Series: Silver Spoon MC Series by Nichole Rose
Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 39033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 195(@200wpm)___ 156(@250wpm)___ 130(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 39033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 195(@200wpm)___ 156(@250wpm)___ 130(@300wpm)
"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. "Tobias ate him?"
"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.
I shrug instead of trying to explain. To her, this company is just an extension of our father. To me, it's an opportunity to leave behind something better. He never cared about the people or the culture. He never cared about family. Everything was about power and influence to him. His shadow still clings to this company, just like it does to our family. I want to erase it. It's the least I owe our employees after the decades of loyalty they showed a man who didn't deserve it.