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It had. Now he had to make them right. Take a page from his wife’s courage and say the words he’d sworn he’d never say again.
Harrison arrived in the foyer, fresh off a plane from Iowa, where he’d been campaigning. His face was just this side of haggard as he bent and kissed his wife. It was a hard, possessive kiss that spoke to the bond they shared.
The bittersweet feeling he’d been experiencing a lot lately grabbed at his heart. His brother was a different person from the hard, jaded man he’d come to know since his father’s death. Frankie had made him a better man.
He suspected his wife was doing the same for him.
Harrison dropped his briefcase by Frankie’s desk and walked into his office. “You look like hell. When’s the last time you slept?”
“Probably around the same time you did.”
A wry smile twisted his brother’s face. “You got a plan of attack?”
“Total and complete surrender,” Coburn said grimly. “You’d better hope it works so you can keep glad-handing the crowds.”
“It will work. The times have changed. It’s no longer enough to batten down the hatches and hope the public has a short memory. The potential repercussions of not taking full responsibility are too great a risk.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Why haven’t they figured that out by now, then?”
“Because it’s their job to hold you accountable. Make you see things from all angles. Stand your ground. They’ll come around.”
“Says the man who threatened me with a mass revolt a few weeks ago.”
Harrison smiled. “That was before you picked this up, stamped yourself all over it and made a bold, courageous statement that will define you going forward.” He rested his dark, fathomless gaze on him. “You’re doing this with a hell of a lot more guts than I would have, Coburn. It’s the kind of thing that either tears a man apart or shows what he’s made of. You are doing the latter.”
Something shifted inside him, a part of him he hadn’t allowed himself to feel for a decade. “What do you think he would have done?”
He didn’t have to say whom he was referring to. Harrison knew, because his father was a ghost always hovering on the fringes, a complex icon whose brilliance had both haunted and inspired them in equal parts.
“He would have done what I would have,” his brother said flatly. “He would have sought to minimize the damage to this company. And it would have been wrong. You have a perspective that’s bigger than both of us, Coburn. Why do you think he struggled to understand you so much? He didn’t get your humanity, your ability to see the life picture.”
Because they had been polar opposites. A dull ache penetrated the protective armor he’d built around himself. “That was hard.”
His brother’s gaze softened. “It made you aspire to greatness. It made you need to be better than the rest. It led you to the right decision today. But now you have to let it go, just like you said I needed to. Pretending you don’t care isn’t going to release you. Following your destiny is. Prove him wrong.”
His fingers tightened around the armrests of the chair. He wished he didn’t have to prove himself to a ghost. Wished he’d been given the same trust his brother had from the beginning. But you couldn’t talk to a phantom. You had to banish it instead.
Frankie stuck her head in his office. “Nieman’s here.”
He nodded and stood up. He had always taken his own path. This shouldn’t be any different. Except it was. This time it was personal. It was about doing what was right. It was about saving his hundred-year-old legacy.
* * *
The venue for the annual Viennese Chamber of Commerce ball was the exquisite Great Hall in Lower Manhattan, a New York City landmark considered to be an Italian neo-Renaissance masterpiece. Designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris and completed in 1921, the space featured sixty-five-foot-high ceilings, soaring marble columns, magnificent inlaid floors and murals painted by Ezra Winter.
Diana might have been enjoying herself for once, amid her and Coburn’s insane social schedule, if it wasn’t for her husband’s volatile mood. The venue was utterly spectacular, the music from the orchestra excellent and her husband undeniably striking in his black tuxedo. Instead, she was worrying about him. He had come home from his board meeting tense and edgy, the weight of the world on his shoulders, utterly preoccupied to anything and everything around him.
She would have insisted they skip the fund-raiser if an important customer of Grant’s hadn’t been in attendance. Instead, she put on her most striking ankle-length gown in midnight blue and focused on being a light foil to her husband’s dark, intense focus as they networked their way through predinner cocktails.
