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“Because he says yes.” Sam heard the edge in his own voice and didn’t bother to tone it down. Fuck this shit. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat this bullshit. “To everything. Every idea my father ever had, good or terrible, Henry was the first one nodding. That’s the whole job. That’s the entire skill set.”
“I’m not sure how to respond to that.”
“You can be as disgusted as I am. I won’t hold it against you.” He tapped his pen against the notebook in front of him. “Henry thinks this company owes him. The family owes him. Because he spent his whole life approving and applauding whatever my dad put in front of him, and in his mind that’s loyalty, and loyalty should have bought him more than it did.”
“And that’s all right with you?”
“No.” Sam didn’t even hesitate with his denial. “But I have bigger fish to fry this week than Henry’s wounded feelings. I’ll deal with him eventually.”
He didn’t say the other thing, the thing that had been sitting at the back of his mind since the parking garage. Henry had been underfoot all week. Hovering outside meetings. Turning up in the executive hall with no reason to be there, asking Tracy questions, asking Sam how the audits were going in a voice that tried too hard to sound bored. Sam had chalked it up to the obvious.
A careless man watching a new boss start turning over the books had every reason to sweat. In Sam’s opinion, Henry should be worried as hell now.
“In the meantime,” he said, “I’m going to keep digging into these. And I could use the help, if you’re offering.”
“I’m offering.” She walked back into his office, the file folder in one hand and a pice of paper in the other. “Okay. So look at this one.”
“According to this contract, last spring we bought twenty new desks. Twenty desks, twenty chairs, a dozen bookcases, and five conference tables. Delivered and paid.”
“That’s a lot of furniture.”
“It’s a lot of furniture.” She looked up. “Feel like taking a walk and finding it?”
Sam considered it briefly but shook his head. Even as the son of the CEO, he’d seen what his presence in certain departments could do. There would be rumors about layoffs and downsizing before close of business.
“If I walk the floors counting chairs, people panic. The new CEO going room to room the same week the audits started? Within hours, there’d be a rumor we’re shutting down.”
“But nobody thinks twice about the new assistant getting the lay of the place.” She was already standing, tucking the file under her arm. “I can wander anywhere. I’m supposed to be learning where everything is.”
“Exactly.”
“Of course I’ll do it.” She paused in the doorway. “I can go now, if you like.”
“Go now.”
She went. Sam pulled the furniture contract back in front of him and read it again. The neat columns, the tidy total, the confident signature at the bottom that he’d seen a thousand times without ever once looking at it.
He’d need to keep Henry under a much more watchful eye.
Chapter
Ten
Bless her, Frankie never bothered with a hello. As a busy tennis star on the circuit, she simply hadn’t had the time. Now that she did, she still hadn’t changed, which only made Sam love her all the more. His twin was one of the constants in his life, always there and always unabashedly herself.
“He’s out of the ICU,” she said the second Sam picked up. “And he’s asking for you.”
Sam set his pen down and took in the request. It was one he hadn’t expected. At least…not yet.
“For me.”
“For you. Not Zack.” She let that sit because she knew what it meant as well as he did. In their family, only the eldest son mattered. The rest of them didn’t. Unless Joel Winslow needed something, of course. “He knows, Sam. That you’re running the company. That Leigh’s dead. All of it.”
“How?”
“Kim told him.” Frankie’s voice went flat with the particular disgust she saved for their stepmother. “She didn’t want to, for whatever that’s worth. But you know Kim. Dad looked at her and asked her straight out what was going on, and she folded. She always folds.”
“She couldn’t stand up to him if her life depended on it,” Sam said.
