Orion did not look as though he were going to have much of a good day. But Jason had a feeling that his was just looking up.
Chapter Ten
Skye did her best to suppress her chuckles as Lou and Marvin argued vehemently about the most recent parenting fail that had come into the coffee shop. The mother in question had absolutely no clue that she was being judged so harshly by a couple of old men. And the old men did not actually intend to judge her harshly. They were just making a few observations about how much control she seemed to have over her three year old.
“Look at that!” Lou stage whispered to Marvin. “The kid just shoplifted and the mother doesn’t even realize it!”
“She’s kind of busy with the baby,” Marvin pointed out. He seemed to be more inclined toward forgiveness than Lou. “She can’t exactly let the kid just lay in the stroller and scream.”
Lou made a face as the three year old made a fly-by pass of the table where Lou and Marvin were sitting. Tom was conspicuously absent this morning. Lou and Marvin had to duck as the three year old abruptly started squeezing his juice box. Apple juice squirted in an arc across the coffee shop and sprayed the wall just behind the condiment bar.
“Oh, now you can’t be willing to forgive that oversight!” Lou told Marvin with obvious exasperation. “The kid just created an enormous mess and she still hasn’t even noticed that he’s not beside her.”
A fact that suddenly became glaringly obvious when the woman looked down at the little platform on her stroller where the three year old was presumably supposed to stand quietly while he waited for his mother to finish changing his infant sibling’s diaper in public.
“Easton!” The woman spun about in alarm and nearly dropped her dirty diaper on the floor. “Easton, where are you? Oh my God! My son is gone! He’s gone!”
Lou was done being nice. “He’s right here, lady. Right. Here. As in he just sprayed the wall with his juice. You should be offering the poor staff a huge tip. You realize that, right?”
“Excuse me?” The woman turned around as though she were about to give Lou a piece of her mind. The she seemed to realize what her kid had done. “Easton, oh my gawd! What are you doing?”
Skye gave up and laughed. She put her hand over her mouth and tried to keep it down as the scene reminded her of so many other incidents where kids made complete asses out of their parents. It was kind of a thing.
“Oh, so you laugh at everybody’s expense and not just mine, is that it?”
Skye spun about and felt the smile die on her face. Holy. Shit. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
But Skye had heard the woman just fine. She also knew the woman’s identity. After all Skye had been staring at photographs of Tisha Olivares-King for several days now and that made it rather difficult to forget a face. After Skye’s two-part column on Tisha Olivares-King’s seemingly obvious ease at getting over the death of her husband, Skye had received so many accolades from her editor that it was almost as if Skye had singlehandedly knocked the bank heist off the front page.
Of course, that was an exaggeration, but the point still remained, and for a split second Skye was afraid that Jason King had just thrown Skye under the proverbial bus. Skye sat back in her chair and looked up at the angry society widow. “I’m sorry, who told you to come and look for me here?”
“Your editor, of course!”
“Oh, of course,” Skye muttered. Because why would Carolyn Phillips want to do anything else? Obviously, it was better for her if there was a huge showdown between Tisha and Skye. That was where the drama came from.
Tisha straightened herself up to her full height, which wasn’t actually much. How could this five-foot six-inch woman pop out five absolutely enormous young men? Not that Skye didn’t realize that the King brothers hadn’t been born full sized, but still. They had to have been ten-pound babies and this woman had very narrow hips and almost no figure to speak of. Tisha possessed that willowy sort of build that plenty of women thought was by far the most attractive shape out there.
Tossing her blonde hair away from her face, Tisha pegged Skye with a hard glare. She plopped her hands down onto her nonexistent hips, and Skye could not help but notice that Tisha’s hair didn’t actually move when she did. The big blonde bouffant style just kind of hung there around her head like a nimbus sprayed stiff with hairspray that defied even the Dallas humidity. How did the woman do it? And her thick makeup wasn’t even melting off her cheeks and forehead! If Skye had tried to wear that much makeup in this heat it would have been rolling down her cheeks in rivers of sludge.
“You are nothing but an opportunistic little bitch!” Tisha said fervently.
The mother with the infant and the three year old was no longer paying attention to her oldest child anymore. Her attention was riveted on the scene playing out before her. In fact, the entire coffee shop was riveted. They all looked as though they were watching the best reality show ever, which they kind of were since this was reality.
Skye exhaled a sigh. Under the table she curled her nails into the legs of her plain capris. She could not just start crying. That would ruin everything. So instead of bursting into tears, Skye forced herself to speak in a very even tone of voice. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t reported anything but the truth. I write for the society page. The readership is interested when a local billionaire’s wife is suddenly widowed under very odd circumstances. Surely you can understand that.” Skye narrowed her gaze on Tisha and sallied forth with her next move. “In fact, I believe you generally love being a topic of interest in the society pages, so I’m not entirely sure what’s upsetting you. Your family is first in the mind of every Dallas society family. Your family is garnering more time and attention than ever before. And isn’t that what you’re going for?”
Tisha’s face began to get red. And considering how thick her makeup was, that was a pretty huge feat. “No! That is not what I’m going for!” Tisha whipped a Dallas Star paper out of her voluminous designer handbag. She threw it on the table in front of Skye. “Where did you get that picture? Where?”
