Page 28 of The Revenge Plan

Caiden smiled. “I liked the sound of that. I’ll get on it.”

He stopped mid-stride when he saw me getting up and putting on my jacket, “Where are you going?” he said.

“Checking on a few things.”

“Checking on what?”

I turned off my laptop. “All the charities that we supposedly donate to. Sydney, the new Social Responsibility manager, helped cut off the obviously shady ones. I’ll be visiting the ones with the most donation money.” I had recently fired the previous Social Responsibility manager for stealing money and the guise of donating it to fake charities. It was just as well that my financial department had caught it in time before it blew into a scandal.

“I didn’t know you had taken it so seriously?”

“It was about time I started caring about who we were giving money to. Especially this brand new one. I hear they formed it to help get children stuck in child labor go back to school and sponsor their education.”

“Sounds like a good cause,” he said.

“If it’s a cause at all. Their books appear to be on the up and up, but guess who works there?”

Ax frowned, “who?”

“My wife’s very own maid-of-honor.”

He raised his eyebrows, “Oh.”

“I know right,” I made my way up to him, “I’ll be back before lunch.”

“Before you go, I wanted to ask, what did the crusty old man say?”

“About the deed? He’ll send it soon, is the general excuse, but it’s been one excuse after the other.”

Ax’s face turned red. He looked like he was about to blow a fuse. I get it. The deed was the real reason we even bought Celeste Jewels.

“But you did everything he said, down to marrying his spoiled daughter. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“We gotta do something about it. We can’t let him get away with it.”

“Don’t worry, I have something cooking.”

He raised an eyebrow.

I tapped his shoulder and strode past him. I will have to deal with the deed issue later. First, I had to get this visit out of the way. I hadn’t done all of them. I had left those to the auditors. This one had piqued my interest, plus it was close, they had New York offices.

When we got there, the head of the foundation, Rachel Baines, a petite woman full of spunk, was waiting in the lobby to welcome us. She seemed giddy to see us and I figured we were their biggest donor or she loved to treat all donors like kings.

She showed us the place. It was small and looked like she ran it on a tight budget. They had a big cubicle area and four other offices at each end and a conference room. Rachel was almost done when we knocked into someone who looked oddly familiar. It was Alicia, Hailey’s friend. She looked a little frazzled, edgy, and she hadn’t been like this when I first saw her, which only increased my suspicions. I took her as more of the calm and cool type when I had first gotten to know her.

“Alicia. We were in the middle of giving our benefactors a tour of the offices.”

Alicia greeted me and said, “My own’s over there. Nothing to see there. Same as all the other offices.” I frowned. She sounded like she was covering something.

“She’s a shy little one, but somehow she has the ability to woo people to our cause.”

“We must see where she does such splendid work.” If she was hiding something, then she was the person most likely to cause my company harm. Not that I could find anything by doing so, but her jitteriness was making me curious. I followed the two women.

“As I was saying,” Rachel said as she approached Alicia’s office. I didn’t hear the rest of her speech. I was intrigued by the office. Something was pulling me to it.

It was small and cramped like the other ones. This one was worse because it had two desks instead of one. There was a big pot plant in the corner taking much needed space.

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