1
Slade Hamilton stood in front of the large window of his office looking out over the business district in Downtown Austin, Texas. The ever-expanding skyline was one of the things that drew him to this branch of his family’s business. From his high-rise on Congress Avenue, Slade could look and see the busy city on one side and the calm of Lady Bird Lake on theother.
As Bull Hamilton’s one and only son, Slade could’ve chosen any of Logan Industries’ locations. California, New York, Asia, Europe, or even the coveted headquarters in Houston, where the great man himself ran the company founded by Slade’s maternal grandfather. All of those locations were in his reach. But Austin and its freshness, its eclectic mix of the traditional and the new, called to him. It also didn’t hurt that the near three-hour trip between Austin and Houston kept visits from his stepmother and father to aminimum.
Slade pulled the knotted tie from his neck and opened the button holding his throat hostage. He pulled in a harsh breath, held it, and let it seep from his lips slowly. Today had gone to hell with gasoline drawers on, and he was more grateful than usual that his father’s office was three hoursaway.
Slade picked up the half-empty tumbler of Scotch and downed his liquid lunch in one gulp. The burn nearly brought tears to his eyes, but the discomfort was nothing compared to what he’d be experiencing once Bull discovered Slade’s colossal loss of the StarTechdeal.
Six months’ worth of work gone like a puff of smoke. Slade was pissed at the waste of his time, but after discovering some of the dirty things Bull expected him to do to close the deal, there was no way Slade could go through withit.
A shrill buzz from the intercom cracked the air. Slade settled the now-empty glass on his desk and pushed the speakerphone button. “Yes,Donna.”
“Slade, your father’s on line one. Shall I tell him you’re unavailable for calls rightnow?”
For a brief second Slade contemplated Donna’s gift of avoidance before he shook his head and capitulated. “No, Donna, might as well get this ass-chewing over with.” He picked up the phone receiver and waited for a beat before he spoke. “Bull, what can I do foryou?”
“Boy, you know exactly what the hell you can do for me!” His father’s voice boomed through the line, making the ache in Slade’s head throbmore.
“I guess you’ve heard about the StarTechdeal?”
“I gave you explicit directions on how to handle that deal, Slade. If you’d just done what I told you to do, we’d have that damn company in ourgrip.”
Slade rolled his eyes as he listened to Bull’s assessment of the situation. Yeah, if Slade had listened to Bull they probably would have owned StarTech. The problem was, Bull’s plan included a whole lot of illegal shit that Slade wasn’t really inclined to get involvedin.
“Bull, it was insider trading. If we’d gone ahead with the purchase of the stock, both of us would end up in handcuffs once the SEC foundout.”
“Ifthey found out,” Bulladded.
Slade shook his head. There it was—Bull logic. Something was only wrong if you got caught doing it. Even then, if you could weasel your way out of your predicament by denying it or resting the blame at someone else’s feet, then you still weren’t technically in thewrong.
Slade had spent years attempting to resign himself to Bull’s way of thinking and living. There was only one problem, he had this pesky thing called a conscience that wouldn’t let him screw people over or do illegal shit just to getahead.
Tired of Bull’s tirade, he placed the receiver down on his desk and let the man rattle on. By the sound of it, Bull had only muddled through the first movement of this familiar symphony. Slade figured he had another twenty minutes before Bull spewed his consistent, “You hear me when I’m talking to you, boy?” and Slade would be expected toanswer.
Slade returned to the window and smiled at his beloved city. Its distance from his father’s brimstone being its most endearing quality at themoment.
He saw his smile reflected in the window and could almost see his inner child sticking out his tongue and singing, “Na, na, na, na, na, you can’t get me,” to his angry father. He reveled in that feeling of his petty win until he heard a disturbance from the other side of his office door. A panicked, “You can’t just barge in there,” coming from Donna made Slade pull up to his full six-foot-four-inch height and step toward thedoor.
“Donna, who in thehell—”
“Who in the hell indeed,son.”
There, big and bold as day, Bull Hamilton stood in the middle of Slade’s office. As if this day hadn’t already pissed Slade off, it had taken a decidedly sharp turn onto shit’shighway.
“I can’t believe you fucked this up, Slade! I gave you all the tools you needed to win this damn thing, and you still managed to screw me and mycompany.”
Slade turned halfway from his perch at the office window to give his father a cursory glance. Bull Hamilton wasn’t a man to listen to rational thought. He just yelled a lot until most folks around him crumbled in fear. Slade wasn’t afraid of his father. He knew how dangerous he could be when he settled on something, but in this, Slade knew Bull had no recourse, so he just turned his back and let the old Texan blow offsteam.
“I know you hear me, Slade. What do you have to say for yourself?” Bullcontinued.
“The same thing I’ve been saying all along. It was insider trading. I’m not going to prison for anyone, Bull, not evenyou.”
“God, you’re some kind of useless,” Bull hollered. “We had that stock in the palm of our hands. It was going to be easymoney.”
Slade was more than a little pissed off now. If he hadn’t done his due diligence in his pursuit of the stock, he’d never have stumbled over his father’s backdoor deals. “This is your fault, Bull, not mine. If you’d just let me handle the deal my way, instead of cutting corners behind my back, we wouldn’t be in this mess. I wouldn’t have wasted so much company time and resources on a deal that was doomed from thestart.”
“Good Lord in heaven. How the hell did I get such a bitch for a son? You whine more than any woman I know. This is business. You go big, you go hard, or you drag your sorry ass onhome.”
