“Um, yes, they are,” Nathan replied, his own voice sounding a bit odd and huskier than usual. Although he was much too stoic and reserved to get as emotional or weepy as me, I could feel that he was just as touched and affected by this moment as I was.
“And coal is also made of carbon. So, you got me coal for Christmas after all,” I said, looking up at him and fluttering my eyelashes.
Nathan just smirked, shook his head, and pulled me even closer to him. I snuggled into his body and listened to the sound of his breathing, the thrum of his heartbeat, and basked in the feeling of being exactly where I was meant to be. This was the best Christmas ever.
Epilogue
Nathan
“Wait, you mean the whole ‘reading of the will’ thing isn’t even real?” I asked the weasel-faced attorney from Clark and Jeffries after the board meeting. I felt like I’d been lied to by every movie and TV show ever. This couldn’t be true.
“Not anymore,” he said, shrugging his narrow shoulders and smiling thinly, “It used to happen pretty frequently back in the day since most people were illiterate. An estate attorney would gather the entire family around his desk and read the will of the deceased family member and answer their questions about it. These days that sort of reading just isn’t necessary. You’ll have to read it yourself. Sorry.”
I looked at the copy of my grandfather’s will I’d just been handed in disbelief. For some reason I had been certain that there would be some sort of formal reading ceremony. This just felt way too casual. I had to believe that my grandfather would have wanted the pomp and circumstance of a formal reading.
“So, it’s just… all over?” I asked, still not entirely certain that weasel-face wasn’t exhibiting a heretofore unknown sense of humor. He’d been acting as secretary for the Durant Industries board meetings for the past seven months, but I still didn’t know his name. It had never occurred to me to ask and now it was much too late to be polite. He would just be weasel-face forever unless he dropped a business card or something.
“Over? Not hardly,” he replied, smirking condescendingly at my apparent lack of legal wills and trusts knowledge, “In addition to the beneficiaries and the executor named in the will and, in some cases the trustee named in the testator's or testatrix's revocable living trust, the accountant for the estate will need to receive a copy so that he or she can read and understand what the will provides with regard to the payment of claims filed against the estate (such as credit card bills) as well as the payment of any estate taxes that may be due as well as income taxes. There are still a number of formalities to attend to. It’s only over for you and the rest of your immediate family.”
I didn’t like weasel-face I decided right then, tipping over from having no opinion on the man to having a negative one at his unnecessarily long, legal explanation. I could wax poetic about astronaut or engineering shit if I wanted to. I could go on for hours about it. But I didn’t, because it’s an asshole thing to do. Apparently, weasel-face hadn’t gotten the memo that nobody likes a know-it-all.
“What about my cousin Nicholas? You know, Richard’s son?” I asked weasel-face after darting my eyes around the empty room to make sure that my uncle Richard wasn’t around to hear me talking about his son, “Does that mean you have to track him down and give him a copy of the will too?”
Weasel-face sighed.
“Yes, it does,” he said in a resigned, tired tone of voice. “As a beneficiary, Nicholas Durant has to receive a copy of the will just like everyone else. Unfortunately, we have literally no idea where he is. We hired a private investigator to try and find him, but it wasn’t successful; I fired them a few weeks back when they failed to produce any results. They found absolutely nothing that could lead us to Nicholas after a full sixty days. It was pathetic. Ultimately it was only your uncle’s pet military contractors, the Skylark Group, that were finally able to locate him. The only catch is that they won’t actually tell us where he is.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” I asked him in confusion. “If they were hired to find Nicholas, why wouldn’t they give you the address and just leave it up to you to get in contact with him? Why make their own job harder?”
“I really wish it were that simple,” Weasel-face said with an expression of obvious annoyance. “It should be. Frustratingly, it seems that Nicholas was very serious about not being found. Very proactive. He actually had a preexisting contract with his own father’s favorite bird dogs to ensure that they wouldn’t disclose his location if they were ever contracted to find him. He was clearly thinking long-term when he dropped off the face of the earth five years ago. It wasn’t a vacation for him. So, although Skylark knows where he is, they won’t let us reach out to him. Instead, they’re only willing to send one of their own people or an independent third party out to contact him on our behalf.”
“Why?”
“According to them, Nicholas doesn’t want to receive any contact from his family whatsoever. He doesn’t want to take any chances with his privacy. Since Clark and Jeffries works for your family, we can’t know where he is. It doesn’t even work like that from a legal perspective, but whatever, that’s what his contract with Skylark said. Instead, Nicholas will just have to sign a statement that proves he received a copy of the will. An independent contractor has been hired by Skylark to go find him and get a signature, you know a corporate fixer type with an NDA a mile long. That way your cousin’s location will stay a secret forever and ever.”
“Jeez,” I said, rolling my eyes at the drama, “I hadn’t realized that Nicholas inherited so much of Richard’s paranoid neuroticism.”
Weasel-face looked at me curiously. His vivid green eyes narrowed with an obvious, keen intelligence.
