Toledano began to squirm in his chair. “We didn’t draw up an official contract as such.”
“I beg your pardon?” Colleen demanded and scanned the diplomas and credentials on the wall above his head. “Is that in keeping with the standard practices of the California Department of Consumer Affairs Professional Fiduciary Bureau?”
Toledano was sputtering at this point, so Colleen kept right on going after him. She demanded, “Do you have records of where and when Mr. King’s money was transferred? Because I guarantee that we have records of when and how much was transferred to you, not to mention the contract Mr. King signed with you to put his money in conservative, easily liquidated investment vehicles.”
Dang, she hoped some of that was true.
Toledano’s sputtering increased.
When Colleen glanced back and happened to catch Tristan’s eye, he was watching her with a small, uninterpretable smile on his face.
After a few more verbal jabs and veiled threats about the professional organizations’ credentials hanging on his wall, Toledano agreed that every dime of what Tristan had invested, plus the interest that he would have earned on the bond funds, plus an inconvenience fee of an additional fifty percent of said interest would be deposited in Tristan’s bank account by the end of the day.
As they walked outside, Tristan held the car door for Colleen and then walked around to climb in the other side of the backseat.
That might’ve been overstepping her position. He might be pissed at her.
As Jian coasted into the Los Angeles traffic, Tristan began to chuckle. “Why didn’t you do that when your manager at GameShack was being a jerk to you?”
Colleen looked down at the scanty notes she had taken during the first part of the meeting. “I’m better at defending other people.”
“Just not standing up for yourself?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?” he asked.
She shrugged because every answer seemed stupid and wrong.
Tristan nodded. “We’ll have to work on that.”
9
A Walk on the Beach
Tristan
Tristan rode back to the hotel with his funny little accidental employee, the fluffy bunny with fangs who’d eviscerated his investment manager.
This little pipsqueak was a firebrand, and it’d been as amusing as hell to watch her take on his investment adviser and trash the poor man. He didn’t feel at all bad for Toledano. The man had been stealing his money. If the cash landed in his account by that evening, he should probably owe Colleen Frost a ten percent finder’s fee.
At the hotel, Jian had already checked them into their suite, a penthouse with two bedrooms on one of the hotel's upper floors. The hotel lay on the outskirts of Los Angeles, slightly north of the city in Malibu. The Nobu Ryokan Malibu was an upscale hotel with a Japanese aesthetic, a restful space carved into lovely niches.
Their luggage had already been delivered to the room, and Colleen’s roller suitcase rested beside his large black one. Good.
The hotel had provided them three keycards, though, so Tristan tucked one into his wallet and distributed the others to Jian and Colleen.
Jian frowned, glancing between the two of them.
Colleen accepted the white plastic card and turned it over in her hands before sliding it into her purse.
Because Tristan didn’t have another appointment scheduled for the day, he’d planned to calculate his possible strategies for quick turnarounds on a dozen or so spreadsheets before their much more important meeting the following day, but that seemed tedious now.
Instead, he asked Colleen, “Would you like to walk on the beach on Coronado Island?”
She frowned a pretty moue. “That’s down near San Diego, isn’t it? It would take hours to drive down there.”
So he had Jian arrange for a helicopter to fly them down. They left an hour later.
