by Julie Kriss
I put my glass down and waited.
“Hank always wanted you to come back and take over the family business,” Maddy said. “But when you didn’t, he hired a man named Clayton Rorick, initially to help him manage his investments. Hank and Clayton became close—”
“I know Clayton,” I said. “He’s the asshole who offered me money to stay away.”
“That was a misstep on his part,” Maddy said with diplomacy. “That offer is retracted, by the way. It was made without the proper context, and now it’s off the table.”
“What a prince,” I said.
She sighed. “Just let me continue, okay? Hank trusted Clayton—so much so, by the end, that he left Clayton everything.”
I went still. “Everything?”
“Everything,” Maddy said.
I leaned back on the sofa. That pissed me off. Not for me, but for my sisters. Ronnie could probably use money. And Sabrina—she was spoiled, sure, but according to her TV show she was used to a pretty high lifestyle. Bea didn’t have a career or a job that I knew of. Disinheriting them was a dick move—a typically Hank move.
“Go on,” I told Maddy.
“I think you know,” Maddy said, “that Clayton and your sister Ronnie had a thing. They were going to get married, but she took off after the engagement party and stayed away. After Hank died, Clayton tracked down Ronnie, and I suppose they worked it out, because they’re getting married in two weeks.”
I was silent. The truth was, until I’d seen the story about Sabrina being kidnapped at the engagement party, I hadn’t known that Ronnie was actually going to go through with marrying that asshole. I thought the letter had taken care of that—and I was wrong. Because I’d been off the grid, and I’d been busy—doing what? Getting drunk and throwing other drunks out of a backwater bar in Panama. Pretending the world didn’t exist instead of facing it.
But now I knew what was happening, and I could put the pieces together for myself. “She’s marrying him to keep the inheritance,” I said to Maddy.
Maddy kept her expression neutral. Like she claimed, she was a very, very good lawyer. “They’re in love. For real this time, and I’ve spent enough time with them that I believe it. And yes, if Ronnie marries Clayton, the money stays in the family. Ronnie is worried about Sabrina and Bea both, financially. Sabrina doesn’t have a job since she left her TV show. And Bea had some problems with a felonious boyfriend and a lot of debt.” She stood up to refresh her drink. “The fact is, disinheritance would be a problem both of them.”
“So Ronnie took the fall,” I said. That sounded so much like Ronnie, the responsible one. “She gave herself to this guy to keep the money.”
“Not much of a sacrifice,” Maddy commented. “She’s in love with him. Clayton is hardly unattractive, and he’s rich as God.”
I leaned back on the couch. “Your type of man, is he?”
She gave me one of her icy looks. “I don’t have a type.”
Sure. I’d told myself the same thing before I laid eyes on her. “In any case, Ronnie is marrying this guy. The money stays in the family. Which leaves me nothing.”
“I’m getting to that.” Maddy sat down again, and I let my gaze wander her long legs at leisure. She noticed, and she gave me another cold stare, but she didn’t move away. “The will was very specific about you,” she said. “Hank stated that if you return to the States within six months of his death, you get a significant benefit.”
I did the math in my head, and she watched me do it. In two weeks it would be six months to the day. “What benefit?”
“You can stake a legal claim and it will be upheld according to the terms of the will.”
She’d lost me. “A legal claim to what?”
She sipped her drink. “To everything.”
I stared at her for a long, silent minute. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that if you want it, you get everything,” she said. “The businesses, the holdings, the stock portfolio, the real estate. The King’s Land, the LA penthouse, the New York property investments, the bank accounts—all of it. If you stake a claim, you get everything except for twenty worthless acres. Marriage or no marriage. It’s all yours.”
My stomach dropped. My chest was tight. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I said.
Maddy only stared at me from her dark-lashed eyes without a speck of emotion. “I never kid about business, Mr. King.”
“I told you, my name is Dylan.”
She blinked once. “Then I never kid, Dylan. Ever.”
I looked away, out the floor-to-ceiling windows, unseeing. The LA cityscape was nothing to me. I just stared, my brain ticking over. There was one thought that rose above the jumble of the rest. What did Hank want?
This wasn’t a gesture of my father’s love—I knew that much. I knew it to my bones. Some part of him may have thought he cared about me, but Hank King didn’t know how to love. A lack that he had passed on to me. I didn’t know how to love, either, and it took one to know one.
So he hadn’t left me everything out of affection. He hadn’t left it to me because it was best for his businesses. I’d never run a business in my life and I had no idea how to start. He’d left all of his holdings to a man who knew how to get into an armed building in the middle of the night without tripping the sensors, a man who knew how to load an automatic rifle in seconds with barely a sound, a man who knew how to sleep in fifteen-minute increments while watching a top-secret location for days. He hadn’t left it to a man who knew how to invest and accumulate dividends.
It was a fuck you to someone, I was sure of it. His board of directors? His daughters? My mother? This Clayton guy? Maybe all of them at once. It had nothing to do with me.
“I suppose you’re wondering why,” Maddy said, her calm voice breaking into my thoughts.
