Czytaj książkę: «A Tangled Engagement»

One

Georgia Kinnear could barely contain her excitement.

Her father commanded the head of the long oval table that dominated the Kingdom International boardroom, a position that granted him an unobstructed view of all present for the Managing Committee’s weekly meeting.

Norman Newman and Jimmy Browne had been her father’s yes-men for almost three decades—more than Georgia’s entire lifetime. Both men served as directors on the board of the luxury goods company, but gossip had it that they’d decided to retire and would not be reappointed at the annual general meeting later today. Not that her father had breathed a word. Showing his hand had never been Kingston Kinnear’s style.

If the rumors that had been swirling around Kingdom’s cutting rooms and stores all week were true, the annual general meeting due to start in an hour was going to change her life forever...

It was about time!

Her father glared down at his watch. “Where’s Jay?”

Jay Black was the original corporate crusader—never late, always prepared, always dangerously well-informed. A rival to respect. Georgia was thankful that no one appeared to have noticed the tension and constant skirmishes she had with him. By unspoken agreement, they both preferred to keep it that way. Their private war. Yet, despite her wariness toward him, taking the opportunity to put the knife in behind his back didn’t feel right.

“The copier jammed—he’ll be here any moment,” she told her father, and tried not to think about how good Jay had smelled when she’d crouched beside him, trying to fix the troublesome machine. Like Central Park on a sunny spring day—all green and woody.

Her father puffed, and Georgia tensed, steeling herself for an outburst.

“That thing has been giving problems all day. I’ll get a technician to check it,” Marcia Hall said calmly, and her father stopped huffing.

“Thank you.” Georgia smiled across at her father’s PA of more than two decades. The woman was a saint. Marcia knew exactly how to placate her irascible father, a skill Georgia had never acquired—despite growing up with him and working alongside him since leaving school.

Georgia wished Jay would hurry up.

In an attempt to steady herself, she focused on the larger-than-life photos of celebrities along the wood-paneled walls. Each wore—or carried—Kingdom goods. Totes. Clutches. Coats. Scarves. Gloves. Umbrellas. And, of course, the epochal luggage Kingdom was famous for. Each image was emblazoned with the legendary advertising slogan: “My Kingdom. Anytime. Anywhere.”

Her father cleared his throat, and the room fell silent. “We’ll start without Jay.”

Switching her attention to her father, Georgia said, “Uh, no, let’s wait—”

He quelled her interruption with a sharp sideways cutting gesture of his right hand, leaned back in the padded high-backed leather chair and rested his elbows on the armrests.

Her father took his time studying his audience, and Georgia’s nerves stretched tighter than a pair of too-short garters. Her left hand trembled a little, and to occupy herself, she smoothed the yellow legal pad on the table in front of her and picked up her Montblanc pen, one of her most treasured possessions.

Norman Newman, the soon-to-be-gone Chief Operating Officer, was seated on Georgia’s left, sandwiched between her and her father.

Chief Operating Officer...

She savored the sound of his title. By the end of today, it would be hers.

Together with her sisters, Roberta and Charis, Georgia already sat on the Managing Committee that was responsible for the day-to-day management of the company. An appointment to the Board of Directors would launch her career into the stratosphere. And then she’d join the inner sanctum of the Financial Committee—the ultra-secret FinCo—where all Kingdom International’s real decision-making happened.

It was impossible to sit still.

She couldn’t wait for her and Roberta to be appointed to the board, couldn’t wait to implement the ideas they’d been talking about for years. New stores. New design directions. New global markets. Ideas their father—backed up by his pair of yes-men—had resisted. But that would change now...with the end of Jimmy and Norman’s reign.

Kingston would finally have to listen to his two daughters...

Surreptitiously, she stuck her hands under the edge of the table and wiped her suddenly sticky palms down her skirt.

Where was Jay? The fashion house’s financial analyst had already been appointed to the secret FinCo by her father, which had caused Georgia many sleepless nights. It was time for him to witness her triumph.

The boardroom door opened.

At last!

Even her father turned his head to watch him enter. Tall. Perfectly proportioned and elegant in a dark business suit, Jay moved with easy grace.