It was the photograph that Skye had taken months ago at a charity benefit dinner. But this was not the photograph that featured Tisha on the arms of her two proposed lovers—dead and alive. This was the photograph that Skye had taken at that same benefit that featured Tisha dancing with Tex Johnson. It wasn’t like the couple was doing anything wrong either. In fact, until Jason King had suggested the impropriety Skye probably would not have thought twice about this photo. But upon closer examination the body language on display was absolutely unmistakable.
“The photo was taken at the Dallas Zoo Charity Benefit,” Skye said quietly. “I was standing there in plain sight when I took it. Actually, not long after I took this one you posed and demanded I take one of you right beside the stuffed zoo animal display.”
Tisha’s gasp was such a dramatic display that the whole coffee shop seemed to wait with bated breath to see what she would do next. The three year old no longer had the attention of the adults in the room, and in a corner of her mind Skye registered that this was not actually a good thing. The kid was standing right in front of his mother, jumping up and down and yanking on her workout top. It did not seem to budge her attention.
“You!” Tisha snarled in a voice so dramatic that Skye almost expected to see cameras somewhere nearby. It was like they were filming for a soap opera. What the hell was this woman’s problem? “You were the one who took that photo?”
“Of course.” Skye rolled her eyes. Surreptitiously scooting her tablet toward the edge of the table, Skye slipped it into her bag. If the woman went totally ballistic Skye could not afford to lose her equipment just because of a rich woman’s tantrum. “Who else did you think? It’s not like the society column at the Dallas Star has an enormous staff or something. It’s just me.”
“Then you’re fired.”
“Yeah. Okay. That will help.” Skye pursed her lips. Wh
at was this woman’s problem? Did she have any idea what she was going to wind up doing? “If you get Carolyn to fire me, she’d just going to hire someone who will do what she’s been nagging me to do!”
“Oh, and what’s that?” Tisha leaned over and glared right in Skye’s face. “Tell the truth?”
“Actually, tell more lies. Carolyn wanted me to say flat out that this reporter thinks you’re screwing your late husband’s former business partner. Would you prefer I go with her request? Because that’s what will get me a bonus. But it’s a lie and I won’t do it.” Skye shot to her feet so quickly that the table scooted across the stained concrete floor of the shop. “I don’t tell lies. But I will absolutely state the facts and let other people decide for themselves whether or not they believe that you do!”
Lou and Marvin started clapping. Tisha made a frustrated noise of irritation, but the gig was up anyway because the attention hogging three year old chose that particular moment to make a bid for the limelight. The kid took hold of Tisha Olivares-King’s expensive handbag in one grubby hand. He had his sibling’s dirty diaper in the other.
“Trash!” The kid shouted the word with glee just as he pushed the diaper into the handbag. “Whee!”
The little imp sprinted back toward his now-mortified mother clapping his hands and acting as though he had just played the most wonderful joke ever. The whole shop went silent. It was like waiting for the sword to fall. Everyone wanted to know what Tisha was going to do about this and the number of mobile phones out suggested that most everyone figured it was going to be explosive.
“You little brat!” Tisha shrieked at the top of her lungs.
Skye was pretty sure the skylights shivered in their frames and nearly fell down on their heads. It was like the earth was shaking and Armageddon had come. Tisha was screaming and shouting and crying and dancing in circles.
She could not manage to get her hand into her bag without touching the diaper so that left her to use the nearest flat surface available. But that surface belonged to a young couple having morning coffee together. They sprang up from their seats as their lattes and scones went flying toward their laps after Tisha dumped her bag right in the center of the table. Her wallet and all of the generic and absolutely regular purse junk went flying onto the table along with a carefully wrapped up, but still totally disgusting, dirty diaper.
The white diaper with its Velcro closures made a dull thud on the tabletop. A chorus of horrified voices shouted ew as the thing bounced from tabletop to floor and then opened up to showcase the contents.
Marvin and Lou were gagging. So were several other people. Shawn was looking on as though he were actually afraid his shop would never recover from this incident. Phones were filming, and there was no doubt that soon enough this video would go viral. Then Tisha Olivares-King stomped right in the middle of that diaper while trying to rescue the rather personal contents of her handbag from the coffee shop table, and the whole situation went nuclear.
“My shoe! My shoe!” Tisha shouted as she danced around and tried valiantly to wipe the baby poo off her high-heeled sandal and onto the floor. “It’s Prada! These. Are. Prada! Do you stupid people even have any idea what that is? This is a crime!”
Shawn groaned and Skye suddenly felt really bad for the guy. Biting her lower lip, Skye attempted to grab hold of the offended socialite. “Here. Let me help you outside. We can rinse off your shoe and everything will be right as rain.”
“Are you kidding me?” Tisha shoved Skye so hard that she nearly face-planted into Lou. “Stay away, you low-life freak! Stay away from me. I will sue you. I will sue this whole place!”
The woman snatched up her bag and stomped toward the door. She was still muttering about suing and hating and suing some more as she whirled out the door in a trail of smeared diaper contents.
