“I took out a short-term loan to tide us over.”
“From the bank?”
His father slid his cell from his pocket, checked the time, and tucked it away again. “I tried the bank but they wouldn’t agree the loan against your grandmother’s house unless I could prove I was the beneficiary and we were still waiting on the will. The Addlestone-Blacks were poised to move on the Kingswater plot if I held off any longer. I wasn’t letting Max take it from under my nose so I took a calculated risk. Then your grandmother left the house to you and not me—which is why we’re having this conversation.”
“We should have had this conversation before you signed the damn contract.”
“Watch your tone, son.” Even when he was in the wrong—and seated—his dad could still manage to look down his nose.
“Decisions like this impact us both.”
“And yet it’s my company.”
Jackson clamped his jaw until he knew he wasn’t going to say something he might regret. “Where did the money come from?”
His father shifted in his chair and crossed his legs, the picture of relaxation. “Landon Peake is a friend of a friend at the country club.”
“People at the country club use loan sharks?”
“Landon Peake isn’t a loan shark. He’s a perfectly respectable businessman who had the funds available to help out. It’s just a bridging loan. It was fortunate for us he was keen to step in.”
“How much did you borrow?”
“$1.4 million.”
“Jesus Christ, Dad,” Jackson hissed. That wasn’t a calculated risk. It was reckless. “What the hell were you thinking?”
His dad’s eye contact never wavered, though his lips pursed. “I was thinking my mother might leave her house to her only child. I didn’t imagine my inheritance would go to you.”
Jackson curled his fingers into the back of his neck. “That is not my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was. But if you’re serious about your commitment to Hale Evolution, the means to show it has been gift-wrapped and laid in your lap. Get the house on the market and sell it. And do it fast. I’m counting on you, son.” His father’s stony expression showed every doubt he had about the fact.
“We don’t need to do this. We could take the company in a different direction. I know I’ve said it before but there’s money to be made in renovations. Especially high-end ones. Old properties.” Jackson was desperate to make his dad see sense. “The outlay would be far less. The risk lower.”
“And the potential profits lower still.” His father pushed back his chair and stood up. An intimidating figure, as always. Six feet and three inches of relentless disapproval. “That’s why I’m the ideas man. I’m looking to move forward, not backward.”
Jackson absorbed the blow, his dad’s words filling him with the same sense of inadequacy he’d felt as an underachieving eight-year-old, holding out a dismal report card. Forever his brother’s less accomplished stand-in. Small. His father had always made him feel so small. Even now, when Jackson was tall enough to look him straight in the eye.
Jackson clenched his hands into fists and stood up.
“I’ll get Florian to send you a copy of the site details,” his dad said dismissively, naming his right-hand man. “You’ll change your mind about the deal when you see it in writing.”
Jackson doubted that.
Inside his grandmother’s front door, a pair of black sneakers cluttered the mat, toed off and dumped in a hurry. He trod on one before he saw it, turning his ankle with a fractured curse. Jackson’s scowled deepened as he tried to push the door closed.
“You’ll need to put your shoulder to it—it sticks!” The voice came from deeper inside the house. For Christ’s sake. Why had he not been told there would be someone here?
He gave the front door a vicious shove until the latch caught. The foyer was dark, square, and spacious. A grand fireplace took up one entire wall, and claret-carpeted stairs swept upward from the far corner. Faded floor tiles in black and white hinted at the footfalls of countless visitors welcomed over the past century. Jackson’s shoes echoed as he crossed to the nearest doorway and stood on the threshold of a vast living room that hadn’t changed since his childhood visits.
He was used to space aplenty in his parents’ mid-century Oak Brook home in the Chicago suburbs—and his own condo nearby was far from poky—but the dimensions of this room were immense. Though the bones of Amity Court might claim to reflect an Italianate villa, much of the original Victorian grandeur was hidden by less elegant influences. It could have been stunning, but it wasn’t. An oatmeal shagpile carpet covered the floor, worn through in patches and discolored around the perimeter. Old, burgundy wallpaper darkened the interior, with wooden boardscladding the ceiling like the upside-down deck of a ship. Flipping a light switch, Jackson grunted as the visibility went from dull to dim. Above his head, an ominous patch in the corner of the ceiling explained the slight smell of damp.
There was no one there. The voice hadn’t come from the living room.
He retraced his steps to the foyer and headed for the back hallway. To the right, sunshine spilled from an open door. Turning toward it, he found himself on the threshold of the study—a cluttered room with bookshelves lining most walls, papers on the floor, numerous lamps and ornaments dotting every surface. In the middle of it all, a colorful figure perched on top of a vintage desk, scribbling in a notepad. She had a mass of hair the color of licorice bundled into a messy ponytail and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses on her nose.
“Who are you?” A twitch pulled at Jackson’s eyelid.
