AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jimmy's a crooked motherfucker who should have been in prison a long time ago. The best thing my father ever did was cut ties with him the day he sent Autumn a picture of his cock when she was sixteen. But he's threatening to sue her for defamation and slander. And I don't have time to juggle one more thing right now.
I'm already up to my eyes in problems. My father was not a good man. He was an even worse businessman. He nearly ran our shipping company, Romano International, into the ground by making shitty business decisions and backdoor deals. The illegal dumping was the worst. God only knows how many gallons of hazardous chemicals he pumped into the oceans.
Before his untimely demise, he hid his crimes by hiring a shady lawyer. Said lawyer's solution to dealing with federal regulators was hiring the Hell's Vipers, an outlaw MC, to strong-arm them into looking the other way. They did a lot of other dirty shit for my father too.
By the time all was said and done, Montoya Investments, Jason "Cash" Montoya's grandfather's company was embroiled in the mess, nearly destroying both companies. Cash, the President of our MC, and I have been picking up the pieces ever since. Romano International and Montoya Investments are slowly recovering under our leadership. But it's been a goddamn nightmare for both of us.
Case in point: the Hell's Vipers. One of the first things we did when we found out about my father's arrangement with them was to end it. No more shady deals, no more dirty deeds…no more money changing hands. They're pissed about it.
A couple months ago, they came after Cash's wife, Hadley. Except they're fucking morons. Hadley has a twin sister. I'm guessing whoever the Vipers sent didn't know that though. They picked the wrong twin, thinking they got Cash's wife. Kyra ended up with some bumps and bruises, but was otherwise okay, thank God.
We rallied the troops and tightened security, ready for whatever bullshit they decided to pull next…only for them to go strangely quiet. Ordinarily, this would be a good thing, but I'm not convinced it is. As we recently learned, the Hell's Vipers are in bed with the Satan's Savages, the outlaw MC who murdered Tate "Hands" Grimes's sister-in-law and nearly killed an innocent baby. Had Tate's sister-in-law not managed to get her baby out, the little girl would have died.
I don't like that the Savages are connected to the Vipers. I don't like that the Vipers have been so quiet. Quite frankly, I don't fucking like any of it. Period. I know the police and feds are working to bring the Savages and the Vipers down, but until they do, there's nothing stopping the Vipers from coming for us. Silence isn't always golden. Sometimes, it's a precursor to the storm.
And that's what fucking worries me.
They're up to something. I'd very much like to know what.
"Look," Autumn huffs. "It's not like I knew anyone was filming. And he's the one who called me a stuck-up bitch first." She scowls at nothing, her cocoa-colored eyes snapping fire. "As if I owe him common courtesy after he sent me that dick pic and scarred me for life. The man is delusional!"
"He is delusional," I agree, clenching my hands into fists beneath the desk at the reminder of the picture Jimmy sent her. I still want to kill the motherfucker for that. He's lucky I was working on my MBA out of state when it happened. They'd still be fishing pieces of him out of the Gulf if I had been here.
Instead, my father took everything and left him bankrupt. I'm not sure if he did it for Autumn or if he simply used the situation to squeeze Jimmy out, but I don't tell her that. She deserves at least one decent memory of the man who raised us. God knows, there aren't many of those.
Which is the other reason I want her back here. Silver Spoon Falls always felt more like a prison to my sister than a home. It's full of bad memories she's been running from for far too long. I don't want her to spend the rest of her life trying to outrun our father's ghost. It's time for her to come home and put him to rest once and for all. She'll never be truly happy until she does.
"I'll make you a deal," I say, watching her over my massive desk. Like usual, it's covered in stacks of paperwork. It's going to take a decade to go through it all, but I'm meticulously working my way through every record we have, trying to restore the company to what it should have been all along. That's going to take years too.
I've been able to keep most of my father's misdeeds from being made public, but I'm certainly not fucking doing it to protect his memory. That's tarnished beyond repair. My only concern is the thousands of people who work for me. Romano International is multi-national. We have offices in eight different nations with thousands of employees to protect. I won't allow them to suffer because of what my father did. He put them through enough when he was alive.
"What deal?" Autumn eyes me suspiciously, her arms crossed, and lips pursed like she thinks I'm up to something. I see the curiosity in her eyes though. My baby sister can't resist a good negotiation, especially if it means getting something she wants. She rarely asks for much.
"If you'll agree to come home for one year, I'll let you rewrite our environmental protection policies," I say. Her degree is in environmental science. It's her passion. Before our father died, it was the biggest source of contention between them. She hated that he flouted the rules so flagrantly. He hated that she did everything she could to make him pay the price. She's been arrested twice for protesting company policies.
"You're serious," she says after a minute.
"Have I ever lied to you?"
"Um, yes!" she cries. "You told me that spiders are more scared of me than I am of them, which is so not true. And then you told me that the guy at the haunted house wasn't going to chase me with a chainsaw. I nearly died, by the way. And let's not forget the time you told me that Smokey ran away."
I grimace. "I forgot about Smokey."
"I didn't," she sniffs. "Goldfish don't even have legs, Andreas."
"I panicked," I say with a shrug. "I thought it was better than telling you the cat ate him."
Her eyes grow wide with horror. "Tobiasatehim?"
"Shit," I mutter, raking a hand through my hair. I forgot she didn't know that part.
"All this time I thought you accidentally flushed him down the toilet or he jumped out of the bowl or something," she says with a shudder. "Instead, your cat was a murderer."
I decide not to remind her that Tobias was her cat. Call me crazy, but I don't think it'll win me any points here. I'm already skating on thin ice with her. If I push much harder, she'll be on the first flight back to California.
"My point," I say instead, trying to get us back on track before I manage to taint more of her childhood memories or push her out the door, "is that I finally have a chance to run this company the right way. But I need your help to do it. Give me one year, and you can write whatever policies you want to write when it comes to environmental protection. No matter what it costs, I'll make sure we implement and follow them."
"You've always loved this company," she says.