Georgia flashed him a wide smile. With his arrival, her over-stretched nerves eased a little. But instead of his customary taunting grin, Jay didn’t spare her a glance; his dark head remained bent, his attention fixed on the sheaf of papers in his hand.

“You all know that I am not getting any younger,” her father was saying, “but I’ve always been determined to give Methuselah a run for his money.”

A ripple of laughter echoed around the table.

What was this? Georgia went still. Did her father also plan to announce his own retirement today? It was her dream to follow in her father’s footsteps, her plan to one day be President and Chief Executive Officer of Kingdom International. But she’d never expected the opportunity to come so soon.

Too soon.

Even she knew that. He couldn’t retire. Not today. She’d never be appointed...

She rapidly speculated about who he’d lined up to take his place.

Jay had seated himself in the empty chair to her father’s left. She shot him a questioning look across the expanse of polished cherry wood. As the luxury fashion house’s financial analyst, Jay was in prime position to have the best insight into her father’s convoluted thought process—something that constantly raised disquieting emotions in her.

But Jay’s attention was fixed on the stack of papers he’d set down on the table in front of him. Somewhere in that pile were documents that were about to transform her life forever. Yet, suddenly Georgia couldn’t stop wondering what else might be in there.

One of her father’s infamous surprises?

Did 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 to each of you, it would leave Kingdom extremely vulnerable to takeover.”

So Kingston had heard the same rumors he’d been hearing—and hadn’t mentioned a word. The first rumblings had surfaced a couple of months ago, but Jay’s own investigations hadn’t turned anything up. The market had settled down. Then this past week, the stocks had fluctuated, and yesterday the share price had been especially erratic.

“Not if we stood together—we’d still hold the controlling interest.” Georgia’s knuckles were white as she clutched the pen like a lifeline. Jay discovered that his own hands were clenched just as tightly.

“When have the three of you ever stood together?” scoffed her father.

At the other end of the table, Charis dropped her pencil, and the sound was loud in the large boardroom. “Daddy—”

“So what do you intend to do?” Roberta challenged the old tyrant, talking straight over her sister. “Give everything to Charis?”

“I have three daughters—I must take care of each,” Kingston said with breathtaking sanctimony. Jay knew the wily old codger had never done anything that didn’t serve Kingdom—and himself—best. “But naturally, I will reward my most loyal daughter.”

“Don’t you mean your favorite daughter?” The edge to Roberta’s voice was diamond-hard.

Across the table, the gold pen fell from Georgia’s fingers with a thud. “My loyalty to you is beyond doubt.” The glitter of hurt in her eyes caused Jay to freeze. “I put in eighty-hour work weeks—heck, I don’t have a life outside of these walls. I haven’t had a vacation in over two years.”

“That’s your choice.” Kingston shrugged away her plea.

Georgia’s lips parted, but she must’ve thought better of what she’d intended to say. Eyes downcast, she picked up the pen and capped it, and then set it down on the legal pad in front of her.

“You have been unusually silent, Charis. What do you have to say, honey?” Kingston’s chilly eyes defrosted as they rested on his youngest daughter.

Charis raised her chin and faced her father down across the length of the table. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” A freeze returned to the blue eyes so disconcertingly like Georgia’s in color. “You will be more enthusiastic shortly, my daughter.”

Jay felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle as, taking his time, Kingston’s gaze rested on each of his three daughters in turn. “The incentive will be straightforward,” he announced. “Whoever proves their loyalty to me first will receive twenty-six percent of the total Kingdom stock—over half my share—and that should be a big enough block to give real power. The other two of you will split the remaining twenty-five percent.”

Murmurs broke out around the table. But the three sisters sat like stone.

Jay couldn’t bring himself to confront the bruised hurt in Georgia’s eyes. And he knew Kingston had barely gotten started...

Kingston should not have been permitted to torment his daughters in such a cat-and-mouse fashion. Jay forced his hands to relax, smoothing over the stack of papers that contained untold chaos.

“Before you ask, your father has devised a way for each of you to prove your loyalty.” He spoke without inflection, not allowing his fury to boil over. “He has a plan.”