“Neuroticism you say?” He inquired, scooping up a legal pad and a pen, “You think that Nicholas has gone crazy? If he is mentally impaired in some way that might actually affect a few very important things about his inheritance. Can you tell me more about your suspicions?”
I laughed and shook my head at the lawyer’s sudden interest.
“No, not at all,” I corrected with a smirk, “I was just being melodramatic. Nicholas is still perfectly sane, at least as far as I know. He’s probably the sanest one in our generation. He was the only one with the good sense to get fully out of the toxic orbit of our family. I only meant that Nicholas clearly went out of his way to make sure that no one from our family can ever find him. I wonder if he’s living in a hollowed-out volcano and stroking a Persian cat like a supervillain somewhere.”
Weasel-face set down the legal pad, looking vaguely relieved.
“Well, if he isn’t doing so now, he will certainly be able to afford to live the Bond-villain lifestyle after the probate process is finally completed,” weasel-face said with a shrug, “he can buy himself a proper lair somewhere tropical.”
We exchanged a bemused smile. Maybe weasel-face wasn’t so bad after all. Alexander II was a giant know-it-all too, but we’d been getting along lately. Zoey had been trying to get me to make some friends. According to her it was weird that the only people I was genuinely close to were David and Cecelia. I’d thought she was crazy until we started making a guest list for our wedding and I barely had anyone to put on it. I hadn’t made any new friends yet, but I was working on being friendlier.
“Did the Skylark people know why Nicholas went off the grid?” I asked, not actually expecting an affirmative answer. I was just making conversation.
Weasel-face shook his head, but his attention zeroed in on me with renewed interest.
“If they know, they didn’t share it with me,” he said with a shrug, “why? Does your family not know? Obviously, my bosses at Clark and Jeffries wouldn’t ever ask about something so personal. I have less tact.”
I looked at him in confusion, although I was pleased by his candor.
“No. No one really knows why Nicholas went off the rails,” I said, “except Richard. And he’s definitely not talking.”
>
This information seemed to be of interest to weasel-face, although I’m not sure why it would be. Nicholas’ decision to write off the entire family had been a source of considerable interest several years ago, but we’d mostly given up on trying to figure it out. He didn’t want to be found and had made that clear. The end.
Of all the Durant heirs, Nicholas was the youngest and the quietest. He was probably the second smartest (after me). He’d been gifted intellectually, and had excelled at everything he ever attempted athletically, but he was constantly at odds with his father growing up. Their personality conflict festered and grew over the years. Somehow, Nicholas had managed to work for Durant Industries for almost five years after graduating from Yale, but the situation with his father boiled over eventually. Nicholas took off after that, leaving no explanation.
Richard certainly didn’t seem willing (or perhaps able) to have a conversation about Nicholas without becoming apoplectic. If Richard was to be believed, Nicholas took too heavily after his mother and Richard’s estranged ex-wife, Ada. Ada, who moved to Australia immediately after divorcing Richard when Nicholas was about five, had reportedly been somewhat unstable. Personally, I would think that being married to Richard would make someone unstable, not that it was any of my business.
My introspection about my mysterious cousin Nicholas must have shown on my face or something, because weasel-face was now staring at me expectantly.
“Sorry, what?” I said in confusion.
“I asked if you wanted to send a note or something with the messenger hired to visit Nicholas,” he repeated.
I blinked in shock.
“I can do that?” I asked, and he nodded and shrugged.
“I don’t see why not,” weasel-face replied, a sly look turning his angular features even sharper, “we don’t even necessarily need to tell Skylark about it. We can just slip it in between the pages of the will. It’s long and bound and then shoved in a folder, so how would they know?”
There was a reason that Clark and Jeffries were our lawyers. They were the best.
“Yeah, I would like to send him a message, thanks” I said, scooping up the legal pad to write down my cell phone number and a quick, urgent request for him to please call me, “he’ll probably ignore it or throw it away, but at least I can say that I tried to talk to him, right?”
Weasel-face just shrugged again and took the note when I extended it. He tucked it away in a folder.
“You never know. I try not to make predictions about how people will act,” he said with a smile, “people always seem to surprise me in this business.”
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Also by Taylor Holloway
Scions of Sin
Bleeding Heart - Alexander
Kiss and Tell - Nathan
Down and Dirty - Nicholas - COMING SOON
Bleeding Heart
Scions of Sin: Book One
Want read more about the Durant heirs? Check out this special teaser of Bleeding Heart or click here to read now!
1
Alexander
I loved Dubai. The city rose out of the monotonous desert and stabbed violently at the heavens with endless, arrogant towers of steel and glass. It was everything a place ought to be in the twenty-first century— shiny, new, modern, and beautiful. A playground for the young, rich, and ambitious. I was amazed it had taken me so long to find it, and sad to see it disappearing out of the wide windows of the Gulfstream G650.
