Lisa planted her fists on her hips. “You’re delusional. That’s lazy. It’s not going to help at all.”
I rolled my eyes. “Throwing a million dollars into charity isn’t going to help at all? Maybe I’m not the one who needs to check my priorities.”
“If you do these interviews, you’ll be on the vanguard. You’ll be the tech CEO leading the charge into philanthropy. You’ll be a damn trend setter, Lukas! Do you realize how much of a difference you could make in people’s lives if you just—just—”
“Just what?”
Lisa bit her bottom lip. “Cared about something.”
“I care about plenty of things.”
“You care about the bottom line.” Lisa took a menacing stop forward. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I stared down the length of my nose at her. My sister had always been a trifle too dramatic for my tastes. Every conversation was a battle with her.
“You need to trust me, Lukas,” she said. “This is what you hired me for.”
“I hired you to make improvements, not complicate things for me.”
“How is asking you to do the right thing complicating things?”
I rolled my eyes. We were running in circles here. “Fine, Lisa. Fine. Let’s just do whatever you think is best. Whatever will get you off my back.” My head pulsed and pressure was building behind my eyes. I just wanted this conversation to be over with.
“Fine,” she said coldly. “I’ll set something up with Kayla. Something simple. Minimal effort because I guess that’s going to be your approach to this since you won’t make money off of it.”
“For fuck sakes, Lisa.”
“You and Kayla can have some pictures taken. Rebecca will publish her article with the pictures, and a few weeks after it’s published and everyone loves you, we can switch to just cutting checks to charities for the tax deduction. Am I speaking your language now?”
“Don’t get sour with me.”
“Sour with you?” Lisa asked incredulously. She threw her head back and laughed like she was the villain of a superhero movie. “Oh my goodness, Lukas. You’re the sour one! I’ve been doing cartwheels for weeks trying to figure out how to help you, and now that I finally have a plan—a plan that I know without a shadow of a doubt will be effective, I might add—you’re acting like all I am to you is a huge inconvenience.”
I prickled. That was not entirely how I felt.
Lisa sighed and shook her head at me. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get cross with you. This has all just been a lot of work to put into play and I feel like you’re not appreciating anything I’m trying to do.”
“I’m a busy man, Lisa. And I don’t appreciate being ambushed.”
“Well, you left me with little options.”
“Even so,” I grumbled. “You’ve done this to me several times. If you weren’t my sister, I’d fire you.”
“And if you weren’t my brother, there are a couple of things I’d like to do to you, too.”
A beat passed and Lisa smiled wryly at me.
I smiled back. “I know you have my best interests at heart, so I’ll try. Okay? I’ll try.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
“But if things go bad and it costs me, it’s on your head. Do you understand?”
Lisa nodded. “I understand. All you have to do is trust me. Have I ever steered you wrong before?”
Chapter 8
Kayla
My online calendar taunted me as I added in yet another commitment: the Lukas Project.
Everything related to Lukas Holt and my responsibility of changing him from a bad boy tech CEO into a compassionate philanthropist success story was noted in blue. Food drives were yellow, soup kitchen shifts were orange, Good Fellow’s commitments were pink, and budgets were green. Purple was supposed to indicate leisure and social time, but there wasn’t much of that on the calendar.
I sighed and considered all the blue coming up in my calendar.
I’d spent a lot of time thinking of ways to ease Lukas into what I did for a living. Somehow, I had to find a way to show him that there was more to my work than dreary homeless shelters and canned-food drives, although that was a big portion of the gig. I doubted those would be the right ways to pull him into a new lifestyle however. I needed something vibrant. Something he could sink his teeth into.
Something fun.
“I have just the thing,” I muttered to myself as I reached for my mug of lukewarm green tea. I took a sip and wished it was hotter but didn’t bother getting up to add more hot water to it from the kettle. My office was a modest place, probably a quarter of the size of Lukas’, but it had all the fixings I needed. I had an electric kettle to make tea any time I pleased, a water cooler, a sofa, an old desk I found at a thrift shop that I’d painted white, a relatively comfortable computer chair, my laptop, and the odd decor piece I’d brought from home to spruce up the place.
My office sat nestled between a coffee shop and a hair salon. Beside the salon was a tattoo parlor, and beside the parlor was a financial services company that, in my not so humble opinion, did more harm than good by giving loans to people who they knew they’d make interest off of.
It wasn’t the best part of the city, but it wasn’t all that bad either, which meant I could afford the rent without having to sacrifice safety.
I flipped through my calendar to Friday and smiled. There it was, the thing that might suck Lukas into charity.
I’d arranged a partnership with a local disadvantaged youth community organization to head out into the countryside on the outskirts of Seattle where we would spend time on a generations-old family farm. The game plan was to pick apples for some fun engagement and also learn about nutrition and growing your own food. I’d been busting
