Tisha heaved a giant sigh and crossed her arms. She grabbed a tissue from the box beside the refrigerator and blotted her eye as though she were trying hard not to just burst into tears. “I told your father about my desire to get rid of the land. I told him why. He exploded. So I went to Tex because Tex was your father’s best friend. I figured if anyone would be able to get through to your dad it would be Tex. Tex tried, but Mac would not listen! He was just so stubborn!”
Jason would have suggested at this point that it was because their father knew the land wasn’t really his to develop and that this would be a horrible blow to his sons. But there was absolutely no use in trying to explain this to a woman like Tisha. She only cared about herself.
Their mother heaved a giant sigh as though she were truly struggling not to be overcome by emotion. “So Tex told me that I should go ahead with it anyway because Mac was being totally unreasonable and that eventually he would get over it and our relationship would be better because of this. And then Tex agreed to help. It was his idea to sign in Mac’s place.”
There it was. The confirmation of guilt, or something like it. So why didn’t Jason feel any better?
Chapter Eighteen
The coffee shop was hopping the morning after Skye’s pub meeting with Jason and Edward King. She would not have exactly classified it as a dinner because she didn’t eat more than a few potato wedges. She hadn’t been hungry. Her mind had been too busy trying to wrap itself around the things that she had been learning about the King family.
The tablet screen was blank on the table in front of her. Her mind was blank too. She was supposed to be writing another column, this time on the topic of a wedding about to take place between two of Dallas’s first families. It was a big deal. Skye had already received an email from a local high-end seamstress that included a perfect description of the designer wedding gown that had been specially ordered from a French dressmaker and hand carried from Paris to Dallas over ten times just for the fittings. It was a crazy story that Skye absolutely knew her readers would love. How many people in the Dallas community could even imagine having a personal assistant travel back and forth between Texas and France just to hand deliver a dress for fittings?
“That is ridiculous!” Lou’s voice interrupted Skye’s reverie.
Skye looked up from her empty screen and made a face at Lou. “You’ve got no idea. It is totally ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean people don’t want to read about it!”
Lou shot Skye a droll look of boredom. “I don’t think I care to read about French-made wedding dresses. Thanks.”
“Hey! How did you know what I’m writing about?” Skye felt her eyes widen as she tried to remember if she and Lou had at some point had a conversation about this story.”
“You talk on the phone,” Lou reminded her.
Skye glanced down at her smartphone. “Right. I do that.”
“Loudly sometimes,” Tom said, actually sounding as though he were giving her some kind of dressing down. “It’s rather annoying.”
“And you guys pontificate,” Skye retorted. “But you don’t see me complaining.”
“Right.” Tom nodded and Marvin started to laugh.
From several tables away, Mary shushed them all with one index finger held to her lips. “We’re in the middle of our crossword. Can any of you think of a seven-letter word for an unwanted child?”
“Bastard,” Skye offered automatically.
Mary looked excited. “Right!”
Skye glanced back down at her tablet and fiddled with the keyboard. It took a moment for her to register the fact that the busy coffee shop had just grown ominously silent. By the time Skye realized it, she caught just a glimpse of a pair of Manolo Blahnik open-toed, heeled sandals standing right beside her table. The only reason Skye knew what they were was that she had featured something in her column a few weeks before about a local shoe seller who carried the famous Spanish fashion designer’s shoes in her downtown Dallas boutique.
“We need to talk.”
Skye exhaled a sigh and lifted her gaze from her keyboard and the shoes to the woman wearing them. Of course, Tisha Olivares-King’s expression was sour. She looked as though she had been sucking lemons all morning long. No doubt she was here because of—actually Skye wasn’t really sure why Tisha was here in the coffee shop again.
“Everyone is staring at me,” Tisha whispered. “Come outside.”
“No thanks,” Skye quickly retorted. “I’d rather stay where I have witnesses with cell phone cameras who can prove that I didn’t do anything wrong. That way when you try to sue me for no reason I’ll have some kind of witness to come to my defense.”
“Oh please!” Tisha snorted. Her pinched expression turned even more arrogant, if that were possible. “As if you have anything I’d want to sue you for.”
Lou was not about to let that one slide. He raised his espresso cup. “That’s not what you seemed to suggest the other day when you were screaming that you were going to sue all of us.”
“That was different.” Tisha offered a careless shrug. “I was angry.”
Skye shrugged too. “So what. Now you can stand here and tell me why you’re inside this shop again. I think you’ve made a big enough mess of things.”
“I’m here to tell you to stay away from my son.” Tisha drew herself up to her not very considerable height. “Jason is a King. He does not have time for a dalliance with some low-rent society reporter.”
“I like how I’m low-rent when you’re worried that your son might be into me,” Skye said sarcastically. “But I’m just fine when you’re dying to be featured in my column. How does that work, do you think? You do realize that I could just slander the shit out of you in the paper and nobody would even bat an eyelash, right? You are such a hated person around town at the moment that people would probably cheer.”
“I’m not hated,” Tisha said stiffly. “People are just jealous.”
