Boss Next Door Page 11

  She met my father when she was working as a blackjack dealer, and he was in town on vacation. To hear her tell the story, it was love at first sight. In some ways, it was kind of romantic because even though he’s never said it outright, my dad fell hard for her. He still loves her, and I know the divorce cut him far deeper than he was willing to say.

  He changed after they split up. He became more withdrawn and angrier. He tries and most days, fakes it pretty well, but after the divorce, he hasn’t been anything close to the larger than life figure he’s always been. And because I’m his daughter and know him as well as I do, I can see the brave face he puts on for the façade it is.

  My mother likes to say she knew this was going to happen. She likes to tell me that my father is a bad man and that I can’t trust him. She always liked to say that eventually, he was going to screw me over just like he screwed her over. And whenever he disappointed me over the years, all I can hear is her saying, ‘I told you so’. She never tried to talk it through with me. Never tried to console me. Never tried to make me feel better. Nope. All she ever did was say she told me so.

  The current situation isn’t any different. All she’s said over the last couple of weeks is that she told me so. But it’s bullshit. It’s just another fiction she’s made up in her own mind. She had no more idea of what was going on than I did. It wasn’t until the FBI questioned her that she found out what my father had gotten himself into – the same way I did.

  I’m positive my father never went out of his way to screw her over. They were opposites and just weren’t a good match for each other, and as a result, their marriage broke up. It happens. And I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend to screw me over. But while it may not have been his intent, that’s the net effect. Because of him and what he did, I can no longer work in the field I’ve spent the last decade carving a career out of.

  So now I have no job, can’t do what I’ve been doing for the last ten years, meaning I have no job prospects, and I’m stuck living with my mom for the time being. In other words, I’m absolutely screwed. Thanks, Dad.

  I lay there feeling a bit like a prisoner. Or a caged animal. I’m beat after the long flight, but I’m wired at the same time. I know I should probably get some rest since I have so much to do, but at the moment, I just want to get out of here for a little while. I need to vent and blow off some steam.

  Grabbing my phone, I make a call.

  “Unreal,” Amber gasps. “I just can’t believe it.”

  A rueful grin touches my lips. “That makes two of us.”

  Spending some time with my dearest friend Amber is just what the doctor ordered. I’m exhausted and want nothing more than to crawl into my bed and sleep for the next week but being out with Amber is helping to recharge and rejuvenate my body and spirit. At least a little bit. I know it’s going to take some time before I feel completely whole again.

  “And you had no idea?”

  I shake my head. “Not a clue,” I murmur. “I feel like I should have though, you know? I feel like I should have seen something.”

  I stare down into my drink, wondering for the millionth time how I didn’t know what he was doing. When the FBI questioned me, they made me feel like I’d been part of my father’s plan all along so sharply that I even began to question myself. Had I just not wanted to see what he was doing? Had I subconsciously helped him cover up his crimes?

  I sit back in the booth and sigh. We’re sitting in a quiet lounge called Al’s in a small outdoor mall near my mother’s house. It’s new to me – it wasn’t here the last time I came back to visit several years back. The lounge is done primarily in brick with weathered steel accents. There’s an old brass still in one corner, and the walls are covered in black and white photographs of figures like Al Capone and other gangsters of the day. There are some large wooden barrels with the word ‘whiskey’ stenciled in black on them stacked up in another corner, and what looks like part of an old Ford Model T integrated into the décor.

  The whole place is done up to look like some old Chicago speakeasy or something and is purportedly owned by a direct descendant of Al Capone himself. I’m skeptical of the claim. But the place is cute. What I like most about it, though, is that it’s quiet. The music plays low, and all the televisions mounted on walls around the place are muted.

  “It’s not your fault,” Amber points out. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I give her a weak smile, knowing she’s right but still not quite believing it. Part of me feels like my ignorance of what he was up to isn’t a real defense. My father was running a massive Ponzi scheme. He did it for years and raked in tens of millions of dollars. He ruined the lives of hundreds of people before the authorities caught up with him and shut it all down.

  When I first found out, I was just numb with disbelief. For several days, I didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and didn’t want to see anybody. It just didn’t seem real to me. It wasn’t until a pair of FBI agents had me locked in a room and were squeezing me as hard as possible, accusing me of being his accomplice, and of having had an active role in his crimes that I snapped out of it. After that, I fired back at them with everything I had. I was innocent and had no idea my father was doing what he did.

  And it’s the truth. The thought that my father hurt so many people makes me sick to my stomach. I always had a contentious relationship with him, but I never thought he would have been capable of doing something so cruel to so many people.

  “So what happens now?” Amber asks hesitantly.

  I shrug. “He’s going to prison. He was sentenced to fifteen years. He’ll probably do half of that at most,” I tell her. “They said they found some inconsistencies in my statements and some unusual things in my reporting, but they ultimately didn’t have enough to charge me with a crime. But I was forced to give up my license, and my dad’s company got the death penalty – it’s being completely dissolved. I’ll never be able to work in the financial sector again.”

