“Yes.” Carolyn straightened and sniffed. She seemed to be relaxing. That was kind of odd. No. Weird. It was weird. And then Carolyn twisted her lips into a smirk. “And now I’m free to tell you that you are fired. You are no longer needed on the staff at the Dallas Star.”
“Excuse me?” Skye was sure she had heard wrong. “You can’t be serious. You’re firing me? For what?”
“Refusing to do the column topics that are requested of you.” Carolyn tilted her head as though there was one other reason that might be important, but not quite as much as the first. “And we’ve been getting a constant barrage of phone calls and emails from Tisha Olivares-King complaining about you and your column writing. She has demanded that the paper fire you.”
“Wait just a damn minute!” Skye did not bother keeping her voice down. She wanted the entire shop to hear. In fact, she wanted the whole freaking city to hear! “You’re firing me for refusing to write a sordid column full of made-up bullshit about Tisha Olivares-King and yet you’re also firing me because that woman is pissed off because I’ve been writing the truth about her? How badly do you think she was going to hate the paper if I printed that bullshit about an affair?”
“Oh, we wouldn’t have cared about that.” Carolyn gave an airy wave of her hand. “That would be just fine because then you would have topped all sales expectations and won some amazing awards for your journalistic wizardry!”
“Bullshit!” Skye roared. She grabbed up her tablet and struggled with the urge to slam it down on the table not unlike a total rock-star-on-stage tantrum with an electric guitar. “You cannot possibly think that my column would win anything but a bunch of moronic gawkers if I was lying through my teeth! Oh, and maybe a lawsuit because that woman is not only a total sue happy crazy bitch, but she’s also in dire need of funds!”
Carolyn suddenly froze with an expression of curiosity on her face. She tapped her lower lip with one long fake pink nail. “Wait. What? What do you mean she needs funds?”
“Nothing.” Damn. There was absolutely no reason to give Carolyn anything else on this particular bit of gossip that might or might not be true. “I was just suggesting that because she might or might not have bumped her husband off. It could be a life insurance thing.”
“Uh huh.” Carolyn narrowed her gaze. “You signed a noncompete. You know that. Right?”
“Yes,” Skye agreed. “I signed a statement promising not to write for any other columns of equal value.”
“Wait.” Carolyn narrowed her gaze suspiciously. “That’s not true. You can’t write for anything.”
“No. Not true. And that would actually be illegal.” Honestly sometimes Skye wondered if Carolyn was really this stupid or if she was just mean and trying to pretend that Skye was the stupid one. “The Dallas Star cannot prevent me from making a living in the Dallas area just because you fired me. I can still write whatever I want and sell it to whatever publication that I want. I just can’t write for another paper in the society column.”
Carolyn’s mouth popped open, but that might have been due to Lou, Marvin, and Tom’s cackling laughter going on in the background. It was hard to say. Regardless of why she was now looking like a fish out of water did not matter one bit to Skye’s current situation. She was unemployed. She needed work. She needed a story. And that sort of desperate situation called for drastic measures. Something along the lines of just showing up at the King Security Solutions, Inc offices to poke around and find out why nobody was getting paid.
Skye leaned around Carolyn to look at Lou. “You win,” she told him. Then Skye turned around and walked right out of the coffee shop. It felt kind of good, all things considered. She had no job, but maybe that job had been holding her back anyway.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jason could already tell that something odd was going on in the accounting department when he arrived on the sixth floor. It seemed as though the place had sort of exploded into action. The employees were furiously pounding on their keyboards and seemed to be whispering to each other as they pointed at their computer screens and looked worried.
This did not necessarily bode well. It kind of made Jason feel as though he were watching a bunch of ants trying to put their ant hill back together after some natural disaster had ripped the place apart. The only thing that was conspicuously missing were the little ant bodies strewn about after some kid had gone at it with their shoe, a bottle of hairspray, and a lighter.
Finally Jason decided that he was just going to have to flag someone down and force them to listen. That was all there was to it. He chose a female clerk in her thirties or so who seemed to be very businesslike in her treks back and forth across the floor as she zigzagged amongst the cubicles.
“Excuse me?” Jason reached out and touched the woman’s arm.
She spun around as though he had just zapped her with some kind of cattle prod. “What do you want?” Then she seemed to realize who he was. “Oh! Mr. King. I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for my brother Edward.” Jason waited a beat.
Surely this woman knew where Edward was. The last that Jason had heard about it, Edward had intended to be right here on the sixth floor trying to dig around and see if he could find out anything more about Tex Johnson and Tisha’s plans for the company.
“Mr. Edward King. Right.” The woman actually bit her lower lip. She was dressed in a pantsuit that flattered her figure, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she was in charge down here. Maybe Jason had picked the wrong subject to bother. Then the woman cleared her throat. “It’s been kind of crazy up here this morning.”
“Sweetheart, it’s been kind of crazy everywhere this morning. I just came from downstairs where we had six people walk off the job because they haven’t been paid. So I’m just basically assuming that there is some kind of issue up here that might be affecting us all.” This was Jason’s attempt at being politic and not pointing any fingers. At least that was what he was hoping. For the moment it did not seem as though it was going to matter what he said. The place was just a mess.