Why was it that people like Tisha never really saw anything very clearly? Not themselves. Not others. They just went from point A to point B thinking that they were at the top of the food chain. “Yeah. Jealous. I’m sure that’s what it is.”
“But you need to stay away from my son.” Tisha reiterated the words as though she thought Skye was too stupid to understand them the first time. “He’s way out of your league.”
“Okay. For starters, I heard you the first time.” Skye sat back in her seat and gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “And I really think that’s something for Jason to decide for himself. Don’t you? He is a grown man. Right? He’s a big boy. Whatever you want to call it. And honestly? The way you treat him makes me think that you don’t even particularly like him. The poor guy has been running himself in circles trying to please you and you’re what? Just kind of bitching and moaning and whining about everything he does.”
“He’s my son.” Tisha said the words as though they explained everything. “But I don’t expect you to understand that.”
“Oh why? Because I lack a son?” Skye shook her head in disgust.
Then Tisha narrowed her gaze and her lips twisted into a mean little smile. “No. Because you don’t have a family. So why would you understand any of this? You’re an orphan. Someone dumped you on a doorstep and here you are.”
“Yeah, but I still managed to turn out a better human being than you so what does that really say?” Skye sneered.
Skye’s heart was hammering a staccato beat against her ribs. She hadn’t expected Tisha Olivares-King to pull out such a thing and use it like a weapon, but then maybe Skye had been fooling herself this whole time. Tisha was the kind of person who played dirty in any way she possibly could. And right now that meant pulling Skye’s past out of the mystery-shrouded dumpster where Skye had left it and brandishing it like a sword.
Lou, Tom, and Marvin were listening. Skye could tell that right away. She felt their stares on her back and wanted to growl at them to stop. A few tables away, Mary and her hus
band Klaus were staring too. Now everyone in the coffee shop would know that Skye had experienced a very slow start to life. Or perhaps a better word would be precarious. She had been dumped on the doorstep of a firehouse, because that was a safe zone where babies could be relinquished without consequences.
“You are trash.” Unfortunately Tisha Olivares-King wasn’t done with her lovely litany. “You would have been better off left in that dumpster than put on the streets to annoy and take advantage of hard working people who earn their way in life.”
“Whoa!” Skye could handle a lot, but this was going too far. She stood up and put her finger right in Tisha Olivares-King’s face. “I’m sorry. But did you just say hard working people? Did you honestly just try to make yourself sound like some kind of person who made her own way in the world? You grew up with silver spoon shoved up your ass and you married into a family who provided you with another one to shove in your mouth. Now you have silver spoons blocking all of your orifices and they are apparently impeding your ability to use logic! You. Are. Not. Hard. Working!” Skye shouted the words and did not care that they echoed off the interior walls of the coffee shop. She could see Shawn’s wide-eyed expression behind the bar. That did not stop Skye. “You didn’t work for anything! It was handed to you and you keep crapping on it and just expecting people to give you more! Get out of here! Get. Out! And don’t come back. Never come back. You don’t get to be in a place like this where regular people hang out. Go to your fancy rich bitch place where you can show off those silver spoons and people will judge you on that and not on the crappy quality of your personality!”
It was a long speech. Skye could not argue with that. She almost groaned when she realized that once again there were cell phones out recording every single moment of this embarrassing situation. Great. The whole world was about to learn that Skye Kincaid was an unwanted orphan.
Then Lou started clapping. He raised his espresso cup into the air and shouted. “Hear, hear! Good speech!”
The rest of the shop, staff and patrons alike started to clap. They were all shouting and calling out words of support. What in the hell was going on? Skye looked around in surprise, but that was nothing compared to Tisha Olivares-King’s reaction.
The woman was about to lose her shit. She was glaring at everyone in the room. And finally she started pointing. “Shut up! Shut. Up! Everyone shut up and stop clapping! Don’t you get it? You’re clapping for this woman and she’s using my son for his money! She’s using him. She’s using my family and she’s making a profit!”
“Excuse me, ma’am?” Shawn had actually stepped out from behind the counter of the coffee shop. He was such a nice guy with a very unassuming personality. He could be firm, but he could also be compassionate, and right now there was no telling what he was feeling. His expression could have been called determined. “You are disturbing my customers and my staff. I’m asking you to leave right now and I would request that you never come back. You’re just not welcome here.”
“Excuse me?” Tisha rounded on Shawn. “You must be joking, you little piece of management trash! I could buy this place right now. I could probably pay cash for it.”
“But you haven’t,” Shawn said quietly. His whole demeanor changed. His mild-mannered expression hardened and he glared down at Tisha from his five-foot-ten inch height, which wasn’t really hard to do since she was so short. “You don’t own this place. I do. So I’m telling you to get out. Now.”
Shawn’s curly dark hair was practically quivering with the force of his nervousness. But he wasn’t backing down, and right now Skye respected the hell out of him for that bravery. Getting up from her seat, she joined Shawn. After a moment so did Lou and Marvin and Tom and then even Mary and Klaus and a few of the other regulars who happened to be walking in or out or even standing in line. They were showing Shawn their solidarity and it was kind of a beautiful thing.