  “Jesus, Chloe,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

  I shrug again. “Nothing I can do about it,” I tell her. “It just sucks. Everything he owns was seized – the apartments in New York. The house upstate. All of his holdings and bank accounts. It’s all gone.”

  “What about you?”

  “Not that they haven’t tried, but they have no cause to seize anything of mine. I was able to put back a nice nest egg, but I can’t live on it forever,” I explain. “So I’m going to have to find a new career path, apparently.”

  Amber reaches across the table, takes my hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. I know she wants to help comfort me but isn’t sure what to say. I don’t blame her for that. I mean, what can you say? It’s not every day your friend gets banished from her career because her father is a criminal who destroyed hundreds of lives with his sheer greed.

  I’m not even sure what I think or feel about it right now, to be honest. Everything’s happened so fast, and it’s all been so confusing that I haven’t had time to really unpack it all just yet. I figure that there will be time enough for that once all the dust settles.

  “God, Chloe, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks, hon,” I reply quietly. “I’ll figure it all out. I just need to get my feet under me again.”

  “And you will,” she encourages me. “You’ll be back on your feet in no time flat.”

  I fall silent and stare into my drink again as if I can find all the answers to my problems in the bottom of my glass or something. I’ve worked so long in the financial sector that I don’t know how to do anything else. Once upon a time, I had plenty of interests and things I could have done with my life. I even got my master’s in Architectural Design. But I’d been forced onto this path, and now that it’s been yanked out from under me, I have no idea what I’m going to do next.

  “How are things with your mom?” she asks.

  A wry grin touches my lips. “About how you’d expect.”

  “That bad, huh?”

&n
bsp; I nod. “Yeah, I’m going to need to find a place of my own soon. I just want to make sure I have a job before I get out of there,” I tell her and then laugh ruefully. “It’s not like I have tens of millions of dollars stashed away somewhere.”

  Amber laughs, though her expression says she doesn’t know whether she should or not. She’s trying to walk a fine line between being sympathetic and not trying to offend me. Not that she has to worry about offending me. My skin is a bit thicker than that. It’s true that this whole debacle has knocked me off my axis, but I haven’t lost my sense of humor. Well, not all of it anyway.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re going to do?” Amber asks. “For work, I mean.”

  “How do you think I’d do as a barista?”

  She laughs, seeming to relax when she sees that I can still laugh through it all. She squeezes my hand again and gives me an encouraging smile.

  “I think that green apron would look cute on you,” she offers, chuckling.

  We spend the next hour or so catching up on each other’s lives and reconnecting with each other. It feels nice to be with her again. She makes me feel more at home than being in my mother’s house does. Amber is one of the people I missed the most. Eventually, though, she has to go home, and unfortunately, our evening ends.

  Later on at home, as I get ready to collapse into bed, I take stock of my own life. Amber’s life is different now, while mine has stayed remarkably the same. In the years I’ve been overseas, Amber has gotten married and has a child – an adorable five-year-old named June, who looks a lot like her mom, and is already filled with just as much fire. Amber seems happy, which of course makes me happy for her. She deserves to be happy.

  But it makes me think of everything I don’t have in my own life. I don’t have a husband, I don’t have children, and now, I don’t even have a career anymore. I honestly never knew whether I wanted children or not. I was so busy forging a career; I never gave it much thought. But I would have liked to have had the option. Seeing pictures of June and hearing stories about her only serve to remind me that without a career – or any viable romantic options – I don’t even have that option anymore.

  What I don’t have seems to be far outweighing what I do have these days.

  As I lay down in my bed, I let out a loud sigh. All the tension and weariness that’s gripped me the last couple of weeks seeps out of my body. At least temporarily. I’m left wallowing in a pool of complete uncertainty that keeps me from falling asleep straight away. I don’t know what I’m going to do, and that scares the hell out of me.

  I close my eyes and try to push it all away for now, so I can get some sleep. But as I feel a tear tracking its way down my face, I know there isn’t going to be much sleep to be had tonight.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Braxton

  Having spent the last week in a hotel in Texas, I’m more than grateful to wake up in my own bed. I slide out and walk into the bathroom to take a leak, then brush my teeth and splash some cold water on my face. I wander back out into my bedroom and let out a long, loud yawn as I stretch and work the kinks out of my neck and back.

  As I head for the stairs, the smell of coffee is already thick in the air. The person who invented automatic coffee makers should be made a saint, as far as I’m concerned. After fixing a cup of coffee, I wander back upstairs and into my office. I don’t feel like going into the office today, so I figure I’m just going to do some work from home instead.

  A large drafting table sits against the wall to my right as I enter the room with a couple of small tables and a large cabinet that holds all my supplies. A large bookcase stands against the wall next to the door, and both the walls to the left and directly across from me each have three large double-paned windows that allow a flood of natural light into the room. The lighting in the room is the biggest reason I made this my office – it makes it a lot easier to work by.

