AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I got up to my office on the upper floors and wiped the dust from my desk. I kicked my feet up and made a few calls which totally could’ve been made from home, wandered around the office and distracted a few people, then finally burst into Adrian’s office a little before five in the evening. Adrian’s wife, Juliette, was sitting in his chair with her fist on his tie. It looked like they’d just been kissing. She jerked back in embarrassment when I came in, but he only looked slowly toward me, eyes smoldering with annoyance.
“Bad time?” I asked, taking the chair across from his desk. “Should’ve thought about that before you forced me to come in.”
Juliette got up and smoothed out her dress. I noticed one of her buttons was done up in the wrong order. Damn kids and their raging hormones. At this rate, they’d be popping out another baby any day now, but I suspected neither of them would have a problem with that.
“I’ll give you two a few minutes,” she said.
Juliette Coleton was pretty, a little prissy, and a former bajillionaire heir. Now I guess she was still a bajillionaire because she was married to Adrian, but she was definitely happier than when I’d first met her and she was pretending to be “Jules” to work her way up our company ranks in secret. Mission gloriously failed there.
“What do you want?” Adrian asked.
“You were so worried about me coming in. I’m here. And I hope you have something important for me, because I’ve got something infinitely more fun I could be doing at the moment.”
Adrian was dark haired, tan, and perpetually looked like someone had just shit in his coffee. “We have a problem.”
“When you say ‘we,’ do you mean that in the royal sense, or do I have a problem I don’t know about?”
He folded his hands together, leaning forward on the desk. He gave me that patented Terranova glare. I’d seen that glare melt the bravest of hearts—not to mention a few pairs of panties. But he might as well be my little brother trying to intimidate me. I rolled my head back and gave him a look that I hoped said we could skip the theatrics.
“I’m assuming you remember the mess we caused with Glass Industries two years back?” Adrian asked.
I pursed my lips. “We faked our identities, took positions as board members, advised the leadership to invest in questionable stock options, purged critical information from their databases, annnd… Oh, yeah, we exposed the CEO for stealing money from employees and falsifying financial records and got him thrown in jail. I could list half a dozen other places where we did something similar. What about it?”
Before we were all stupid rich, I was part of a quartet of friends dating back to my high school years. Adrian was the one with a mind for business. He had a way of snatching golden opportunities out of thin air and spinning them into money. Noah was our tech guru. Honestly, the guy was an all-around genius, but he made his own fortune with a tech startup and his know-how was a big part of what let us do the things we did. Adrian’s sister, Jordan, was our infiltrator back in the days of going after Coleton. People really opened up to her, and she’d been our best shot at gathering sensitive information. And me? I was the attractive, charming glue that held it all together.
Until recently, the four of us had been focused on bringing down Juliette’s father, Russ Coleton. He ran one of the most corrupt and powerful corporations in the world. Adrian had a very personal, very legitimate reason to hate Russ Coleton with a violent passion. That was enough for the rest of us to devote ourselves to helping bring Coleton down. Long, interesting story made short? The shit we pulled at Glass Industries was just one rung on the ladder we climbed to screw Russ Coleton.
“Glass Industries…” I tapped my chin. “That was Brandon Glass, right? The asshole with the stupid mustache?”
Adrian nodded.
“But he has a wife who does well, doesn’t he? K.M. Glass Design Studios, right? The fashion thing?”
“Correct. Apparently, his wife has had an axe to grind with us. All I have are whispers so far, but it sounds like she might have some kind of evidence that could be bad for us.”
“Evidence?” I asked.
“Proof that we illegally sabotaged her husband’s business, I’m assuming.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how bad would it be if she had something like that?”
“We broke federal law several times. So felony charges, jail time, fines, sanctions. Anything is on the table.”
“Execution?” I asked. “I’m too handsome to be executed.”
Adrian sighed. “I need you to do what you do. I set up an interview for you. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get you too close to the top with the identity I set up. They apparently have some promising young woman working as Mrs. Glass’ right hand at the moment. I need you to get in there, get close to them, and find out what the hell they have.”