I was headed home. Back to Pennsylvania, the home of the Liberty Bell, a shit-ton of backward Amish people, and my dysfunctional extended family. On the upside, at least it wouldn’t be a hundred and six degrees in Pennsylvania over the upcoming Easter weekend.
Sinking back from the window into my soft leather seat, I ordered a gin and tonic from a smiling brunette and reminded myself that it was a good idea to leave the Middle East during this critical phase of my most ambitious project to date. The project had occupied almost one hundred percent of my time and effort for three years, but I promised myself that it was going to be worth it.
The worst part of the timing of this trip was that I was going to miss the goddamn symbolic ground-breaking ceremony. I secretly loved those. I would have denied it to anyone who dared to ask, but I had a closet entirely full of those goofy, gold-painted shovels and hardhats they always give you. They’re my trophies. Still, this trip had potential beyond adding another shovel to my collection.
In return for a large amount of cash funded by my business, and an even larger amount of cash funded by family’s chemical empire, the Colombian petrochemicals conglomerate Propetrolas was going to give me the right to develop several square miles of prime Bogota real estate where their old industrial hub once sat. I would then develop the hideous eyesore into a world-class resort, thanks to a number of generous financial incentives and tax breaks. Durant Industries, my extended clan’s chemical dynasty, would receive the right to build and reap the financial rewards of operating the new, state-of-the-art facility located elsewhere. And Propetrolas could brag to the world that they had revolutionized their dirty, unsafe petrochemicals industry overnight. Everybody wins.
It was an elegant deal, simply conceived but brilliantly engineered so that everyone got exactly what they wanted and gave up no more than necessary. Out of failure, decay, and environmental degradation, our American, capitalist assault would forge something different in Colombia. Something new and wonderful would rise from the ashes of the old.
Even Durant Industries’ small cadre of vassals in the governments of both countries would get something out of it. They got to take credit for the humanitarian and environmental aspects of American investment in South America, courtesy of a handful of NGO’s that had lobbied them tirelessly to support it.
Soulless, scumbag politicians. They were already taking credit for something they had nothing to do with. I mean, I may be scum too, but at least I build things. All politicians do is talk. Talk and lie. They’re necessary parasites, however, and the Durant-Breyer clan has always kept them well-fed.
The woman who was actually behind this deal, Madison Clark, would never see a proportional return for her investment of time and effort. That’s the penalty that the world always extracts on altruists, but only because they let it. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve what they get. You must reach out your hand and take what you want in this world. Otherwise, you’ll starve.
“Would you like something to eat, Mr. Durant?” The smiling brunette asked me, returning from the plane’s galley.
She handed me the leather wrapped menu, but her pale blue eyes offered up an entirely different kind of delicacy. Her small, warm hand lingered on mine, making her implication crystal clear. The nametag on her modest chest said ‘Vicki’.
This was my family’s plane, sent to collect me when I insinuated last week that I might not come in person for the closing. I could have taken my own, obviously, but why not trick them into spending their own money? I wondered if my uncle had fucked this Vicki girl, or the blonde that was with her as part of the crew. Probably not. He was archaically devoted to my aunt.
If one of my cousins—either Nathan or David—had been with Vicki, she would have already quit. They were both terrible people who play
ed mercilessly off the weaknesses of others to get what they want. It’s a family trait.
“Have a seat, Vicki,” I told her, and she perched delicately in the seat across from mine obediently, smiling shyly, “I’m not hungry right now, but I could do with some company. It’s a long flight with no one to talk to.”
“Sure,” she replied in a soft, breathy voice, “I’d like that. What would you like to talk about?”
“Tell me about yourself,” I ordered her.
“Well, I’m from Oklahoma and I moved out west to California about four years ago…” she began prattling on about her education and interests. ‘Blah blah college blah blah tennis blah blah flight attendant training’. Whatever. Tuning her out immediately, I used the next five minutes to examine her.
I didn’t bother to smile and nod along like I was listening. I just stared. If Vicki was like most women, she told herself that my focused attention was flattering. That I was so interested in her that I was practically transfixed. She would be wrong, of course. I wasn’t listening; I was doing a cost-benefit analysis.
Vicki’s maybe twenty-four or twenty-five—a good eight years younger than me, but old enough to know she definitely shouldn’t have hit on me. But she was doing it anyway, placing that same soft hand on my knee as she talked. She was tall, thin, and tan—the sort of woman who’s a generous six-plus on the coasts and a solid nine in a flyover state like Oklahoma.
I suspected that she found it shocking to learn she wasn’t as stunning as she thought she was the first time she left her farm in Bumfuck, Oklahoma. Vicki was probably hot shit in her hometown. I imagine that she’s been fighting that insecurity ever since. She’d mostly gotten rid of her southern accent, but it still snuck through sometimes on single syllable words with long ‘a’ sounds (she said ‘air’ like ‘ay-er’).
Kiss and Tell (Scions of Sin Book 2) Page 26