LITMIR.BIZ

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Roberta know something she didn’t?

      Meeting Georgia’s questioning gaze across the boardroom table, Roberta rolled her green eyes—glamorously defined with black-eyeliner—toward the ceiling while her perfectly manicured nails toyed with a pink cell phone. Clearly Roberta thought the comment nothing more than Kingston’s idea of a joke.

      “I have no plans to retire yet.” Her father smiled, and Georgia’s pulse steadied a little. “The corner office is far more comfortable than any in my home. My daughters will have to someday carry me out in a box.”

      There was more laughter. This time, Georgia joined in, the sound high-pitched to her own ears. Of course, her father had been joking. He wouldn’t give up his position so easily...

      Georgia’s attention switched back to Jay, but from this angle, all she could see was the top of his head.

      A rapid glance along the length of the boardroom table revealed the mood amongst the other members of the Managing Committee. Since the start of the rumors, Georgia had quietly set up one-on-one meetings with each of them to smooth the coming transition. She was satisfied she had them all on her side. Yet, right now, they all appeared mesmerized by her father.

      With one exception...

      At the foot of the table, her youngest sister doodled in a sketchbook, locked in a secret world of Kingdom’s nascent designs. Charis didn’t look like she’d registered a single one of their father’s jokes. No surprise there. Meetings were her idea of hell.

      Georgia knew her youngest sister would not be interested in an appointment to the board...or whether their father planned to retire. As long as Charis had a pencil and paper, she was in her element.

      Again, Georgia tried—in vain—to catch Jay’s attention. She willed him to look up so she could figure out what was going on inside that maddening, quicksilver mind.

      But he remained stubbornly hunched over the documents in front of him, his espresso-dark hair falling over his forehead.

      A wild thought swept into her head.

      Was it possible...?

      Had her father lined Jay up for her job?

      Old insecurities swamped her. But she weighed the evidence. Only minutes ago, she and Jay had been engaged in a teasing exchange by the copier. Jay had even joked about buying her a cup of coffee when she got the appointment—

      No, not when, but if—

      Her breath caught.

      He’d definitely said if she got the appointment...

      Had Jay been trying to warn her?

      She replayed that silly exchange. Despite the teasing, he’d seemed a little terse. She’d attributed it to his battle with the monstrous machine. But had it been guilt?

      He’d said there was something he had to talk to her about. He must’ve already known he was getting the appointment she craved.

      She stared blindly at the pen between her damp fingers as her thoughts whirled chaotically. She was the ideal candidate to replace Norman. She knew it, and so did her father. She’d proven she could do the job over and over in the past couple of years.

      The pen slipped under the pressure of her fingertips. Her father couldn’t possibly have decided to give her job to Jay.

      Could he?

      * * *

      The faster Jay read, the more the words on the page in front of him blurred together. He shook his head, fighting to make sense of the cumbersome legalese.

      What kind of prick had drafted this nonsense?

      He speared one hand into his hair to push it off his brow. It needed a cut. But he hadn’t had time. The past two weeks had flashed past as he’d fought to clear his desk of never-ending fires. And he still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of the quiet niggling rumors about Kingdom on Wall Street.

      He suppressed a groan as his focus on the black print sharpened. Kingston Kinnear had lost his damned mind. And he couldn’t have picked a worse time to go nuts.

      In three days’ time, Jay was going on leave—his first visit home in years. And he’d made a vow to come clean with Georgia before he left. If he weren’t such a goddamned coward he would’ve done it a long time ago.

      Today was already too late...

      He hadn’t expected his orderly work existence to rapidly turn to crap.

      Kingston’s retention of a new firm of attorneys to handle “a special project” had seemed harmless enough. If Jay hadn’t been so focused on fixing every last crisis before going on leave he might have suspected something clandestine was happening. And maybe talked Kingston out of this insane course of action.

      Too late now.

      He shuffled the papers back together into an orderly pile, then linked his hands together on top of it as though holding them down would stop the mayhem from escaping. Then he looked up—straight into the pair of Colorado-sky blue eyes he’d been avoiding.

      Georgia was smiling at him. She lifted an eyebrow in question and his gut sank into the Italian loafers he wore.

      Jay looked toward the head of the table where the cause of all the trouble sat. Kingston placed his palms on the armrests of the chair and pushed himself slowly and deliberately to his feet. It was the only chair with armrests, giving it the appearance of a throne, which, no doubt, was exactly the impression he intended to convey. Finally, he straightened the lapels of his hand-tailored suit jacket with a dramatic touch of showmanship.

      The boardroom went so silent that Jay could hear the whir of the state-of-the-art air-conditioning. At last, Kingston spoke. “While public stockholders own forty-nine percent of Kingdom, I have always enjoyed the comfort of holding a majority interest and I have been considering the future of the company for a while now.”

      Georgia sat straighter. Jay knew she was expecting an appointment to the board today...

      On top of the tower of documents, his hands curled into fists.

      A frisson of electricity zapped around the boardroom. Even Charis had stopped her frenetic sketching and was watching her father intently.

      For the first time, Jay wondered whether Kingston had already secretly begun selling off his private stock—it would explain the recent, unexpected movements in the stock market.

      The old bastard was stringing them all along...

      Or did the youngest Kinnear daughter have any idea of what her father planned? Charis was, after all, the apple of her father’s eye. Jay still hadn’t worked out what Kingston had planned for his youngest daughter. So far, nothing in the documents he’d speed-read had dealt with her fate. But Jay had no doubt that Kingston had control of his youngest daughter’s life finely outlined. He rather suspected that this time even Charis had been kept in the dark.

      The tension in the boardroom had become palpable.

      Georgia chose that moment to speak. “Roberta, Charis and I have always been deeply involved in every facet of the company—we are all heavily invested in Kingdom’s future.”

      What a miserable understatement! Kingston expected his daughters to live and breathe the company. And Georgia, even more than her sisters, had made Kingdom her life. There had been moments when her blinkered commitment to Kingdom had caused Jay to despair.

      It was Charis who put what everyone was thinking into words. “The obvious thing, Daddy, would be to divide your fifty-one percent share equally among the three of us.”

      “That would be the obvious solution,” drawled Roberta.

      Jay braced himself for the firestorm to come.

      Finally, Kingston spoke into the silence. “To do so would fragment the company. If I transferred seventeen percent

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