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And unbeknownst to him, I did now.
Max had so much money, I wasn’t sure we’d ever be able to spend it. Not in a lifetime, not if we bought a thousand homes, or gave it away, because even if we did give it away, the next day, more money would have accrued from his investments.
He was like the goose who’d laid the golden egg, and that baby just kept on laying them.
Derek eyed me a second, and I knew he knew what Max had done.
There was concern in his face even as he hustled me out of the way, taking Nida’s attention off me and onto him. He greeted him with a smile that could only be considered sharkish, and I watched as, focus snatched by something more interesting than a pregnant blimp, Nida was guided into Max’s office.
Derek usually shut the door when we had meetings. I was amused to note he hadn’t this time.
Max wanted me to hear Nida’s annihilation. And though I’d moved on in the past few months, a part of me never could. The bloodthirsty part that had reared her head when she’d discovered she was pregnant and knew she was a tiger when it came down to protecting her cub, well, that part wanted vengeance.
Karma was about to hit Martin Nida square in the jaw, and karma’s name?
It was Max Greene.
Despite my need for revenge, my legs were shaky as I slumped back into the desk chair.
It amused me that, even though I was now Jessica Greene, I still worked for the corporation as a temp. I think Max got a kick out of it too. Telling me that we could work through his boss and secretary fantasies at a later date, because technically, I wasn’t his employee.
Technically.
The man was king of them.
The perks of being Jessica Greene?
My desk chair cost the equivalent of my monthly salary. A gift Max had insisted on giving me when we’d learned I was pregnant.
It hadn’t been worth four months of morning sickness though. Jeez. I had to be the only woman who could seriously lose weight when she was pregnant, then blow up like a balloon in the third trimester.
Like a reminder, I pressed my hand to my belly and felt the stirrings rumbling inside. It was a comfort as, ear pricked, I finally heard the men get over the usual bullshit greetings. Max was shit at small talk so even though Derek was technically only his PA, he had a habit of handling the start of meetings. Smoothing over things, making things nice and neat before they got down to business.
“I’m grateful you could fit me in, Max. I wanted to discuss the next stages of the merger.”
The merger? We’d finalized one last week, I knew that, and Max had already set Derek to task… Avalon had bought it with the full intention of dismantling it. Piece by piece.
My eyes widened at the realization.
Especially as it clicked that Martin Nida was the President of Omacorp… a very large, flourishing publishing company.
Had Max bought that just on a whim? For me?
I knew in business he was a mean SOB. Max had a habit of buying businesses just to get access to their tech patents, and once he had those, he had zero problems in doing away with the company. It always amused me though because the employees? Yeah, they always found work because Max had ways of shuffling them into other Avalon-owned companies. But the presidents and the VPs? The executives? Yeah, they were always shoved out into the cold.
The law firm he’d told me about, the one with Derek’s girlfriend? He used them a lot to finagle his way through the legal minefield that came hand in hand with untying meaty contracts like executives usually had.
Something he was about to do with Martin Nida, I realized.
Dismantling his contract, wrecking it, making it so he’d have to go without his bonuses, without his umbrella payouts.
It wouldn’t break him, but it would hurt his reputation.
Derek had once told me that executives who worked in companies Avalon had taken over rarely found jobs in the same sector, and never again at the same level. How that was so, I didn’t know, but Max had ways… He was like a job hitman. Stealing work only from the rich and giving it to people who weren’t a part of the old boys’ network.
Martin Nida was about to be ruined.
He wouldn’t be destroyed financially; that I knew. Not unless he’d been reckless with his money. But he’d lose a lot. He’d worked his way up from VP to President in just under three years since that one day he’d changed my life… all of that was about to be hit by the wrecking ball that was my man.
