“I married her,” I said. “What did you expect?”
Jameson smiled faintly. “Honestly? Less teeth.”
“Jane Thayer rebuilt that company with no support, no safety net, and a board actively working against her,” I said. “I’m not going to be the man who finishes what they started.”
Silence fell as they all stared at me, but finally, Harlan nodded again. “Alright, Alex. We won’t acquire them outright.”
Sterling picked up his drink. “We’ll proceed carefully instead.”
I looked around the room at my family, feeling the weight of their names and expectations, but I still felt oddly steady. “No one sells my wife’s company out from under her. Not the board, not us, and sure as hell not her own family.”
Naturally, my dad watched us with a painfully smug expression on his face. He leaned back in his chair with his hands laced over his stomach, looking like a man who’d successfully predicted the weather and wanted credit for inventing the sky. “I told you this was a really good match.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “You sold it under the banner of efficiency. A sure thing for the majority.”
“Semantics,” he replied cheerfully. “Efficient. Brilliant. Tomato, tomahto.”
Harlan didn’t smile exactly, but there was something approving in his expression. “You committed quickly. Faster than I expected.”
I shrugged. “When you know, you know.”
Sterling snorted. “You sound insufferable.”
“Saysyou.” Jameson grinned. “He’s married. Of course, he’s insufferable. Have you met yourself since you got Laney to sign on the dotted line?”
Sterling opened his mouth, probably to tell Jameson he was the same, but Harlan held up a hand, silencing the banter before it could get too comfortable. “Dedication aside, the truth of the matter still rings. You should not trust Nora Thayer until she votes like she’s trustworthy.”
That wiped the smile off Douglas’s face and, annoyingly, also put a knot in my stomach, but my uncle continued. “Let’s not pretend Nora doesn’t have options, gentlemen. She came from a family with money. She’s lived off her daughter’s trust fund for the past five years. That well doesn’t last forever.”
Sterling sighed. “Lifestyle creep is real.”
“That’s the polite way to put it,” Jameson added unhelpfully.
Harlan looked directly at me. “The idea of a few million coming her way if the company sells, even to us, is going to be hard to ignore. Especially when she’s currently relying on her daughter to fund her lifestyle.”
My jaw clenched. As much as I wanted to believe that the woman would always have her daughter’s back, that just wasn’t true. Jane had told me all about how Nora used to float from lunches to galas, largely ignoring her own children in favor of whatever social engagement tickled her fancy.
Sure, that had been back before her status had been wiped away by her husband’s arrest, but that didn’t mean that selfish streak wasn’t still in there. Shit, she treated Jane less like a daughter and more like infrastructure.
I thought of the house Jane wouldn’t leave. The brother she wouldn’t abandon. The fact that she wasmarriedandstillcouldn’t move in with her husband because she was too worried about her youngest brother.
Parentifieddidn’t even begin to cover it.
Harlan looked at me like he knew what I was thinking. Considering he knew everything about everyone, he’d probably correctly guessed where my mind had gone. “As it stands, Jane is the adult in that household, and Nora knows it.”
Douglas scoffed. “So what, we assume the worst? That woman has been through a lot and her daughter has stuck by her side. That has to mean something.”
“Does it?” Harlan said evenly. “We’re not assuming the worst. We’re assuming reality, and the reality is that the woman has lost everything, but she stands a chance at getting some of it back, financially at least, if that company sells.”
The very fact that we were discussing this left a bad taste in my mouth. But only because he was right. Jane’s trust fund was probably well on its way to being obliterated at this point, given how she’d been covering all her family’s expenses and her brothers’ schooling for so long. Nora would know that, and she’d be worried about where it would leave her once it was gone.
Jameson sighed. “What about the current CEO? Andrew?”
“Alex needs to get face to face with him,” Harlan said. “Apply pressure.”
“No.” Sterling shook his head immediately. “He doesn’t matter. The man is checked out. He never even truly checked in. Your battle isn’t with him. It’s with the board.”
I exhaled. “I know.”
