Page 58 of Texas Made
“We’ll wait a bit,” Jaclyn told her. “Thank you.”
She took a big sip of her drink and set down her glass. “Marshall and I are back together.”
“Well, hall-e-freakin’-lujah. Now I won’t have to kill you.”
“Very funny. We’re back together but we still have the same problem we had when we broke up.” She took another sip of margarita.
“Oh, the long-distance problem? He can’t move here and you can’t move there?”
“That’s what I thought at first. Marshall definitely can’t move here. Not only is his business—his family business—in Whiskey River, but he also can’t leave his family in a lurch by moving away. And I wouldn’t want him to. He’s not the kind of person who’d do that.”
“So that means you move there. You and the company?” She said it casually and her poker face gave nothing away, but Jaclyn was 99.8 percent certain Rachel wouldn’t want to move to Whiskey River.
“No. I’ve thought about it and moving Divinity from our current location would be a bad business move. For a number of reasons.” It would be a freaking nightmare. Thinking about the logistics involved in moving her headquarters and manufacturing base made her nauseous. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ certainly applied here.
Plus, she couldn’t do that to her employees. Most of them wouldn’t want to move and many of them had been with her from the beginning. People like Rachel and Kelly, the woman who oversaw manufacturing. She and Rachel worked closely together. Moving the company would mean a lot of lost jobs.
The waitress came back and took their orders. Shrimp tacos for her and chicken and shrimp enchiladasespecialfor Rachel. The enchilada special was a dish she adored but didn’t often get as it was very rich.
Rachel rummaged through her purse and pulled out a small tube of hand cream. “Have you ever tried this? It’s made by a company in Whiskey River, oddly enough. It’s called lovely lavender hand cream. It’s lavender-scented.”
Jaclyn took it and looked at the label. “Funny you should ask. Yes, I’ve been to the shop. It’s owned by Juliette and Ariana Kelly. They married brothers. The shop is called Lavender Dreams and they have a whole line of products made with lavender. They have a lavender farm in Whiskey River as well as their manufacturing complex.” She squeezed a dab of lotion onto her palm. Rubbing it in she said, “This is wonderful. And that brings me to my idea.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Remember when we talked about making lotions and creams?”
“I do. But we decided we didn’t want to expand that much and that we’d probably need a different facility to manufacture that sort of thing. Plus we were still pretty new and already felt like we had more than enough to handle.”
“All true. But that was a long time ago. When I went to Lavender Dreams I remembered thinking I’d like to expand. Not in lavender,” she added hastily. “They’ve got the market cornered on that, at least in Texas, but there are loads of other fragrances. And we could have a signature lotion, or a line of signature lotions: hand, body, and face.”
The waitress brought their food. As soon as she left Rachel picked up the conversation again. “We’d need a chemist. One who specializes in lotions.”
“What if we opened a new manufacturing center? I think it would make sense to have two marketing departments but they would coordinate with each other since it’s the same company.”
“That would be fun. But it doesn’t solve your problem. It only makes it worse.”
“Not if we locate the new facility in Whiskey River.”
“I still don’t see—you’d have to go back and forth even more.”
“Not if I had a trusted partner who took care of this division of the company.”
“But you don’t have a partner.”
“Not yet.” She grinned at her friend. “How would you like to be a partner in Divinity, Rachel?”
*
Rachel’s mouth hungopen. “You want—you want me to be your partner? Are you shitting me?”
Jaclyn laughed. “No, of course not. It’s the perfect solution. You already own some stock. You can buy more until you have enough to be the minority shareholder. In the meantime I’ll make you a partner.”
“I don’t know what to say. Don’t you need to think about this?”
“I have thought about it. Rachel, you’ve been with me almost from the beginning. You know the ins and outs of everything to do with our makeup. Both manufacturing and marketing. And I trust you. I know you’ll make the best decisions for the company.”
“Not so long ago you didn’t believe that,” Rachel said dryly.
