“Maybe you should just get me oatmeal and fruit,” Reece said as he bent to collect the waffle from the floor. Sara bent down at the exact same time and they clunked heads.
“Oh my God!” Sara bleated. “I’m not usually such a klutz!”
“It’s okay, really. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just go change clothes.” Reece made a hasty exit from the dining room, and Sara, looking utterly horrified, quickly collected the dish and the spoiled waffle and hurried back into the kitchen.
Max burst out laughing. “What was that?”
Cooper just shook his head, seeming faintly amused.
Was it possible Sara had a crush on Reece? She’d said something about him being cute and that she wanted to muss his hair, but Allie hadn’t taken much notice. Sara thought a lot of men were “cute.” Reece didn’t seem her type at all. She was much more likely to fall for some itinerant coffeehouse guitarist or a professional surfer than a CPA. In fact, out of the three cousins Allie would have picked Max as a more likely match for Sara.
Sara returned a couple of minutes later looking sheepish. “Allie, I forgot all about you. What would you like for breakfast?”
Allie gave Sara a knowing smirk. “Toast and coffee is all I need, thanks. I overindulged while I was out of town. On food.” Clearly Cooper interpreted a broader meaning. Now he was the one offering up a knowing look.
She hastily averted her gaze. Damn the man. He was six feet away, and she could still feel the effects of his eyes on her.
Allie bolted her food as quickly as she could, then wiped her mouth and prepared to make her escape.
“Just a moment, Allie.” It was Cooper.
Oh, God, what did he want now?
“Yes?”
“I have some tasks for you today,” he said. “I’ll expect you to report to work by eight-thirty.”
The nerve! She wasn’t some serf he could order around. He was angry and he was getting his revenge by acting like…like Captain Bligh. She started to tell him where he could get off-but stopped her runaway mouth just in time.
She kind of deserved his shabby treatment. She was still uncertain what had motivated him to suggest a partnership, and she wasn’t a hundred percent sure he wasn’t trying to manipulate her somehow. But she strongly suspected he hadn’t deserved the tongue-lashing she’d given him the day before.
She should probably be relieved he still wanted anything to do with her. She turned and gave him a smart salute. “Yes, sir. I’ll be right back. I just want to freshen up. Are my clothes appropriate, or do you want me to change into something else?”
“Uh, no, you look fine.”
As she left the room, she took some small satisfaction in the utter bafflement in his eyes.
“COOPER.”
What was Allie up to? Cooper wondered. Yesterday she’d been ready to tear his throat out. Today she was Little Miss Submissive.
“Cooper!”
“What, Reece? You don’t have to yell.”
“If you can tear your thoughts away from Allie for a moment, I was about to tell you the results of my audit,” Reece said, drawing Cooper back to the present. “I discovered a few interesting things.”
“I wasn’t thinking about Allie,” Cooper blustered, though of course he had been. He couldn’t go thirty seconds without thinking about her and wondering what went so terribly wrong. “So what did you find out?”
Reece had stacked Allie’s paperwork on an empty chair against the wall, and from it he retrieved a ledger book and opened it.
“First of all, Allie keeps meticulous records. This ledger goes back three years, and she’s the one who’s made most of the entries. Every once in a while Johnny made a notation, but mostly Allie’s the one keeping the books.”
“Okay, then.” Cooper rubbed his hands together. “She probably took over the bookkeeping the moment she hooked up with Johnny. That would fit with a con artist.”
Reece shook his head. “The charter service was providing a good living to both Johnny and Allie until Johnny got sick. Then more and more expenditures went toward doctors and hospitals, and less money was coming in from the charters.
“It appears Allie was socking most of her salary away in her personal account. But the last couple of years, she started to raid her own savings to pay for stuff-boat repairs and maintenance, mostly.”
Reece reached for the checkbook and opened it to the relevant entries.
“What? Are you sure?” Cooper peered at Allie’s neat, precise handwriting. Reece had flagged checks she’d written related to the business, and there were dozens of them.
“Yes. Not only has she not been embezzling or mismanaging the funds, she’s been putting her own money into the business. The financials give
“How much?”
“Close to fifteen thousand dollars.”
Cooper wasn’t worried about the amount. It was small, compared to the value of the boat and the business. But he wondered about Allie’s motives.
“Looks like she expected all along to inherit the
“No, Cooper. What it looks like is a woman who genuinely cared about Johnny and his business and didn’t want it to go bankrupt. It looks like she was functioning as a full de facto partner.”
“If they didn’t have anything on paper-”
“They did. A will. We have to face it-it was Johnny’s intention to give this boat to Allie. Now you’re the legal hotshot, so we might be able to get it away from her based on legal technicalities, but if we do, that makes us thieves, no better than Heather. I, for one, recommend we drop all legal proceedings.”
Cooper shook his head. After all he’d put into this venture? The thought, the money, the legal stuff? He’d quit his job, burned his bridges and alienated his entire family for this dream. Not only that, he’d dragged Max and Reece into it with him.
He wasn’t going to just walk away.
“Why don’t we try again with the cash settlement?” Max suggested. “Knowing what we do about what she’s invested in Remington Charters, we could offer more.”
“The amount doesn’t seem to be in question,” Cooper said. “I didn’t get as far as naming a dollar figure. She shot me down within thirty seconds.”
“Everybody has their price,” Max said, polishing off the last of his hash browns. “We just have to find Allie’s.”
Cooper already knew. No amount of money was going to move Allie, at least not any amount he and his cousins could come up with, and they could come up with quite a bit.
Maybe the best thing to do was let the courts sort it out. If he and his cousins won, he would voluntarily pay Allie back her financial investment and then some, enough that she could start fresh somewhere else. If she wasn’t a con artist, or even an opportunist, he refused to take away everything she cared about and leave her destitute.
If Allie won-and he had to acknowledge the possibility, since none of his strategies for breaking the handwritten will were panning out-he would have to fall back on Plan B.
Of course, he didn’t have a Plan B, but maybe it was time to come up with one.
One thing he wouldn’t do, under any circumstances, was crawl home and beg for his job back. He would never hear the end of it. His mother still called him almost every day, pleading with him to see sense and come back home.
His older brother, Derek, would lord it over him if he ever returned to Remington Industries. His life would be a living hell.
As if on cue, his cell phone rang. He checked the caller ID, winced, and let it roll over to voice mail.
“Is it your mom?” Max asked.
Cooper nodded. “Are your parents bugging you to come back?”
