Simon weighed his options carefully and quietly settled on a few ideas.
When he came back to himself, he noticed the housekeeper beside him still sitting rigidly and smiled. "Want to leave your current job early and join Ygritte ahead of schedule?"
Alice tilted her head slightly. "Boss, would you actually let me go?"
"If you leave early, the ten-million-dollar trophy fund disappears."
The two new business proposals had not touched a penny of the housekeeper's trophy-wife fund. For one thing, ten million was simply too little, not even enough to cover promotional subsidies for the online payment system. For another, Simon refused to let these proposals, which were vital to Ygritte's growth and expansion, operate independently.
The housekeeper did not care much about the ten million anyway. She quickly realized her boss was teasing her again, so she simply stopped responding.
Simon was about to say something more when the assistant's voice drifted down from upstairs. "Simon, are you coming up to rest?"
He looked over and saw Jennifer standing at the top of the stairs in a bathrobe.
There was no way he could say no.
Simon nodded at once. "Sure."
Jennifer stayed where she was, still watching him, so Simon had to stand up immediately and follow her upstairs.
Alice remained seated, watching the two figures disappear. A faint trace of envy stirred in her heart.
...
Upstairs in the master bedroom.
Jennifer walked straight to the big bed, lay down on her stomach, and started flipping through a magazine.
Seeing that she was ignoring him, Simon smiled, walked to the bedside, lay down beside her, and leaned in to kiss her cheek.
Jennifer dodged half-heartedly, letting him catch her face, then gave his chest a light push. "Go take a shower."
"Want to shower with me?"
"I just finished."
Simon did not insist. He headed to the bathroom, washed up thoroughly, and came back out. The bedroom was now lit only by the soft yellowish glow of the bedside lamp.
Jennifer had changed out of the cotton bathrobe into a pink silk nightgown. She sat against the headboard pretending to read the magazine, but the gentle glance she sent his way carried a quiet hint of anticipation.
Lately Janet had been draining him every night. Simon had actually planned to do nothing tonight and just get a proper rest.
But.
Feeling the hopeful look in her eyes, he knew he could not say no.
The first rays of morning light were just slipping through the curtain gaps when the bedside phone rang. A slender white arm reached over, picked up the receiver, and held it to the man's ear.
Simon listened for a moment, exchanged a few words, and hung up.
It was good news.
On the East Coast, during morning business hours, the Department of Justice had officially approved Daenerys Entertainment's acquisition of MCA.
Simon had already known the rough outcome two days earlier. Today's announcement was merely the formal notice, so he felt neither excited nor surprised. Everything had gone exactly as planned.
Right now, sleep mattered most.
Last night had worn him out.
Jennifer was pulled back into his arms, but she had lost all desire to sleep. She pressed a hand against his chest and whispered, "I'll get up first and make you breakfast, okay?"
"Mm..."
Jennifer heard his deliberately weak reply and gave a soft laugh. She knew Janet was growing more and more desperate for a child. If she had not felt a little jealous last night watching him tease the housekeeper, she would not have pushed him so hard.
Now.
Hmph! Let's see if you can still muster the energy to flirt with other women.
She wriggled free of his embrace with ease, bent down to peck his cheek, then slipped out of bed and headed for the bathroom.
After washing up, Jennifer dressed quietly and left the bedroom.
The moment she stepped into the hallway she saw a graceful figure standing near the stairs, mopping the floor.
The figure wore a tailored suit skirt, golden hair pinned up to reveal a slender white neck. The narrow waist looked impossibly delicate beneath the fitted jacket, and below that the skirt hugged a tempting curve. The long legs sheathed in black stockings were equally alluring.
Jennifer drew in a quiet breath.
She had to admit.
If some guy walked out of the bedroom right now, he definitely would not slap that backside. He would more likely press a hand down and take her right there in the hallway.
Little vixen.
Bastard.
Hearing movement behind her, the figure turned around.
Jennifer vaguely remembered the girl's name: Zoe Parks.
Seeing it was the assistant who had emerged, Zoe's expression showed no flaw whatsoever. She shifted the mop aside with a polite smile. "Good morning, Jenny."
"Morning."
The assistant answered softly but offered no smile. Her face remained neutral as she walked past the girl toward the stairs.
She regretted it a little.
She should have drained that guy one more time last night. Ideally until he could not get out of bed all day.
Downstairs, two other girls were also cleaning.
The assistant greeted them with polite indifference and was about to head to the kitchen when the housekeeper walked in from outside, a stack of newspapers in her arms. She greeted the assistant as well.
After a moment's thought, the assistant stepped forward, took the newspapers, and instructed, "Once you're done cleaning, take them out for breakfast. Come back after nine."
The housekeeper paused briefly, then nodded. She pointed toward the kitchen. "Need any help?"
"No."
The assistant headed to the kitchen with the papers.
The housekeeper stood where she was, watching the assistant disappear. Instead of joining the cleaning, she turned and went to her own bedroom.
On the desk by the window sat a Compaq laptop. The housekeeper sat down, opened the computer, and waited patiently for it to boot. It ran Microsoft's Windows 3.0 released last year, but the machine itself was not the latest model. The screen was still black and white.
Once it started, she connected to the network and opened the IE browser.
Staring at the clean, text-only interface she had set as default, the housekeeper could not help feeling a small surge of admiration again. A graphical browser that could perfectly adapt to Macintosh, Windows, and DOS systems, and handle both new and old hardware across different years, was truly impressive.
If Ygritte raised the price of IE and ran it as a proper commercial product, the company would already be generating very respectable revenue.
