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“Except for the project in Ector County.” He lathered shampoo in his hair as if I weren’t even there.
“How did we go from me having unfiltered access to bank accounts to now I’ve misused company funds? Was I or was I not supposed to find us oil?”
This had gone too far. I didn’t know why the accounting was haywire on my part. I did my job, and I did it well.
“You weren’t supposed to take us under.”
“Me?” He squirted body wash into his palm. I knocked the bottle out of his hand. It clattered to the stone floor between us. “I made us the money. You were in charge of it.”
Ice-cold eyes met mine. “I appreciate you clarifying our roles. Any others you care to tell me about?”
His tone gave me pause. Were we talking about something else entirely now?
“That about sums it up,” I said scathingly. “Mark my words. I did not screw with Carter Energy.”
I slammed the shower door.
“The lady doth protest too much,” he called.
“Nobody’s ever accused me of being a lady.”
A stringof curses left my mouth as I marched down the hall in search of my brother. What in God’s name had caused Easton to jump ship and stop believing in me? We were a team.Fuck.
“Stone Jacobs. You unlock those doors to your spare bedrooms this instant,” I said when I entered the kitchen.
“Stone ran upstairs.” Muriella lifted a kettle from the stove.
In my haze of anger, I hadn’t even bothered to see if he was in the room. “Then you can unlock them. I know there are extra beds in there. This funny business has gone on long enough.”
A frown line marred her forehead. She searched in a drawer until she found whatever she was looking for. In the doorway, she looked back at me. “Are you coming?”
She opened the first of the closed doors and the lights came on automatically. Drop cloths covered the floor. Paint buckets, trays, and brushes were stacked in the center next to a ladder. There wasn’t a speck of furniture in sight.
“Everybody will be here tomorrow,” I pointed out, some of the hot air knocked out of me.
“I know that,” she snapped. She let out a long sigh. “Sorry. I think I might have undertaken a bit too much.”
“What’s in the other room?”
“Are you sure you want to see?”
When she revealed the other bedroom, it was full of clothes. They were stuffed on racks along the wall and piled in heaps everywhere.
“You running a department store out of here I don’t know about?” I asked, a little overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of clothing. My sister-in-law was fashionable, but this took the term clothes horse to a new level.
“They’re donations. For Paths of Purpose.”
“What’s that?” I fingered a bag from Saks Fifth Avenue.
“A women and children’s shelter. They recently moved to a new facility, so I was storing this until they were ready for it.” She winced when she took in the room again. “They’re going to have to be now.”
“This is designer,” I said, noting the bags of name brands.
“Some of it is. We have some amazingly generous donors.” Genuine pride etched her face.
“The Jacobs boys will help you take this to them when they get here,” I volunteered.
“I’m sure they would, but we’ve made arrangements to move it before they arrive. If you have time to drop by you’ll be amazed to see how they’ve utilized the space.”