She was cool, this woman. Unfeeling, maybe. But in this moment, when I was learning the most surprising news of my life, unfeeling was what I wanted. What I appreciated. I turned away from the window and looked at her. “I suppose I am,” I said.
She smoothed her hair back behind her shoulders, a gesture that was unintentionally sexy. I wanted that hair draped over me while she rode me. I very much hadn’t forgotten that, even in this crazy moment. “You’re his son,” she said. “His only male heir. Hank put a lot of importance on that. So much so that I think your sisters felt excluded. They tried to please him, especially Sabrina, but they never could. Hank talked a lot about you, Dylan. About what you would do when you came back. What would happen when his son returned.”
I stared at her, incredulous. “You’re saying that he left me his entire fortune, above my sisters who have been there all this time, because I have a dick?”
To my surprise, Maddy’s cheeks went pink. Like the mention of my dick made her a little bit uncomfortable. Which couldn’t be right, because she must have heard much worse than that. Plus, she’d already seen it. “If you want to put it that way, basically, yes. But it wasn’t just your gender that factored into the decision. It was you. He always thought it would be best to leave everything to you and no one else.”
I stood up from the sofa and paced the room. It was fucking ridiculous—medieval. What year had my father thought it was? I had no idea how to take over for him, run things.
At the same time, Clayton Rorick was an asshole, making Ronnie marry him for money, and at the same time offering me money to stay away. Now I understood his letter—if I took my measly two and a half million, he got the rest of it. He got the richer end of the deal by far. Two and a half million was nothing compared to the King fortune.
What if Ronnie was unhappy? What if she didn’t want to marry him? What if Clayton planned to run my father’s legacy into the ground or cut it up and sell it off? What if he was an idiot and ended up bankrupting King Industries?
I shouldn’t care. I hadn’t cared for over a decade now. This wasn’t my heritage; I’d never planned to take the reins. I’d never
thought there was a chance in hell this would happen.
And yet…
And yet it had.
If you stake a claim, you get everything.
I wasn’t greedy, though there was no denying that this was a lot of money. It was also a lot of things that were more than money—businesses that employed people, land that had worth. In the wrong hands, if the assets were run into the ground, it could affect a lot of people.
I could live out of one bag for the rest of my life. I preferred it, actually. But I’d been bored in the jungle. I was used to action. I was used to being the guy who parachuted into a bad situation and made everything better. I could do that right now for my sisters, be the superhero who showed up, took care of them, and vanquished the bad guys.
All I had to do was claim an inheritance I had never asked for.
My sisters didn’t even know I was in the country. But here I was, thinking about taking King Industries.
I stopped pacing and looked at Maddy. Her honey-brown hair, her high cheekbones, her soft mouth. She wasn’t flirting now, wasn’t sparring with me. The mask of pure business was on. Her phone buzzed and she glanced at it. Then she put down her glass and stood. Her heels clicked as she crossed the floor toward me.
“Take some time,” she said. “Think about what you want to do.”
“I don’t need time,” I said.
She paused, her eyebrows rising. “You don’t?”
“Who was that on your phone?” A husband? She didn’t wear a wedding ring. A boyfriend? Hell—a girlfriend?
“None of your business,” she said. “And that isn’t the topic of discussion.”
“It seemed important.”
“Messages from my fellow partners in the firm usually are.”
I wondered if she was telling the truth. Why would she lie? I was very fucking curious. “You want to know what I plan to do about the will?” I asked her.
She pressed her lips into a line, but I wasn’t fooled. The spark in her eyes gave her away. I wasn’t the only one in this room who was very fucking curious. But she said, “Since it’s the main business of my entire firm right now, yes, I’d like to know the decision you arrived at so quickly.”
I smiled at her. Decisiveness was a virtue in SpecOps. You were given information and you made a decision about what to do with it. If you waited, people died. “I think the answer is obvious,” I said to her.
“And what answer is that?”
“My father wanted it, and I have nothing else to do,” I said. “Everything’s a mess, and someone has to fix it. That someone is me. It looks like I’m taking over the estate.”
6
MADDY
What kind of man made a decision like that without thinking about it? For all my research, I hadn’t really had a full read on Dylan King. Until now, when I finally had him in front of me, in person. Clothed, which was unfortunate—though I’d never admit it.
“You just got off a plane a short while ago,” I said. “You should take more time.”
“I told you, I don’t need any time,” Dylan said. “I’m in.”
He couldn’t be serious. “You would be taking over a massive estate ahead of Clayton and your sisters.”
Dylan walked to the sofa and sat on it, his elbows on his knees. “I’ll take care of my sisters. Believe me, they won’t go without.” He turned and looked at me, his dark eyes watching my face. “You don’t want me to do this,” he said.
I dropped my eyes, turned away. I hated being read like that. “What I think doesn’t matter.”
“It does, actually. You wanted me to say no.”
“I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“Why?”
Because I didn’t think you were greedy. I didn’t think you would take the lion’s share away from everyone else. I didn’t think you were like that. I thought you were the one person I’d met who didn’t care about money. “Like I say, it’s a big decision. I thought you would think it through. This doesn’t seem like something you’d do.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw and his eyes went hard. “You don’t know me,” he said.
