Page 28 of Love In Hiding

“If you’re asking if we can legally do it,” Spencer said. “The answer is yes. West Carlisle owns half this company and we are here at his order. I’d advise you to do as Ms. Westerly has requested.”

She didn’t do that great of a job hiding her annoyance that Bob only moved once Spencer spoke.

This was going to be a long couple of days.

“I had it covered,” she whispered to him when Bob walked out ahead of them.

“He asked a legal question and I answered. That’s my job,” he said, his voice more firm than it’d been but not snappy like hers. She didn’t think he even had it in him to raise his voice.

She sighed. “This is a nightmare.”

“You’re making it that way,” he whispered back. “The guy you need to take it up with isn’t here. The ones that are don’t know what is going on.”

“Meaning dial it back for them?”

“Would you want to be talked to like that if you were clueless?”

“Bob isn’t clueless,” she said.

“Don’t kid yourself. He knows what he’s told and does about the same. Let him tell you what he’s good at and you’ll get more.”

“Oh, so letting the little lady see how the machines run?”

“London. I get it. We aren’t here long and the drive wasn’t that great. Neither is this smell. When Belinda gets here, hopefully she can provide more insight.”

She hoped because the last thing she wanted to do was return here again and have this be a completely wasted trip.

“One can hope,” she said, moving out onto the floor where Bob was talking with others.

“Let’s start outside,” Bob said. “The lobster boats come in daily, sometimes multiple times a day. We purchase what is caught, but there are standards to it.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. This was the information she needed. “Perfect. Can you let me know the standards that you require for purchase?”

While they walked to the docks where the boats came in, Bob explained that he was the one who inspected the catches. “Around these parts a lobsterman knows to only keep the lobsters over a certain weight and throws back the egg-bearing females to keep more coming.”

She got a history on that, glad it was being recorded because it was all new information for her.

After ten minutes, they returned to the building where Bob walked them through the daily process to get the lobster out the door and distributed across the US.

Belinda came in shortly after, got reports run and sent to them and spent another hour going over concerns that she hadn’t been aware of.

When London and Spencer were left alone, she said, “I can see the biggest problem already.”

“The man left in charge who doesn’t seem to do much.”

“Exactly and Belinda speaks so highly of him as being like family,” she said.

“That’s not our concern. When West gets these reports, it will be a conversation for him and Belinda.”

She smiled. “I’m not sure if West actually has those conversations himself.”

At least she didn’t think so. He had too many ventures to deal with them all. That was why he had teams and staff.

“That’s not my understanding,” he said. “Not for an operation this large and that big of a percentage at stake. West pumped a lot of money into the place to get it up to modern times and worked on the distribution.”

“Which has some issues also.”

From the data she had already, she knew shipping times were lagging, with some shipments missed completely because trucks arrived and had to wait and couldn’t get back on the road fast enough.