded and cut into the tender juicy meat.
Samara dragged her eyes off his plate and focused on her salad. It really was delicious.
“So,” she said, “I think he went to Matagalpa to sell the farmers on the new idea. If he made promises to the farmers there, we may already be committed to doing something.”
Travis’s brows snapped together above his nose. He shook his head. “Leave it, Samara.”
“We can’t just leave it! What if those farmers are expecting something from us now?”
Travis’s face colored, and his jaw tightened. As he was gritting his teeth. He stabbed his fork into the sandwich and sawed at it with his knife. “Fine,” he ground out. “You keep trying to call Javier. See if you have any luck getting through to him. I doubt he’s sitting there waiting for us to come flying down there and build a cupping lab.”
She shrugged, chewing on more spinach. It was like eating the leaves of an elm tree, for Godfrey’s sake. “Okay.”
She couldn’t wait to get back to the office and start trying to get through to Javier. She knew phone service in Matagalpa wasn’t the most reliable, but she should be able to reach him. Maybe she’d be able to do something Travis hadn’t.
Travis’s head pounded in a thick, heavy rhythm later that afternoon. He put a hand to his temples and leaned his elbows on the desk in the office he was using, the space he often used when he came up from Los Angeles.
As much as he wanted to do it, running the company without Parker wasn’t going to be easy. There were problems—the company had been growing so fast, and for so long, the downturn in the economy had come as a rude shock. Parker had wanted to continue the expansion, whereas Travis wanted to scale back and take a look at how they were organized. Parker had thought that, because they were a high-end coffee importer and roaster, they were immune to economic downturns. People who could afford high-end coffee drinks weren’t as impacted as lower income earners. But the expansion had increased their customer base and brought in many customers who were lower income earners. With the slump in the economy, those people were, in fact, eliminating pricy coffee drinks from their budgets. Parker had made a few bad decisions lately.
Tough competition from newer companies was eating into their market share. Even fast food places were serving cappuccinos now, for Chrissake.
He lifted his head and slid his hand to the back of his neck, massaging the tight muscles.
Now Parker was gone, there was no one to argue with, and dammit, Travis missed that already. He liked the give and take, the way they built off each other’s ideas. Sure, now Travis could just revise their expansion plans however he wanted, but it didn’t feel right. It felt like he needed to fight for what he wanted, or else it might be...wrong. If he didn’t have to make the arguments to convince Parker using rationale and a good business case, how would he know he was doing the right thing?
He needed to have confidence in his own abilities. He did have confidence in his own abilities. But running a big corporation like Cedar Mill Coffee was a daunting responsibility for anyone. As partners, they’d supported each other and balanced each other. He sighed. He needed to make some tough decisions. Possible staff cuts. He hated to do that.
He had to remember that he wasn’t alone in this. The entire executive management team would be involved in major decisions, as they had in the past. He’d be sure to involve them even more now that Parker was gone.
Confident he was in managing his own division, he knew the problems extended beyond retail. Travis was still concerned about Parker’s mysterious plans in Matagalpa. His gut clenched when he thought about what Parker might have been doing there. The last time he’d been worried about Parker’s activities there, the DEA had been involved, for Chrissake. There was no goddamn way he could let Samara continue down that path.
Thoughts of Samara sent his mind off in totally different directions. God she was infuriating. Annoying. Frustrating. And sexy as fuck.
He closed his eyes, his dick hardening. Hell, not here. He shifted in his leather office chair. He couldn’t help but admire her determination and loyalty to the company, even though he had to shake his head at her stubbornness. She was a complicated woman, no doubt about that.
Thankfully he’d arranged the meeting with the executive team for tomorrow, so he could shut down her crazy idea that she was going to take over Parker’s role in the company. They had enough problems.
Parker’s oversight of the import division relied in large part on his relationships with growers and the co-ops in Central and South America. He’d built those up over the years. They trusted Parker. It was going to be damn tough for someone else to step in there. Samara certainly wasn’t capable of doing it.
They’d also had some grading problems with some of the growers recently. They’d been trying to expand production into marginal land that wasn’t really suitable for growing high quality coffee. As a company that had built its reputation on excellence, and because they roasted their beans and sold them whole through retail outlets, this was a serious issue. If they were just roasting the beans to grind and sell, or to brew, it wouldn’t be quite so critical. But many of the producers knew little about grading and didn’t even drink the coffee they produced —how would they know the quality they were growing?