Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Her own purposeful momentum was lost as she watched them go.
Envying them was faulty reasoning on her part because no one would want what they were dealing with.
And yet she couldn’t keep going until they had disappeared down the hallway and through the door to the bedroom suite she had given to them a hundred years ago. Or maybe it was two hundred.
Fine, it was only back in April that they’d moved in, after truths had come out, and Daniel had been shot, and his stage four cancer diagnosis had blown his life apart as all terminal illnesses did when they finally made their presences known.
Snapping back to attention, C.P. followed in the couple’s footsteps for half of the way, and as she got to her study’s closed door, she thought of people who entered places without knocking. And saw things they shouldn’t have. And jumped to conclusions that were correct.
Gus had left her and her business for all the right reasons. But his greener pasture was not just full of weeds—he was going to be buried in it.
As her stomach rolled, she shoved her way in and went right to her desk. Sitting down, she stared across the empty, glossy surface. It was like a mirror and the last thing she wanted was to look at herself, so she triggered the phone compartment release: Off to one side, a panel retracted, and a platform raised up, presenting her with an encrypted landline.
She dialed from memory and sat back. As the ringing commenced, she pulled the fleece she had on closer and turned her face into the top of the collar. The cologne or aftershave or soap Gus always used was fading, but she could still smell him.
Or maybe she was imagining things. Either way, it worked… she saw Gus as clearly as if he were standing in front of her, his presence summoned—
“Catherine, what a pleasant surprise.”
The way Gunnar Rhobes rolled his r’s made her want to slam the receiver down four or five times, right in his supercilious ear.
“What did you do to Gus,” she demanded.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Spare me the pseudo-polite bullshit.” She swiveled around to face the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out into the back field. “Where is he.”
“If you recall, I was the one who notified you that he could not be located—”
“What better way to divert attention away from yourself? And do not pretend you don’t think like that. You’re capable of anything, Rhobes.”
“Why, thank you,” the man said dryly. “I am complimented in the midst of your insults—”
“You lied, Gunnar.”
“About what.”
“His car was in the garage.” She shook her head. “When you called me an hour ago, you told me that it was in the driveway. That’s a pretty big discrepancy, dontcha think.”
There was a moment of silence that could have been interpreted in a variety of ways. Then her chief business rival said: “You’re accusing me of having no honor, over a detail like that?”
“In. The. Garage.” At the edge of the forest, a doe soft-walked into view, nearly invisible against the pale brown rushes that had died back in October. “You expect me to believe that a man who runs an empire like yours is going to forget something like that?”
“I did not go to his abode. One of my associates did.”
“Associates. Is that what you call them?”
“Do you refer to your hired mercenaries as something else? And are we really arguing about this, considering the single most significant brain in medical science today has gone missing?”
The doe proceeded forward, seeming to place each hoof down at a precisely chosen spot, so careful, so hyperaware. And then there was a sound that brought the animal’s head up, her radar-cup ears sweeping as her tail twitched, her haunches vibrating as if she were ready to bolt.
Funny how survival of the fittest dictated that the paranoid tended to live long enough to reproduce—and keep their offspring alive. So anxious genes prevailed.
“I don’t get it,” she said tightly. “He works for you now. You won. Why do you have to pretend—”
“I called you in good faith,” Rhobes snapped. “I do not like you, you do not like me. We are not just competitors, we are enemies—and you are correct. I did win and he does work for me now—which is why I wish to discern his goddamn location.”
The deer bolted back into the trees, as if the vitriol was what had spooked her, and C.P. pivoted back around to her desk. With an objective eye, she regarded the restrained decor she had chosen, the furniture modern and monochromatic, the art on the walls abstract and worth a fortune, the bound rug a vanilla lawn cropped close as the green around a golf hole.
Eyeing the Rothko across the way, she did some quick math on all her debts and wondered what kind of seller’s cut Sotheby’s down in NYC would take if she sold the thing. Then she remembered she didn’t have to think like that. Her time was running out way faster than her cash position.