Reluctant to end the conversation, he put his phone away and headed to the conference room for his next meeting, where he was intercepted by the VP of Marketing, who looked anxious as he wielded a slim folder like a shield.
“Mr. Beaucroft? These are the quarterly profits you asked for.”
“I’m on my way to a meeting. Didn’t I ask for those two weeks ago?”
“Yes, you did. But one of the files got corrupted. We had to have IT retrieve the data.” He cleared his throat. “Should I put it on your desk?”
“No. Those numbers are confidential. Shred the folder and send the data to me in a spreadsheet. I’ll review it later.”
The man nodded, looking crestfallen, and hurried towards the copy room. Nicholas looked over at Arthur’s office, but he was in a meeting with a woman from Acquisitions and the twoof them were talking animatedly. As he passed, Arthur lifted his hand in a congenial wave.
Nicholas nodded back, before shutting himself into the main conference room. The meeting was tedious and he really did need to speak to Arthur, but when the presenter finally wrapped up their presentation on their current roster of prospective, high value clients, Arthur was still in his meeting, much to his annoyance.
Not wanting to hang around the door like a student at office hours, Nicholas went back to his own office. At his desk, he opened one of the bottom drawers and took out a burner phone.
Danielle hadn’t answered when he’d tried to call from the house, so he hadn’t bothered with his cell or office phone, figuring she was screening her calls. Smart enough to block his number but not smart enough to realize that her proactive silence was an admission of guilt.
Not smart enough to realize that he could buy as many phones as she could block.
She picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”
His hand flexed involuntarily. “It’s Nicholas. I understand that you’ve been trying to get in contact with Jay about my finances. That’s unacceptable to me. If you want to do business with me, you do it with me—not her”
“Got her locked up in the attic?”
“It’s about seventeen years too late for you to still be pretending thatJane Eyreis your favorite book. Or haven’t you already cannibalized enough of her life?”
“What do you want?”
“The negatives of the photographs I know you sent.”
There was a brief pause. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It was almost admirable, how well she lied. But he had watched her con his father for years and knew her for the careerist bullshit artist that she was: the kind who would sell her own firstborn child to save her own skin.
Someone waved at him through the glass wall of his office, trying to get his attention. Nicholas spun around in his chair, making an impatient brushing-off motion.
“Unlike you, I’m not a fucking adulteress trying to skate around an infidelity clause. It’s nobody’s business what I do in my own house, and if you think you and your two-bit Craigslist photographer can wring money out of me with an outdated Nikon, I’m going to come after you so hard that you’ll be pissing litigation.”
“So you’re threatening me,” she said, a little too loudly.
Was she recording him? How amusing. “It’s not a threat. It’s a promise. Just like the promise you made to my father before violating it on top of a freezer with a pool cleaner young enough to be your son. But that’s not my problem. You can fuck every moron from here to Kokomo as long as it means that I never have to hear from you again.
“What is my problem is you calling here, upsetting Jay, and making her cry as you try to fuck up her life for what I have to figure is the thousandth time. These photographs—which, I know, you’ve never seen before, it must be nice to outsource your dirty work—are the last straw. Do not test me. If you have the negatives, I suggest you give them to me. And if you don’t have the negatives, you had better find them and still give them to me, or I will make you very sorry.”
“You have a lot of nerve accusing me of anything when you were perfectly happy to buy her from me yourself.”
The truth of that statement hit him like a wall. Because it had been exactly like that, hadn’t it? Knowing he couldn’t lure Jay to himself willingly, he had employed the same underhanded tactics to reel her in, like a fly caught in a spider’s web. “What did you do with the money I paid you for that?”
“I have expenses.”
He laughed harshly. “I just bet you do.”
“You never had to work. Not like I did.”
God, the fucking irony. He leaned back in his chair, looking down at Jay at her desk.I had to work three times as hard.“Do you even have a job?”
“Screw you.”