He was right. I wasn’t even supposed to know him as well as I did. I kept slipping up, including when I’d handed him a whiskey. I knew that was his favorite drink because one of his exes had written it in an email we intercepted: Come back and I’ll pour you a whiskey, just like you like it best. It had been second nature to pour him that drink, to try and outdo whoever she was. Thank God he hadn’t noticed.
“I know your military record,” I said to him. “I know you’re a man of action, not a businessman. I thought that taking over King Industries would be uninteresting to you. I suppose I was wrong.”
“You’re right,” Dylan said. “I’m not a businessman. But if I don’t take over King Industries, no one does.”
“Clayton Rorick will take over if you don’t. There will be someone at the helm.”
“Clayton Rorick is an asshole,” Dylan said.
“He’s perfectly competent.”
“Competent and heartless.”
“Your father trusted him.”
“My father made a lot of mistakes,” Dylan said. “Screwing my mother was one of them. Maybe trusting Clayton Rorick is another.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. This was how it was going to be, then. He wasn’t going to take my counsel—even though I knew this particular game, and the players, much better than he did. He was going to ignore me and do whatever the hell he wanted.
I hadn’t thought I cared.
He stood up, came toward me. Even barefoot—especially barefoot, perhaps—he still seemed like a dangerous jungle cat.
“I get it,” he said. “I haven’t been around. That’s true. Maybe you wonder why I left. Hell, I don’t know—maybe everyone wonders.”
I did wonder. There was a lot in his file about what he did, but nothing at all about why. “It isn’t my business,” I said.
“I had reasons. Good ones. My parents may be rich, but they were so toxic they nearly drowned me. My mother raised me on a diet of nasty arguments and insults, and Hank was no better. By the time I was old enough to enlist, I was ready to get away from both of them. I felt like I needed air.”
I nodded mechanically, but I could feel my pulse in my neck. That was in the file—there had been a bitter custody battle for Dylan when he was small, and his mother, Charlene, had won. Hank had never had anything good to say about Charlene, and she had phoned my office a few times, livid and insulting. It wouldn’t have been a healthy atmosphere for any kid.
And I knew what that felt like. I knew the feeling of toxic parents, of needing air. But I swallowed the words back, kept it professional.
“So I left,” Dylan said. “I won’t get into it, but I saved a lot of lives. Took a few of them, too. That’s what I did, who I was. And now…” He stopped moving forward and went still. “Now Hank is dead, and staying away is a coward’s move. If someone needs to take over, and that someone is me, then I’ll take over and do the best I can. King Industries employs a lot of people who count on it. My career in the armed forces is done. It’s time for me to take over.”
I had to remember that this was a job. He was just a client—not even that, not until the takeover was official. “I’ll start the process of drawing up the papers,” I said.
Dylan gave me half a smile that made my knees weak. “You do that.”
There was a hum of silence between us. If he did this, if this happened, it wouldn’t just change his sisters’ lives—it would change mine. He’d be my client going forward. My boss. For as long as King Industries employed the firm, which could be forever.
And I’d have to be professional with him, day in and day out. Did I think I could do that?
I had to. So of course I could fucking do it.
I picked up my purse and pulled out a business card. I wrote a number on the back.
“This is my personal cell number.” I put the card on
the table. “Take the night to think about it and call me. I’ll do what you say. And then I’ll send you a bill. Because that’s what I do, Dylan. That’s all I do.”
He didn’t speak. But I felt him watch me as I turned and walked out the door.
I waited until I was in the elevator to look at my phone again.
I looked at the text that had come in from Malick Gray, the firm’s senior partner. Madison, call me immediately.
I’d known Malick since I joined the firm, and we’d collaborated on some cases since I became a partner. There were two things that were always true about him: his assistant managed all of his communications, even with me. And he never, ever texted.
I swallowed and hit his number as the hotel’s elevator doors opened and I stepped out into the lobby. There was only one account that could possibly get Malick’s personal attention, and I had a feeling I knew which one it was.
“Madison,” Malick said when he picked up. “What’s this I hear about Dylan King returning to LA?”
“He’s here,” I said. “I’m handling it. I just met with him. I’ve put him at the Hexagon Hotel.”
“You told him about the will?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And is he of sound mind?”
Malick was so much a lawyer he put even me to shame. “In my opinion, yes.”
“That’s too bad. It makes this more difficult. I’ve just met with the other partners. Get him to renounce his claim to the estate.”
I paused by the lobby’s glass doors, surprised. “Pardon?”
“We all agree,” Malick said, as if it were obvious. “We had an emergency meeting, and we’re unanimous. We can’t have an inexperienced unknown taking over everything. Clayton Rorick is obviously the best choice to take over the estate.”
Even though I happened to agree, my defenses went up. “It isn’t our call to make. It’s Dylan King’s call, by the terms of Hank’s will.”
“Of course it is. But he has to be persuaded to give up his claim. At all costs, Madison. And you have to do it soon.”