Page 32 of Built to Last

“Just remember what’s at stake,” Jeremiah says cryptically as the elevator doors open.

“You do the same, brother,” Reid replies as Jeremiah leads Aggie onto the elevator and we’re left alone. He turns my way. “Seriously? I shamed you for your boots? You couldn’t come up with anything else?”

I knew he wanted to call me out for that all night. It was kind of fun to pick at him.

“Probably, but why bother when it was right there?” I ask. I’m surprisingly chipper after the talk with Luca, and honestly, the food worked wonders for me. “What were those things? The delicious things that were like bread but also not?”

Reid sighs and crosses over to the bar, pulling out two rocks glasses. “Are you talking about the Yorkshire pudding? It’s a common English comfort food. Luckily for us, Luca spent a lot of time in the UK, so he enjoys English food. Aggie is a very proper Brit.”

“She seems nice.” I watch as he puts in a code to open the liquor cabinet. Odd. I guess he’s got the good stuff under lock and key so the servants don’t take a nip.

He pulls out what looks like old Scotch and pours a couple of fingers into each glass. “She is. She’s a lovely woman. She was our nanny’s sister. She came over to the States when Marilyn got sick and my father kicked her out. At the time Jer and I were at boarding school. We came home that summer to find my father had installed a new bang maid, and we were told we didn’t need a mother figure anymore. I had to enroll us both for fall semester and go to his accountant for the tuition.”

I hate when I feel for him. And I feel for him all the time. I take the glass when he passes it to me. “How old were you?”

“Seventeen,” he replies, taking a sip. “Younger than this Scotch.”

“And what did you do?” Somehow I don’t think he simply allowed it to pass.

“I found her. My father fired her without severance. He tossed her out like she never meant a thing, which I suppose she didn’t to him.” Reid walks over to the windows that offer a spectacular view of Central Park. It’s dark now, illuminated by the moon and stars and the buildings around it. Reid stands in shadows as he speaks, his eyes on the park below. “The worst part was I contacted her often. We had a standing phone call. Once a week. The week before I was coming home, she confessed what happened. She only told me because she knew I was about to find out. Even when she was making not a dime from my family, she treated me like a son. I used the trust fund my grandfather left me to make her comfortable. She was in a filthy nursing home in hospice care because the cancer was too far gone. Sometimes I wish I’d been the one to take my father out, not some random heart attack.”

I have to check the instinct to move into his space and offer him comfort. The funny thing is I’m not naturally affectionate. That’s Ani’s job. She’s the most open and loving of us. Ivy and I can be standoffish, but I’m struggling with him. “I’m sorry but I’m glad she had you. I’m glad you had a trust fund you could help her with. At least you used your money for some good. I get requests for company cash all the time, but it’s about buying a new car or funding my cousin’s sorority life.”

He turns, frowning my way. “Company cash? Are you telling me your father wrote checks from the company to pay for personal business?”

I nod, glad at least someone understands the implications. “Yep. My father and uncle treated the business like their personal banking system and taught the family to do the same, and let me tell you, there are tax implications.”

“Damn straight there are.” He moves back toward me, sinking down onto the sleek modern couch that dominates the room. “Are you seriously telling me your father used company funds to buy things for family members?”

“Oh yes.” It’s good to know I can shock him. “You should understand that my father’s accountant at the time was one of his second cousins. I believe he called it dividends.”

“That’s not how it works,” Reid says with a shake of his head. “A licensed accountant would know that.”

“I think they just call Carl an accountant,” I admit. “He didn’t go to school or anything. You would not believe the uproar when I fired him and hired an actual accountant. You would have thought I burned the whole place down.”

“I suspect that’s when you had to deal with the aforementioned implications.”

“Oh, yes.” I sit across from him, one big cushion between us. The light is low and it feels far too intimate, but I’m sure that’s only me. Or it’s how he wants it because he’s right back in control-the-rogue-girl mode. “I had to deal with the IRS. Naturally they didn’t audit the company until a year after my father passed. I had barely gotten my feet wet, and I had to deal with nearly losing everything. And my mother told me it was all my fault. I remember it vividly. She cried that they were going to take her house and all because I didn’t let Carl work his magic. His magic was to be incompetent at best, illegal at worst. But I got through it. Now I’m the mean lady who won’t pay their bills. It’s not easy being the villain in the family.”

“Don’t I know it,” he says with a sigh. “Your company is still family held? You didn’t open it up to investors? I would think that would be a way to get out of having to foot the tax bill on your own.”

“Don’t think I didn’t float that idea around. I thought we should sell thirty percent of our shares to an outside investor. It would have given us an influx of cash and perhaps inroads to new business. That was the first time they threatened to put Paul in my seat. He turned them down because he knew what I was facing.”

“He knew he could potentially be in trouble,” Reid replies with a shake of his patrician head. “He knew that whoever was in the CEO seat had a hard road ahead. So how did you manage it?”

“I sold some assets and some of my stock,” I admit.

“You took care of it personally, didn’t you?”

I shake my head. “Not all of it, of course, but some of it. My father left me a couple of properties. I had to sell them.”

“And what did the rest of the family pony up?”

I huff, a cynical sound. “Not a dime. They didn’t see the purpose. I was told I should fight the IRS. Like that wouldn’t have cost even more money, and we would be accruing interest the whole time.”

“Sounds like a pain in the ass. It makes me happy we never went past an LLC,” he says, clearing his throat. “It seems like you have your hands full. How much stock did you have to give up? And I assume you had to sell it to a family member. So let me see if I understand. They bought your stock knowing you would have to use the money to get the company—that they also own—out of trouble? That sounds like family to me. I didn’t realize the Upper East Side rules were in play in Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Your father wasn’t the only ruthless bastard out there,” I reply. “Sometimes I think it would be a relief to let the whole thing go. Right now I still have the majority behind me, but my cousin is working on the rest of them,” I admit. “I wasn’t lying about why I was in Jersey this afternoon. I can’t prove it, but I think Paul is sabotaging some of our jobs to make me look bad.”

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