“Get out!” Lou snarled. “And take your snooty superiority complex with you. Have fun at your next charity benefit and don’t forget to kiss your late husband’s former best friend and smile pretty for the camera because we are all watching!”
It was a very prophetic kind of declaration, and for just a moment Skye wondered what had happened at the King home last night to result in this visit from the matriarch come morning. Had the brothers confronted their mother? Had she told them something of interest about the land deal? Or was the whole thing dead in the water because the Kings were such a convoluted sort of family with the sort of secrets that left them all feeling vulnerable?
Finally the door closed behind Tisha and the entire coffee shop exhaled a sigh of relief. But for Skye there was only a sense of horror as she tried to imagine exactly what had transpired in the King household leading up to this moment where Tisha had decided it was time to step in and prevent her son from taking up with someone she had deemed to be a lower-class citizen.
Chapter Nineteen
“You need to stay away from that woman.”
Jason King looked up from his desk in the mailroom at King Security Solutions, Inc. The day had not been a pleasant one so far. In fact, he wasn’t even really supposed to be here. He had more or less quit thanks to his brothers’ assertion that they were going to split the company three ways. But the department head had called Jason that morning to beg him to come in.
They’d had several employees quit due to a very strange error in the accounting department that had somehow managed to “forget” to pay all lower ranking employees for the last two weeks since Mac King’s death. Since Jason did not actually work in accounting, he had been on the phone with them all morning trying to determine what was going on. He hadn’t been paid either, which was rather odd. Unless of course you took into account all of the rumors and other whispers floating around the bowels of the huge corporation.
But right now all of those accounting and human resources issues were taking a backseat to the current problem standing in front of his desk. Jason tilted his head just far enough to see half a dozen of the mail room employees staring over at his mother. They didn’t like her. That wasn’t a secret and they never tried to hide their feelings in order to spare his either. But right now Jason was figuring that his mother would be lucky to get off this floor with her head still intact.
“Why are you here?” Jason asked Tisha. “You don’t belong down here and you know it. And I have nothing to say to you and I think you probably know that too. If you’d like to talk about what we discussed last night you will find Orion upstairs in his office as usual.”
“I don’t want to talk to Orion,” Tisha snapped. She glanced around and sniffed at the employees. “They look angry. What’s going on?”
Jason sighed. He really didn’t want to get into this with his mother, but then maybe it was time that someone let her know that this company was experiencing some pretty strange things. “They’re pissed off because they haven’t been paid since Dad died.”
“Excuse me?” Tisha had the gall to roll her eyes. “That is such bullshit. They’re lying to you.”
“They aren’t lying to me.” Jason could not believe that his mother would actually suggest such a thing. “I haven’t gotten paid since Dad died either.”
Now Tisha looked uncomfortable. Or even more uncomfortable. She was dressed in her usual designer clothes and high-heeled shoes and carrying a bag that had probably cost more that these other employees made in an entire week’s worth of work. And she could actually stand there and pretend that they were the ones with the issues? Really?
“I’m sure it’s just an accounting oversight because of the estate settlement process,” Tisha said dismissively.”
Interesting. That was probably more than Jason had gotten from anyone up in accounting. Nobody up there seemed to know what was going on at all. Jason narrowed his gaze at his mother. “So when will that be resolved?”
A nonchalant shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe by the end of the month. But probably longer. A few months. People
will just have to be patient and wait.”
“Excuse me?” Jason shot to his feet so quickly that his desk chair toppled over backwards. “You must be joking! You cannot possibly expect people to go a month or two without pay!”
“Why not?” There was absolutely no regard for these people in his mother’s mind. In her world there was no such thing as living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, she didn’t actually get a paycheck. She just spent money and it magically reappeared in her accounts or on her credit cards. “They need to tighten their belts and realize that the company is going through a bit of a rough spot. Estate law is a pain in the ass and your father and Tex had more than a few agreements that are a little tricky to navigate.”
“Meaning that you are having some trouble totally taking over the company and circumventing Dad’s will!” Jason accused. “That’s fine. But I’m going upstairs and I’m going to make Orion put some kind of proviso in place to get these people paid! We will lose our whole workforce if this continues!”
Tisha did not seem particularly concerned. “Then we’ll hire more. People like this are a dime a dozen.”
There were several outraged cries of irritation and then four more employees just walked toward the elevator carrying their things. Tisha watched them go with a frown on her face. Jason felt differently. They’d just lost six employees this morning alone and he should not even care because he had absolutely no stake in this situation. This wasn’t his company. That had been made perfectly clear just a few days ago.
“Where are they going?” Tisha sniffed derisively. “Lunch? It’s early for lunch, don’t you think? You should really call them back and give them a write up or whatever you do to discipline employees.”
“Are you kidding me, Mother? They just quit. As in we have absolutely no power over them right now because you just told them that they aren’t getting paid, possibly for months. They’re going to sue us and they’re going to have an absolutely reasonable reason to do so. The other thing that’s going to suck is the unemployment suit! You do realize that there are consequences for not paying employees, right?”
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 14