She looks at me over a shoulder expectantly. “That sounds fun. Am I meeting them, too?”
“No.” We reach the foyer.
“Oh.” She smooths her hair and turns away.
I don’t like the stiff set of her shoulders. Although I promised myself I’d even the scales, this is just petty. “You’ll meet them at the wedding reception. Tonight’s dinner is a low-key boys’ night out. My brothers’ wives aren’t invited, either.”
She relaxes a little. “I see.” She smiles at me as a cream Cullinan pulls up. The wall around her seems a little less solid. So a dollop of kindness is all I need to weaken it? That’s entirely too easy—suspiciously so.
She presses a quick kiss to my cheek. “Have a productive day.”
“You too.”
“And take a look at the Sebastian Peery collaboration docs I sent!”
She climbs into the car, then quickly disappears from view. Unless she takes a detour, she’ll be in the office before anybody else. I don’t know about her abilities as an executive, but I’ve got to give her full credit for showing up.
I get behind the wheel of my Phantom.
I told myself I’d strip her of what she wanted from this marriage. I read the document she had me sign after we got married. Our union forces Nesovia to recognize her as an independent adult female capable of making her own decisions. But attacking her from that angle is ridiculous. I don’t want to manage her money or her affairs. In fact, I empathize with her need to free herself from the legal restrictions.
But that doesn’t mean I’m okay with her method.
How about Peery Diamonds…?
She must love that company to have gone to the trouble of marrying me to fully inherit her shares. And she threatened me with losing Sebastian Jewelry.
Well, what goes around comes around.
Chapter 14
Lucienne
–Sebastian: I checked, but never received any docs about the collaboration.
That’s weird. I asked Bianca to resend everything to him after our lunch at Gion, and she confirmed that she did. Is he just being difficult? But he has no reason to claim he never got them. This sort of move costs him money, too.
On the other hand, our contract specified I’d be spearheading the collaboration, so this could be a way to undermine me. I swallow a sigh and pull Julio up on the intercompany messenger.
–Me: Would you email all the Sebastian Peery collaboration docs to Sebastian Lasker? [email protected]
–Me: Also can you instruct security to not allow Roderick, Karl or Vonnie into the building under any circumstance? If they are insistent, tell them to contact Jeremiah Huxley at Huxley & Webber. Also, disable Karl’s employee badge and access keys.
I set my phone so all calls from Roderick, Karl and Vonnie will go to voicemail. I consider blocking them, but they’d just get other numbers to harass me with. By the time they learn about my marriage, it’ll be too late.
That done, I scan my inbox. The most important is an email from my legal team in Nesovia saying that the papers have been filed and acknowledged. Roderick can no longer act as my trustee in any capacity. Nor is he my proxy for the Peery Diamonds shares in the special trust.
Right below that delightful notice is one from Julio with a list of audit teams I could hire to look into my personal finances. I pick a couple, and instruct Julio to set up appointments with them. I need to dig into how my trust fund has been used. Although I’m not certain exactly what I can do about Roderick’s generous use of my money—the laws are a warren of loopholes—I need to know the extent of the damage. And a good legal team should be able to come up with some ways to make it hurt for him.
I send instructions to HR to fire Karl for excessive absenteeism and dereliction of duty, then tally up all the days he’s been absent and do everything in our power to claw back his salary and benefits for those days.
Afterward, I email Naomi in internal compliance, and ask her to do a thorough audit of expense reports for the last twenty-four months. Every time I tried to use internal compliance to investigate some of the executives’ expenses, Roderick did everything in his power to stop it. Even though he isn’t a member of our C-suite, he had an enormous say in the way Peery Diamonds is run because he got to vote my shares as he saw fit.
But not anymore. I plan to audit everyone at the VP level and above because I suspect some of them are embezzling. Not that they’re doing anything as dramatic as taking a million dollars in one shot out of the company coffers. The most common way to embezzle is padding expenses, and it isn’t that difficult for executives to claim additional thousands of dollars a month that haven’t been spent if internal control is lax.
I also need to announce my marriage, but after speaking to Sebastian about how we should go about doing that.
My phone pings.