Instead, after investing so much manpower and resources to support all these versions and backing it with the rich content of the Ygritte portal, each copy still sold for only ten dollars. It was practically being given away.
Even on her own laptop, which lacked the specs for full graphics and had to run in text mode, the Ygritte homepage layout remained clean and pleasant to read.
Of course the housekeeper had tried the software on other machines as well.
The villa at Dume Point had a dedicated computer room that looked like one of the internet cafes springing up everywhere in the past two years. It housed more than thirty mainstream PCs of every type on the market, from cheap two-thousand-dollar models to fifty-thousand-dollar workstations, from outdated 1970s machines to IBM's latest desktops. Everything was there.
Her boss had set up that room specifically to test IE's compatibility across different hardware and operating systems in real time.
After a quick glance at the portal homepage, the most prominent headline was still about the war in the Gulf.
America Online's haul of 2.3 million sign-ups in the past month was inseparable from Ygritte portal's timely coverage of the Gulf War.
Even though traditional media had realized the threat Ygritte posed and deliberately cut back on reporting about the portal, the new platform's spread among the public had not been slowed at all.
For the same price as a newspaper subscription, users received richer news, plus online games, blogs, email, and many other highly practical features. The appeal was enormous.
That was exactly the selling point Ygritte and America Online had been hammering in their joint advertising campaigns across every platform.
In San Francisco these past two days, she had also seen that Ygritte was developing richer multimedia functions such as music and animation. Once everything went live, the housekeeper felt the traditional print media really would have little reason to exist anymore.
After lingering only briefly on the portal content, the housekeeper opened her email.
She was currently recruiting to expand her own team and planned to hire at least ten more girls, all handled personally by her. In addition, the Miami estate design and construction needed her oversight, along with countless small matters concerning the boss's properties across North America.
Aside from laundry, cooking, and making beds, she was actually very busy.
And now she had to juggle Ygritte work on top of everything.
She could not help remembering what her boss had said last night while teasing her, asking whether she wanted to leave this job early.
Of course she did.
But the more you received, the more you had to give.
She understood that principle well enough.
Otherwise, no matter how many degrees she held, entering the workforce would mean starting from the bottom. After all, her family had no powerful background to give her a head start.
After reading and replying to every email, twenty-plus minutes had passed. Checking the time, the housekeeper knew she should gather the girls and leave.
Still.
She felt a little indignant.
You just got to his side a little earlier than the rest of us.
Everyone else.
Maybe none of us is much worse than you.
Of course, she only thought it. She really could not figure out her boss's personality. Sometimes warm, sometimes cold, sometimes flirtatious, sometimes distant, constantly changing.
And she had assumed that once she started working for him, he would claim her body soon. Yet months had gone by, and the most intimate thing he had done was lift her chin last night.
Playing hard to get had not worked. Acting aloof had not worked. Being capable and professional had not worked. Being seductive and charming had not worked.
Last night she had deliberately tried a shy, timid act.
Still nothing.
Really...
Where exactly was the problem?
It was so frustrating.
Maybe she should act spoiled and willful like the lady of the house.
But if she tried that, she suspected the outcome would not be good.
The lady of the house could act without restraint in front of him. If she did the same, it would most likely backfire.
After all, her position was different. She was only his housekeeper, only a trophy.
When he felt like it, he could pick up the vase and play with it. If she became too restless and stepped forward on her own, he might lose focus for a second and let it slip. Then it would shatter into pieces.
While Simon could calmly go back to sleep after hearing that the Department of Justice had officially approved Daenerys Entertainment's acquisition of MCA, Hollywood could not remain calm.
The approval meant a true Hollywood super-giant was about to be born.
Once the merger was complete, the new Daenerys Entertainment would span film, television, music, games, theater chains, publishing, theme parks, merchandise, and video-rental retail, among many other media businesses. And most of these were far from casual side projects.
Film alone needed no explanation. The 1991 theatrical slate already confirmed for both Daenerys Entertainment and MCA exceeded thirty titles.
Although Daenerys Entertainment's major releases this year, Batman: The Dark Knight, Terminator 2, and The Fugitive, were co-productions with other studios and not handled by them for distribution, the total output of more than thirty films meant that, just as the three major guilds had claimed in their lawsuit, Daenerys Entertainment was likely to control more than forty percent of Hollywood's box-office share.
In any industry, a market share above forty percent basically qualified as a monopoly-level superpower.
On the television side, besides Daenerys Television with its string of hit dramas and reality shows, MCA also held fifty percent of MCA Television and the USA Network. MCA Television's assets included a production division on par with Daenerys Television plus six local stations across the country.
The merger would therefore further strengthen Daenerys Entertainment's position in television and give the company its own broadcast stations.
Beyond that, the thousands of films and TV titles in MCA's library would largely make up for Daenerys Entertainment's lack of content depth.
Outside film and television, Daenerys Entertainment's biggest gains were undoubtedly MCA Records and the theme-park business.
MCA Records was in fact the predecessor of what would later become Universal Music. Founded in 1913 as a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, it had grown over more than half a century into a world-class record giant on the same level as Warner, Columbia, PolyGram, and EMI. MCA Records possessed a vast music catalog and its own distribution networks across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Through this acquisition, Daenerys Entertainment would no longer need to rely on other labels to distribute the soundtracks of its films.
MCA Records' weakness, however, was obvious: it currently lacked a superstar on the level of Michael Jackson or Madonna to anchor the roster.
As for theme parks, MCA only operated two at present, Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Studios Florida, but both were highly successful, drawing tens of millions of visitors each year and generating rich cash flow for MCA. Next, Daenerys Entertainment would partner with Matsushita to begin construction of Universal Studios Osaka.