“Edward was here a minute ago. I think.” The woman looked around and shrugged.
The clerk’s pantsuit was sleeveless and taupe brown. It looked like something that Jason’s mother would have approved of. That, of course, brought back to Jason’s mind his mother’s threats about making him have dinner with someone named Eleni who was the daughter of her friend Alaina. Not that Eleni was necessarily a horrible person, but Jason hated her mother.
Alaina Ariosa was one of Tisha’s oldest friends. As in the two women had grown up together in their privileged Dallas neighborhood at their fancy prep school and with more money than either one of them knew what to do with. There was no doubt in Jason’s mind that Alaina was probably still a total snob—just like Tisha. And that did not make her daughter a very attractive marriage prospect. Of course, that was even assuming that Jason was looking.
Was he looking? Somehow the idea of marriage had not come up in his mind. But he was certainly interested in spending more time with Skye Kincaid. He enjoyed her company. He loved the way her mind worked.
“Hey!”
Jason startled so hard that he nearly fell over backwards. Edward was suddenly standing right there with a really pissed off expression on his face. “Oh! Dude. Sorry.”
“Dude,” Edward said drily. “Really? You just stand there with some vacant expression on your face for like five minutes after Olivia drags me out of a conference call to come and talk to you and now you’re just going to say dude and sorry?”
“Yes. Sorry.” Jason cleared his throat. He was feeling silly. He hated that. It was what always took him right back to feeling like the baby of the damn family and the resident moron. “I didn’t mean to zone out. It’s just been a very long morning. I came up to ask if you knew what was really going on with the payroll problems.”
The expression on Edward’s face said that he absolutely knew what was wrong but w
asn’t about to discuss it out here in plain view of anyone who might want to listen. Jason raised his eyebrows and tried to signal to his brother that there was something very serious going on. Finally Edward made a motion and the two of them retreated to Edward’s office about halfway down a hallway opposite the cubicle land where most of the other accounting staff had their desks.
Once the door was closed, Jason turned to look at Edward. But to his shock Edward was looking around as though he were pretty sure there was either a listening device or some other kind of spy implement going on. What the hell was going on?
“You must be joking,” Jason said quietly. “You can’t be seriously thinking that someone has bugged your office.”
“Dude!” Edward shot back sarcastically. “You never know. All right. Things are a little crazy right now. Not only crazy, but really disturbing right now. You realize that most of the workforce hasn’t been paid, right?”
“Yeah. Neither have I.” Jason snorted and shook his head. “But I suppose that you have. Right? So basically we can lay that at Mother’s feet because I’m the one she would most certainly try to cut off as soon as she could.”
“I don’t know about that.” Edward pursed his lips. “But it just makes the whole thing stranger when you say you haven’t been paid either. Someone got into the software right after Dad’s death and stopped payroll. Just stopped it. No reason. No explanation. It’s just stopped as though someone upstairs”—he was talking about the top executive floor—“decided that they weren’t going to pay anyone until they had gotten some kind of payout from the company. The funds for payroll aren’t there.”
“Excuse me?” This was news to Jason. “What do you mean the funds for payroll aren’t there? Where the hell are they?”
“That’s what we are trying to figure out!” Edward snapped. He was frowning and shaking his head. “How did you not get paid?”
“I just didn’t. Nothing got deposited. No email with the usual payroll junk like information about taxes and other crap. You know. Nothing was normal. And I’ve had six people walk off the job this morning because they can’t wait a few months.”
“Who said it would be a few months?” Edward’s tone rose a few octaves until he sounded almost like a teen-aged version of himself. “Where did you hear that?”
Right, because Jason hadn’t told Edward that part of the story and all of its fun implications. “Mother came downstairs to tell me that she expects me to never see or talk to Skye Kincaid again and to inform me that her friend Alaina’s daughter Eleni is the woman I’m supposed to marry.”
Edward snorted. “That will never happen.”
“I know.” Then Jason realized that Edward didn’t mean the same thing that Jason did. “Hey! I’m not a bad catch you know.”
“I know that.” Edward rolled his eyes. “But Eleni is Orion’s age and smart as a whip. She’s not going to be manipulated into anything that she doesn’t want. That’s all I was saying. And a man who is in love with another woman is not going to interest her one bit.”
“In love with…” Jason realized what Edward was insinuating. “What makes you think I’m in love with Skye?”
“Really? Are you that boneheaded that you can’t even see what’s right in front of your face? Skye is great. She really is. And you are so head over heels for the girl that you would make a fool out of yourself for her in a millisecond.”
Jason could not exactly deny that at all. It was pretty true. Besides, why would he want to deny it? It wasn’t a bad thing. Then he realized that he needed to get his brain back on topic. “Back to the rest of what Mother said. When I asked about the payroll problem she claimed that it was probably because of probate issues and that it was to be expected and that it probably wouldn’t be resolved for a few months. Some of the employees overheard that and let’s just say that the mail room floor is now utterly empty.”