For just a moment after Tisha left the shop, the atmosphere was absolutely frozen. It was like someone had cast a spell over the entire room. Then people began to whisper. The mother of three-year-old Easton the diaper bandit was bawling her eyes out. The couple whose breakfast had been irrevocably interrupted tried to soothe the woman. Both of her kids were crying now. It was a scene from bedlam and there was really nothing to be done.
“Psst,” Lou said as he gestured to the table that had been part of the whole event. Then he pointed to Skye. “That woman left her appointment book on the table. Look at that!”
Skye stared, but almost couldn’t process. The woman had left not only her appointment book, but also her cell phone, her makeup bag, and also a good deal of folded up paper that looked like it could be of some importance. It was like a gift from above. And even better, none of it was covered in baby poo!
“Wow,” Skye whispered. “That’s a bit of luck after all.”
Getting as close as she could to the table, Skye began swiping the remaining contents of Tisha Olivares-King’s purse into her bag. It was time to do a little poking around and then she could hopefully turn things over to Jason King and let him make what he would of them. That way if anyone asked, Skye could say with honesty that she had turned the woman’s purse contents over to her family. What happened to them after that was really none of Skye’s business.
Chapter Eleven
“Oh my God.” Orion’s voice was almost breathless as though he could not get enough air in his lungs to actually speak. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Zane was snorting and struggling not to laugh his ass off. That much was obvious. He was holding his phone up to his brothers as though he were about to drop that too. “The video already has enough hits to have been seen multiple times by every single resident of the Dallas/Ft Worth area.”
“Great,” Orion muttered.
Jason could not help but think that this was probably the best diversion ever. Their mother would not be thinking about anything but this video for months. “Don’t you guys get it?” Jason asked his brothers. “If we want to keep our mother out of the office and out of our hair long enough to do the changeover and make sure that the five of us split the responsibilities and benefits available through our family’s controlling shares, now is the time to do it.”
“What did you just say?” Devon was staring at Jason as though he were pretty sure his brother had lost his head. “Did you just suggest that we split our family interest in the company five ways?”
“Yes.” Jason frowned. “That’s how the inheritance works, right?”
Orion cleared his throat. “In theory.” He only looked up at Jason long enough to give the idea that he wasn’t really on board with this notion, then he looked back down at the phone. “Our father owned sixty percent of the company.”
“Thirty percent belongs to Tex Johnson,” Devon added.
Jason frowned. “Who owns the other ten percent?”
“Orion and I do,” Devon said with obvious discomfort. “It was given to us by Dad because of how much work we do with the company itself.”
“I work at the company,” Jason said, trying not to sound like a spoiled brat and feeling as though it was impossible not to. “I’ve spent years working there!”
“You draw a salary,” Zane pointed out. “So do I.”
Jason pointed to Devon and Orion. “And they don’t? What about Edward? I’m sure he pretty much spends most of his time at the company offices.”
“Not really.” Zane frowned and poked at his phone to stop and replay the video of their mother’s epic public tantrum just one more time. “Edward prefers a salary and has no interest in owning the company. In fact, I’m kind of surprised that you would be interested.”
“So you guys were going to what?” Jason looked from one brother to the other two. “Just kind of split Dad’s share three ways and assume that Edward and I weren’t interested?”
Jason was starting to feel his temper rising. “Fine. You know what? Maybe that’s better. You guys take the company. I’ll take the land.”
“What?” Orion growled the word.
“That land belongs to all of us!”
“So does—or did—our company!” Jason fumed. “You’re all making assumptions. You treat me like I’m too stupid or disinterested to be a part of that place. Why?”
Orion looked like a deer in the proverbial headlights. Finally he lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “I suppose that for the most part Mother has always said you weren’t interested and Dad believed her. He never included you in the discussions about these things.”
“So tell me.” Jason struggled to hang onto his temper. He could feel his nails elongating. In just a moment he would burst into his wolf body right there in the kitchen of their family home. “What did you expect me to do? I’ve been working at our company offices ever since I started my MBA. Now I’ve graduated and I figured that I would be putting my time into a company that I actually owned a share in. Now I find out that I’m nothing more than a hired flunky who was pretty much going to be stuck in the mail room for the rest of his life!”
“You have to admit….” Zane was speaking, but his gaze was glued to the display of his phone where their mother’s tinny shrieking voice nearly shattered Zane’s speakers. Finally Zane glanced up at Jason. “You get the best salary of any mail room guy I know of.”
“Yeah,” Jason said bitterly. “Which is why I find my job satisfaction to be crazy low. Do you honestly believe that this is all I want in life? A salary and a chance to work hard so the rest of you profit from my labor?”
The three of them stared at Jason as though he had just spoken something in Greek. It was obvious that none of them had even considered what his goals might be. They had assumed a lot, but they had never made an attempt to discover the truth. How typical.
“What are you watching?”
All four of them froze and looked up with guilty expressions on their faces as their mother swept into the kitchen. It wasn’t like there was any way to hide what they were watching on Zane’s phone. Tisha’s shrill voice was coming out of the phone’s high definition speakers as though she were right there reenacting her bad behavior all on her own.
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