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Prologue
“Do you know what’s going on?”
Royce Kennedy looked at his sister, Elise, as she attacked him when he walked into their family’s office building. Elise worked in the back, not up front. He hated when she all but mauled him trying to get answers the way she’d been doing since they were kids.
“You know the same thing I do,” he said. “We got the same group text.”
He started to walk past her toward his office, which was next to his father’s. “Slow down,” Elise said. “And why are you so grouchy?”
He turned and looked at her. “Unlike you who gets to sit in the air conditioning, I’m outside sweating my balls off in the heat. I’m down three guys today and we are on a deadline, as you so often remind me.”
“Awwww,” Elise said, following him as he continued down the hall. “Poor baby had to get his hands dirty rather than bark orders and tell people what to do.”
He turned and looked at the smirk on his sister’s face. “Beat it, brat. I’ve got fifteen minutes before we meet and I need a damn shower.”
“I guess I never figured out how handy that shower would come in when you insisted it be put in the bathroom between your and Dad’s offices,” Elise said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Pampered princess sits at her desk and looks at papers and tells us what to do without actually doing the work. The rest of us don’t want to sit in dirty sweaty clothes any more than we have to.”
He shut his office door in his sister’s face to her laughter. They always talked like that to each other. For the past almost two decades it’d been just his father and the two kids. Their mother didn’t get the life she thought she was going to and decided to find someone else to give it to her.
He and his sister had fought to stay with their father and not their mother. They were of an age where their voices were heard and their mother was just as happy to only see them every other weekend. When she wasn’t trying to find a guy to give her what she wanted.
Royce walked over to one of the cabinets in his office where he kept a change of clothes. He didn’t often need to shower here, but there were times he’d come from a site and be a mess from the dust and dirt blowing around and then have a client meeting and didn’t want to show up looking like he walked out of a dust storm.
Most probably wouldn’t care all that much. They owned a construction company, so it came with the territory.
Maybe it was just one of those things his mother used to bitch about with his father. That his father came home dirty and stinking and she’d comment about it. Not that his mother ever bitched about the money they had. Never that.
Just that his father didn’t sit behind a desk for it but worked with his hands.
At least back then. In the past three years though, since his father’s heart attack, he spent more time in the office with Elise and managing projects or talking with clients, putting Royce on the site and doing the hard work. Like today.
Once he was in the bathroom, he locked the connecting door to his father’s office so that he could shower and get in the conference room on time. When Richard Kennedy called a meeting you got there when you were told.
“You made it,” Elise said to him when he walked into the conference room down the hall. If it was just the three of them he wasn’t sure why they couldn’t meet in his father’s office. “And you smell much better.”
“Bite me,” he said. He lifted his hand and pushed his fingers through his damp hair that he’d towel dried fast.
“You’re both here,” his father said coming in. All six foot three inches of man that didn’t have the presence that he had years ago. His father lost a lot of strength and muscle after his heart attack and recovery. He was pretty sure his father lost a lot of his confidence too, but it was not something they ever talked about.
“After Royce showered. He stunk,” Elise said.
His father looked at his sister and frowned. Royce wondered if it was a memory of the words their mother used to say.
“You’d stink too if you were outside working construction in ninety-degree weather. Do you want to switch with your brother for a week?”
Elise laughed. “I would break a nail. No, thank you. I love you both just the same though.”
His father laughed. He grinned and shook his head. His father would never get mad at Elise, he was sure, because she stuck by his side. She’d always been a daddy’s girl.
“You might not love me when I’m done talking,” her father said. “But I’ve got big news to share. It’s going to put a crazy amount of work on us, but it will pay off in the end.”
“You made a decision without us?” Elise asked.
“I still own more of the company than you two, remember that,” his father said.
When his father had his heart attack, he gave up fifty percent of the company, giving Elise and Royce each twenty-five percent, his father retaining half. His father had enough to decide on his own knowing that they’d never both go against him.
