Free Pursued (The Diamond Tycoons 2) by Tracy Wolff

do you want me to say?”
    “I want you to get the article,” Ollie demanded. “There’s no way they run that article without you seeing it first. Tell her—”
    “I know what to tell her. You go get Hollister.” He wanted Bijoux’s head counsel in here, stat.
    Nic unmuted the phone, this time hitting the button so hard that the entire device skidded a foot across his desk. Son of a bitch. He was going to get that article and then he was going to tear it—and the reporter who wrote it—apart with his bare hands. “I need to tell you, Darlene, that if you run that article as is, without giving me a chance to vet it first and debunk your obvious misinformation, you will be facing a lawsuit the likes of which the
Los Angeles Times
has never seen.”
    “Our information is good.”
    “Your information is wrong, that much I guarantee you.”
    “It comes from an insider at Bijoux. One who has proof that the company has systematically bought conflict diamonds and passed them off as conflict-free diamonds for at least seven of the last ten years.”
    “Let me get this straight. You’re claiming that one of my people came to you and gave you information implicating us in not only buying conflict diamonds but then in conspiring to defraud consumers by claiming the gems are conflict-free.”
    “Essentially, yes, that is what the source has provided us proof of.”
    “And again, this came from one of our people?”
    “That is correct.”
    “And you think you’re going to run this article in three days.”
    “We
are
going to run this article in three days,”
    Over his dead body they were. “Yeah, well, Darlene, that just isn’t going to happen.”
    “With all due respect, Nic—”
    “With all due respect, Darlene, you’ve been taken for a ride.”
    “The
Los Angeles
Times
does not get taken for a ride, Mr. Durand. We triple-check our sources—”
    “Well, you didn’t in this case. This is the first time either Marc or myself has heard of these allegations, and in a situation like this, no one else is in a position to know more about our diamonds, and where they come from, than we do. I know where every single shipment comes from. Marc personally inspects every mine on a regular basis. The certification numbers on the stones come straight to us, and only our in-house diamond experts ever get near those numbers. All of our diamonds are conflict-free. All of them. Now, you are welcome to come in and tour our facilities and see all of the safeguards we have in place to ensure that what you’re accusing us of doesn’t happen. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to courier over all of our PR materials so you can see where our diamonds really do come from.”
    “Our reporter tried to come for a tour on two separate occasions while she was researching this article. Both times she was turned away by your PR office.”
    He ground his teeth together, wondering what the hell Ollie had been thinking. Probably that he didn’t have time to babysit a reporter on a puff piece, what with the sudden uptick in business and philanthropy—and the publicity both generated. But if she had told him what the story was about, there was no way Ollie would have turned her away. And no way this information wouldn’t have been brought to Nic’s attention a hell of a lot sooner than three days before the article was supposed to run.
    Which, he figured, was exactly why the reporter hadn’t told anyone the nature of the story she was writing. And now they were all paying for it…
    “Your reporter’s inability to explain her article idea to my PR department is not my fault.”
    “Of course not. But your PR department’s secrecy and inability to deal with the community when necessary is not our fault, either.”
    He ground his teeth, counted to ten to keep from spewing onto her all the vitriol that was racing through his brain. When he could finally speak again without fear of telling the managing editor of the
Los Angeles
Times
to