Page 97 of The Merger
“Are you okay?” I asked him. More than anyone else I know how badly he wanted to save our sister.
He cleared his throat. “Not really, but it had to be done.”
The door opened and thumped against him. He stepped back, prepared to go another round with our sister, but Jana stepped in.
“Why did I just pass a very pissed-off Waverly on my way up here?” she asked.
“It seems Malcolm knocked her up, and she’s demanding we get him out of jail for her,” Beck summarized.
“Are you sure it’s his?” she asked.
Colt laughed, and he sounded on the verge of hysterics. “Fuck, how did I let her become that?”
Beck slapped him on the back. “Let yourself off the hook. She’s your sister, not your kid. Your daughter turned out all right. She’s got much better taste in men than Waverly.”
“Yeah, fantastic. The daughter I didn’t know about until her fuckhead of a baby daddy accused me of having an affair with her turned out just fine,” Colt grumbled.
Beck fought a smirk. “Yeah, sorry about that. I learned my lesson, believe me. I swear to believe any future children are mine without a paternity test.”
“Do you have news?” I asked Jana before Beck started making comments guaranteed to piss him off completely.
It was obvious that Beck was trying to distract him from dealing with the full weight of cutting Waverly out of his life, but it would only delay the inevitable. Some relationships couldn’t be saved.
“Diamonds,” she answered me. “Lots of diamonds. They don’t have serial numbers, so they’ll be hard to track down. The most likely reason is because they’re black market stones. After all the scrutiny from the launch of the vodka it seems he stopped using the Cayman accounts. The market value of the stones, after a rough estimate, seems to be a close match to the amounts in Malcolm’s records minus the spending we’ve been able to track.”
“Why was he stockpiling so much money?” Stryker asked the question everyone wanted to know.
There was a knock on the door before Evie pushed it open. “The door was cracked,” she said as she let herself in. “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. Did you know the hallway amplifies sound?”
“You know why my father was stockpiling money?” Jana asked surprised.
“I finally got a hold of Chad. He’s still disgusting, by the way.”
Gracie bounced in her arms, and she stopped talking long enough to pull a chubby fist out of her hair.
“Da-da, da-da,” Gracie demanded, reaching for her daddy.
Beck lifted her out of her mom’s arms and snuggled her to his chest. My ovaries melted, and I hoped for the dozenth time I was going to get a positive pregnancy test. There was just something about seeing a strong man holding a baby.
“Wouldn’t you rather come to grandpa?” Colter asked Gracie.
She smiled a mostly gummy smile, but then snuggled closer to her daddy.
Beck and Colter continued to silently argue over who got to hold the baby, while the rest of us refocused on what Evie had to tell us.
“If y’all are done watching two grown men argue over who gets to hold the baby, I’ll tell you what Chad said.”
Beck took a couple of steps back and bounced his daughter. Colt pouted, but rejoined the rest of us.
“What I never really understood was the timing of Chad stepping in to take over your position,” Evie said to Jana.
Jana lifted one shoulder. “My father is a misogynist. I really didn’t examine his motives too hard.”
“But see, you had that position for years and it wasn’t a problem. Not until after he made a play for Anderson Global and lost,” Evie theorized.
“What epiphany did Chad inspire?” Jana asked.
“Basically, he had been running all the ideas by your father from the beginning. The most interesting thing I learned was that he was originally planning to follow the suggestions you had been making, but it was your father who changed Chad’s mind and made him think that it was better to try and go viral with influencers rather than utilize traditional marketing tactics. Don’t you see? Your father is the one who tanked the launch,” Evie explained.