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He gave her a pained look. “Expanding Siberius’s base isn’t an important priority for us right now. It’s doing fine in the strength areas it currently occupies.”
This was hurting her brain. She put her laptop down and eyed him contemplatively. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we supposed to be selling Leonid on how Siberius will flourish within Grant International? Encouraging him we are the right way to go? He said he had innovative products no one else has. How do we promote those?”
“Every company says they have innovative products,” he bit out impatiently. “I am conscious of not setting unrealistic expectations when anything could happen when the board gets ahold of this deal.”
She frowned. “But of course they’ll support the plan if this is the only way you can get Leonid to sign. They’ll have no choice.”
“That’s an idealistic way to look at it, but the reality is they’ll do what makes business sense. I can only make suggestions. In scenarios like this when we’re acquiring similar resources, the board will likely force us to streamline the two companies into one. It’s doubtful Siberius will be left standing as its former entity.”
“So why are we spending all this time doing a plan?” The words were hardly out of her mouth before it hit her. Harrison had no intention of keeping Siberius intact. He was going to lure Leonid in with this plan and dismantle Siberius when it was done.
Every bone in her body hated the idea. The company had belonged to Leonid’s father. He wanted his legacy preserved. That had been his whole hesitation in signing.
She eyed him. “It’s a bait and switch.”
The impatience in his gaze devolved into a dark storm brewing. “No,” he rejected in a lethally quiet voice. “I made a promise to Leonid to do what I can to see Siberius preserved. It is beyond my or any other CEO’s control to promise him it will remain intact when business realities say it won’t.”
Yet he wasn’t even giving the company a fighting chance with this plan. She lifted her chin. “I see.”
“Francesca...”
She shook her head. This was the part where she needed to stop talking because it got her into trouble. “Let’s keep going,” she said quietly, looking down at her screen. “Where were we?”
“Francesca,” he growled. “This is business. Put the self-righteous look away and be a big girl. You have no idea of the stakes here.”
The “big girl” remark did it for her. She looked up at him, eyes spitting fire. “Dictate to me what you want in this plan and I will do it. But do not ask me to say that this is right.”
“It is right.” His ebony gaze sat on her with furious heat. “This is the law of the jungle. Only the fittest survive.”
“In your world,” she said evenly. “Not in mine.”
“And what would your world have me do? Allow some other predator to snap Siberius up because I’m the one stupid enough to tell Leonid the truth? Not happening.”
“I believe in karma,” Frankie said stubbornly. “I know what a good man Leonid is. He’s putting his trust in you.”
The fury in his eyes channeled into a livid black heat that was so focused, so intense, it scorched her skin. “I know all about karma, Francesca. I know more about it than you will ever want to know in your lifetime. Trust me on that.”
She watched with apprehensive eyes as he got up, paced to the railing and looked out at the fading light of New York. Having him ten feet away allowed her to pull in some air and compose herself. This job meant everything to her; she was proving she could make it on her own. But so did the principles upon which she’d been brought up.
“I’m not trying to be difficult,” she said quietly to his back. “But my father taught me to treasure my ethics at all costs. That if I was ever in a situation that would make it hard for me to sleep at night, maybe I shouldn’t be a part of it.”
He turned around, leaned back against the railing and rested his elbows on it. His anger had shifted into a cold, hard nothingness that was possibly even more disconcerting than the fury.
The chill directed itself her way. “Although my grandfather built Grant Industries, it was my father who had the foresight and brilliance to modernize its methods and transform Grant from a successful but stagnant regional player in the American auto industry to a force to be reckoned with worldwide. He spent every minute of his life at the office, sacrificed everything for the company and eventually it paid off. When I was ten, my father came home one night with a big smile on his face and told us Grant Industries had made the list of the one hundred most profitable companies in America.” He lifted a brow. “Imagine. Coburn and I were only eight and ten—but we got that, we got what that meant.”
She nodded. Wondered why he was telling her this.
“As soon as we finished university, Coburn and I joined the business. It was in our blood just like it was in our father’s. We had the bug. But neither of us ever expected to take on the mantle so soon.”
Because his father had killed himself.
Her insides knotted, a cold, hard ball at the core of her. The skin on his face stretched taut across his aristocratic cheekbones, a blank expression filling his eyes. “One day my father’s usual superhuman working day stretched into two. Then three. He looked like a wreck. He would go into the office, put his engineering teams through crazy all-night sessions, then come home and sleep it off. At first we weren’t too concerned—it wasn’t unlike him to be tunnel-visioned when he was working on a project. But the pattern started getting more and more frequent. More dramatic. One particular night, he came home and he was talking so fast none of us could understand him. We couldn’t get him to rest so we called a doctor. He was diagnosed that night as a manic depressive.”
Her heart went into free fall. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Oh, Harrison.” She went to get up but he held out a hand, staying her.
“His condition got progressively worse as the years went on. The stress of success and the accompanying pressure made the cycles more acute, sent him into longer bouts of mania. My mother had to focus entirely on keeping him well and ensuring his condition was kept under wraps so the press, the shareholders, didn’t catch on.”
To the detriment of her boys’ emotional well-being.
“We thought we had his condition under control after handling it for two decades. Then my father made a deal with Anton Markovic to buy one of his Russian-based companies.”
Anton Markovic? The sadistic oligarch Juliana didn’t like in her house?
For the first time since he’d starting speaking, a flare of emotion moved through his dark gaze. “My father saw the potential in a post-Communist era and knew it would only grow. Buying Markovic’s company was supposed to cement Grant as the most powerful auto parts manufacturer in the world. Except Markovic sold us a false-bottomed company that was on the verge of bankruptcy. Under normal circumstances, Grant would have easily absorbed the hit but we were overexposed at the time, in the midst of leveraging capital for an expansion. As a result, the debt from the deal almost crippled us.”
She tried to absorb all the information he was throwing at her. “Couldn’t you have gone to the courts?”
“We did. His holding company was bankrupt by then.”
She swallowed hard, not sure she wanted to know where the story went after this. The emotion in his eyes became hard to watch. “Coburn and I told him it’d be fine. We’d rebuild ourselves stronger than ever. But the miscue threw him into a depressive state he couldn’t pull himself out of. There was also the stress of his impending race for governor of New York.” His lashes swept down over his cheeks. “My mother left the house for a half hour one day, thinking he was asleep. I came home to find he’d shot himself.”
Oh, my God. Her heart broke into a million pieces. It was public knowledge that Clifford Grant had shot himself at the family residence. But to find your father like that, by yourself? This time she did get up and walked over to him, setting her hand on his bicep.
“I am so sorry, Harrison.”
He looked down at her hand as if it was an intrusive appendage that had crept into his lair and threatened his solitary confinement. She could feel the emotion he declared he didn’t have vibrating through him. Then his eyes hardened until they resembled an exotic, impenetrable rock, polished by the elements he’d endured until there were no cracks, no dents, just icy determination. “I’m not looking for your pity, Francesca. I told you this because I need you at my side with this deal. I need you to understand where I’m coming from. Acquiring Siberius is the final piece in my plan to cut Anton Markovic off at the knees for what he did to my father. The company is valuable to me only because it supplies Markovic with vital instruments.”
Understanding dawned. Suddenly all of it—Harrison, Coburn, the way they both were—it all made sense. Coburn spent his days running from the truth, Harrison pursuing vengeance.
He wanted her on board so he could land this deal and finish Markovic. Collateral damage in Leonid was inconsequential.