  I set my cup of coffee down on the desk beneath the window on the rear wall, the windows affording me a view of my backyard. Sitting down at my desk, I boot up my computer and wait for my email program to start. I grab the remote sitting on the corner of my desk and hit the button to set the music playing – the first strains of Pink Floyd’s “Time” filter into the room.

  Once my email inbox comes up, I filter through everything, trashing the majority of the correspondence and responding to the rest. I sigh, knowing I need to go over the plans that have been submitted on a new project I’d delegated to one of my teams. Most of the time, I trust my people enough to let them do all the designing on a given project and only present it to me for final adjustments and approval.

  But with most of my top teams already working on a variety of important projects, I had to assign this one to Curtis Greeley. He’s an obsequious, weaselly little man who seems more intent on getting on my good side than doing right by our clients – which, ironically enough, would be the way to get on my good side. I don’t much care for Greeley, to be honest, but he’s the most senior architect I have available right now, so I don’t have much of a choice but to use him for this – this being a new project for a client I’d like to keep. It’s a client that has vast resources and the intention of spending quite a bit of money as they attempt to gain a foothold in Vegas, which as we all know, is a bottomless well of money. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into my company’s coffers if we’re successful. And that is a slice of the pie I’d love to sink my teeth into.

  But to tap that endless well of cash, I know I’m going to need to impress the hell out of them. And since I don’t necessarily trust Greeley to do the job up to my standards, I’m required to hold his hand every step of the way, signing off on every piece of the design – or sending it back for alterations. Which I’ve had to do quite a bit of.

  I’m just about to dive into reviewing the preliminary work on a new project when movement out of the corner my eye draws my attention. I turn and look through the windows on my left – windows that overlook my neighbor’s backyard. My neighbor is an… eccentric woman. We don’t particularly care for one another. It’s probably more accurate to say that we despise one another. Though why she doesn’t like me is a mystery. At least I have cause – her dog continually digs beneath the fence that separates our properties and shits in my backyard.

  Oh, I’ve raised the point with her a number of times, but she refuses to believe it’s her dog – despite the fact that the hole is dug from her side and, oh, I don’t even own a goddamn dog. She blames it on the coyotes that live in the desert that surrounds our housing tract. It’s been a point of contention between us ever since I moved into the neighborhood three or four years back now. Just the sight of that woman pisses me off.

  I look over, expecting to see her, but I’m surprised when I see a firm, young, tight ass in a canary yellow bikini making her way across the deck. Well, I see the whole woman, but I can only see her from the back. Not that I’m complaining about that. She’s just climbed out of the pool, and the sun overhead glistens off her wet skin enticingly.

  The mystery woman in yellow has long, smooth legs and a body that’s toned and has generous curves. There’s something familiar about her and yet at the same time, something completely foreign. She’s got black hair that hangs to the middle of her back and soft, tawny skin. From behind, she reminds me of Chloe. But to be honest, it’s a loose reminder based on nothing more than a great ass and black hair. I know myself well enough to know that I look for women who remind me of Chloe. I guess it’s a form of self-flagellation for letting her get away or something. I don’t know. I just know I kind of punish myself by trying to find somebody who reminds me of her – even still, all these years later.

  With her back still to me, the woman puts on a large, wide-brimmed floppy hat and sunglasses so that when she turns around, her face is almost completely obscured. Of course, when she turns around, I get a great view of her tits in that bikini top – which are fabulous, by the way. But I can’t see wh
o this woman is.

  As far as I know, my neighbor lives there by herself. Well, her and that little shit machine of a dog of hers. Not that the dog is to blame. The dog is actually pretty cute, and the few times I’ve found him in my backyard, he’s been sweet. But his owner isn’t teaching him to behave properly, and that’s on her.

  My curiosity is definitely piqued by the woman in the yellow bikini. I wonder if the woman next door has a daughter I didn’t know about. Not that I would have known about her – it’s not like I have a close, personal relationship with my neighbor. We don’t exchange Christmas cards. Hell, we don’t even acknowledge one another when we see each other on the street. Our interactions are limited to bickering over her letting her dog shit in my backyard.

  From what little I know of the woman; she thinks the world of herself. My impression of her is she tries to give off an air of cultured refinement, without necessarily being able to back it up. I think she had some big divorce and now spends her time always going to art shows and other events where the wealthy tend to congregate. Although she seems like a square peg trying to jam herself into a round hole, she does her best to blend into some of Vegas’ hoity toity social circles.

  But I can see through her. She’s not nearly as refined as the image she tries to project, and I think she knows it. But she keeps trying. Those are just my impressions of the woman, though. And I admit that although they could be skewed by my dislike for her, I don’t think they’re entirely wrong.

  I push the thoughts out of my head and focus on the woman in yellow again. She’s sitting down on a chaise lounge; her long, toned legs stretched out in front of her. The wide, floppy brim of her hat still obscuring her face, she picks up a book and opens it. And as my cock stirs in my shorts as I watch her, I wish I could see her – see who she is.