“Shit!” Edward pressed his lips into a hard line. “That’s not good. Don’t people understand that a company like this can’t exist without the people who make it run from the ground up?”
“No. They are all like our brother Orion who stood in the elevator and told me that I’m not really needed or welcome here. Asked me several times where the hell I was going before remembering that I’d said I was so upset about the unfair distribution of the inheritance that I wasn’t going to work here anymore, and then claiming that I’m a liar because of what I told him about the accounting issues.”
“Damn.” Edward did not look pleased. He started pacing around and around his desk. “I haven’t talked to Orion yet. I was trying to trace the way that the money went. It was a bit of a pain in the ass. Someone definitely covered up the trail. They sent the entire payroll for the last month or so to an account in the Virgin Islands and then kind of rerouted it from there. It doesn’t make things easy to track when you do that.” Edward made a face. “Which is, of course, why they do it.”
Jason was already feeling as though his trust in their mother was destroyed. “Are you sure Mom is behind this? I have to say that as much as I think her capable of doing something like that I don’t know if I think she’s actually capable, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I’ve asked myself that many times this morning already,” Edward muttered. He was standing with his arms crossed over his broad chest and one hand tugging at his lower lip as though he were going to yank it off. “It just makes me ill to think that she would be stealing from the company.”
There was a ruckus outside the office door. Both men turned to stare as they heard people shouting and it sounded like running footsteps coming down the hallway. Someone knocked hurriedly at the door of Edward’s office.
“Sir? Sir? Please, sir? She doesn’t have a badge!”
“Where is he?” The voice was feminine, familiar, and very pissed off. But as much as Jason wanted Skye to be looking for him, he wasn’t actually certain that she was. “I want to talk to Edward King now! Tell him that I’m here or I’m going to bang on every single one of these doors. Do you get me?”
“Ma’am, you can’t be back there!” The panicked voice presumably belonged to a King Security Solutions employee. “Ma’am!”
“It’s okay.” Edward hurried to open the office door. “Skye is just fine to be back here. Let her in.”
The woman on the other side of the door, who appeared to be a textbook accountant in her ballooning brown dress and a pixie haircut that actually managed to look severe, looked shocked. “What? You want me to let her back here? But why?”
“Just do it!” Edward growled. It was obvious he did not appreciate being questioned by his employees. “She’s a friend.”
“A friend? She’s a reporter!” The pixie accountant drone shot back.
But before Edward could respond to the drone’s incredulity, Skye came charging down the hallway. “Aha! I found you!”
Jason stepped out from behind Edward and leaned out of the doorway. “Calm down sweetheart, you’re welcome to come in here and chat with us. But you have to stop scaring the drones first.”
“Jason!”
Skye stopped moving so abruptly that one of the employees chasing her rammed right into her back. It was like watching dominoes except Skye did not topple. She managed to hold firm long enough to step out of the way, at which point the other two employees who had been chasing her seemed to nosedive right to the industrial carpet like some scene from a comedic film.
“Whoops, sorry!” Skye told the people on the ground. Then she looked up and pointed at Jason. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour! Where have you been?”
Jason pulled out his phone. He had four missed calls and six texts. Wow. “Sorry about that. Sometimes in this building it doesn’t actually ring. And I’ve been a little distracted.”
Skye left the carnage of her dramatic entry behind and came all the way into Edward’s office. Skye gleefully shut the door in the accounting drone’s face. Once the three of them were final
ly alone Skye put her hands on her hips and looked from Edward to Jason.
“So,” Skye began, chuffing out a sigh. “Let’s start talking about what happened in the payroll department, shall we?”
Jason wondered what Skye had heard. It seemed like she would not be here if she hadn’t heard something. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“My guess?” Skye snorted and shook her head. “Don’t play games with me. You guys are in trouble. Or rather the reputation of your company is in trouble. The whole city knows that you aren’t paying your employees. They’re talking about it in coffee shops. Do you know how fast word travels in places like that?”
Edward groaned. “Shit.”
“I had a beautiful little discussion with a man who, until earlier this morning, worked here at your company. He said they haven’t gotten paychecks since your father’s death. Is this a probate thing or is this a criminal thing?”
“I know it’s not a society column thing,” Jason retorted. He could not imagine why she was so doggedly pursuing this issue.
Then Skye made a face and opened her bag. Pulling out her tablet she plopped into a chair in front of Edward’s desk. “Since the conversation I had before talking to your former employee involved my boss firing me for refusing to spread lies about your mother—oh, and because your mother told her to fire me—I don’t particularly care how this issue relates to the society column.”
Damn. Jason did not even know what to say. If anyone had a right to tell this story it was Skye. Jason just hoped they could actually figure out the answers that they all needed before the company came down around their ears.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Skye had not expected to find Jason here. Although in hindsight she could not decide why that was. There was really no reason that Jason would not be here at the corporate offices of his family business. The guy had talked about quitting and about the unfairness of things since the transition after his father’s passing. But in the end this was where his family was and they were most certainly going through a crisis.
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 16