My chest aches as I realize just how lucky I am that I found her. To date, I’ve not been with one woman where I feel so content to sit and listen to her talk about anything and everything. Sitting there gazing at her, I realize that I never want these moments to end. I want to have evenings like this with her every night. I want to have a nice dinner out, knowing that I get to take her home to my bed afterward, and then I want to wake up with her being the first thing I see every morning.
Then, the intensity of my thoughts takes me a bit by surprise, though they’re not unwelcome. I continue to ponderthese thoughts, still actively engaging with her in conversation. I pay the tab, and then we go back home to my penthouse.
As if she’s lived here all her life, the minute Whitney crosses the threshold of my bedroom, she starts undressing, dropping her clothes all over the floor, and then crawling up on my mattress. She turns to face me, giving me a hooded stare that makes my cock thicken in my pants.
I follow her lead, and then the next thing I know, we’re repeating the events from earlier this evening.
And there’s no better way I’d rather spend the rest of the night than buried deep in the woman that I’m slowly starting to fall for.
“Hey, Whitney,” the familiar sound of my brother’s voice echoes from out by my girlfriend’s desk a few days following the incident with the sixth-floor fire. “Theo in?”
Whitney’s delicate voice confirms his question. I look up just in time to see Chase crossing the threshold of my office. He swings around and closes the door behind him, effectively shutting everyone else out. Frowning at him, I sit up straighter. “What’s going on?”
My brother exhales sharply and digs his fingers through his hair. “You know how you told me there was something about these financial statements that just wasn’t sitting right with you?”
“Yeah,” I draw out the word, hoping he’ll get to his point sooner rather than later.
Chase takes a few steps forward and drops a stack of papers on my desk. He falls into one of the chairs and then glowers at me. “I think I finally figured it out.”
My fingers hesitantly grab hold of the papers hedropped for me, and I begin to thumb through them, unsure what I’m looking at. I catch sight of many different strategic marketing evaluations and other invoices from sales and leases.
“What is all of this?”
Chase shakes his head. “He was sneaky about it. But that mother fucker was pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.”
I nearly drop the stack of papers as my hands go numb. “You’re kidding.”
“No. It took me ages to figure it out,” he says, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “But I finally found a trend.”
Ibrace myself to continue going through the stack he’s delivered, gearing up for the worst. Chase watches me as I try to put two and two together. My brows furrow when I come to one specific property—a lakefront view, tons of space, and fully renovated.
“You’re telling me this is the cost that this went for?”
My brother’s lips pull into an unamused smirk. “According toourbooks and everywhere else? Yes. But in actuality, it went for about two hundred thousand more than that.”
“How’d you discover this?”
“By doing exactly what you’re doing. I picked a date and went through every single high-dollar property we did contracts for. On paper, everything looks like it was a seamless transaction, and the buyer got a good deal. But then once I started digging deeper—going down to the lower level and speaking to actual buyers and sellers—I found the truth.”
“He was reporting less than what it was purchased for?”
Chase nods his head slowly and dramatically. “And then pocketing the rest.”
I fall back in my chair and give my brother a dumbfounded look. “How?”
“He buried them among other similarly priced properties so it wouldn’t stand out in the reports. If it weren’t for you having a gut feeling something was off, I don’t think even I would’ve found them. He must have been one sly mother fucker.”
I stare down at the damning evidence that my brother had found about the previous CEO. I was not surprised, rather, I was feeling validated by my inexperienced eyes noticing something was amiss right from the start. But still, even with this validation, A sour, sick feeling settles in my gut. If Peterson had been embezzling moneyandgetting away with it, who knows what other skeletons we’d uncover if we dug deeper.
I tap my pen on my desk, considering all that my brother has brought to me today. He’s watching me expectantly, as if waiting to see what my next move is going to be. I have a lot to consider. Obviously, there’s one clear path here, but I know moving forward with it is going to leave a whirlwind of damage in its wake.
Even though I was suspicious from the get-go that there was shady business going on with this office’s predecessor, the woman sitting out front did not.
Whitney adored Peterson. He had been the father figure she yearned for in her life, and now I was going to have to be the one to tell her that he wasn’t all that he said he was.
I knew this was something I had to do; she deserved to know the truth, but that didn’t mean I was going to be happy about it.
And that fact, knowing that I’d purposefully make her unhappy, is like a knife to the gut. But I know I have to do the right thing. I have to tell her.
