Blackbird (A Stepbrother Romance #1)(46)

For the better part of two hundred years, it worked. Amsel prospered by finding men of talent in fields of interest and funding them. Synthetic fibers, explosives, medicine, chemistry, computers. Most people probably never heard of us until Eve took over the company and started making waves, but Amsel owned a piece of everyone’s daily lives, from the food they ate to the clothes they wore to the cars they drove. That’s a lot of money, flowing in and out, year after year, day after day, hour after hour. Somewhere I had a calculation to tell me how much money I made while I was using the bathroom. Tuition was meaningless to me. I could have bought the college if I felt like it.

There was only one thing that mattered and I was going to lose it.

I showed the receptionist my driver’s license and signed in at the front desk, and headed to the elevator. I wanted this tedium to be over. Really, I wanted to just stick my head in the sand and deal with this when I took over. Once it was official and I had my degree, the requirements of my father’s will would be satisfied and I would be the sole owner of the company. Then it would be bye bye Martin. As of that moment, my part of the company was held in trust managed by my mother, and my mother put Martin in charge after he managed her portion of the estate successfully for years. That was how they met, years ago now. So far as I knew their marriage was happy. He never laid a hand on my mother and he was hands off with Eve, too, virtually ignoring her during the summers between semesters. We still kept things quiet, leaving the estate when we wanted to spend the night together, but it would take a fool not to realize where we were going and what we were doing.

Fool that I was, I thought we really were keeping it a secret. I was trying to talk Eve into coming off the birth control after I graduated. She wanted to finish her degree. I respected that. She was starting to budge on coming off after she graduated herself, a year from now. That would work for me. Not like we were going to try for a kid, so much as let nature take its course. If we kept at it like we had been before, nature would take its course pretty quick. When I was younger if you told me that I’d be thinking about marriage and kids when I was only twenty-two years old, I’d have been horrified. Now I could barely think of anything else. The idea of filling the halls of that huge sprawling house with children was starting to appeal to me. Mom wanted more kids with Dad, but it never happened and he was gone when she was so young. If he’d lived I’d have brothers and sisters, I know it.

My every instinct was screaming at me to Let. It. Be.

I had to know. If Martin was trying to destroy my family legacy I had to know. I had to be able to take care of Eve.

Arms folded, I leaned on the elevator wall and sighed, waiting for it to ascend. If it was up to me I’d be fixing cars for the rest of my days. Hell, maybe I’d find a manager -anybody but Martin-and do just that. Be hands off. Dad was like that. He came here maybe two days a week, and didn’t visit at all for long stretches in the summer. Up until around he died, anyway. Something happened then and he was spending hours every day, but he’d leave super early and be home in the middle of the afternoon to spend time with me and then spend the evenings with Mom. That was a happier time, happier than I can remember until I convinced Eve to take a chance on me.

Eve. If I closed my eyes I could smell that lavender, like tasting a color. I wanted to get this shit over with and get back to her.

I still hadn’t told her where I was, what I was doing. She thought I was in class right now. If I made it back in time, nothing would be amiss.

The elevator came to my floor. I stopped in at the receptionist’s desk and signed in again. Yes, twice. Just to be on the safe side.

Then I went to meet Brittany.

It didn’t feel like I was ruining my life. Every employee that saw me greeted me pleasantly. Old men slapped me on the back and told me it would be good to have an Amsel at the helm again after so long. One even squeezed my arm and told me my father would be proud of me. That made my day. It was a subtle thing.

The record’s vault was in the 27th floor, the second floor of the three belonging to the company. That was where I was to meet Brittany. There was no guard or anything. The big vault door opened with a pass code, a unique one assigned to everyone with access. Lots of important stuff was stored in here, and on paper. There were electronic records but Amsel is old fashioned, it’s just how things go. Institutional momentum, my dad called it once. He was talking to my mother when he called it that. I punched in my code and the door popped open with a hollow metal thump and a hiss of escaping air.

Brittany was already inside. She dressed conservatively, as usual. Her reading glasses were cute, but I noted it as a passing thing, a simple fact like the color of her gray skirt or the heels on her pumps. She was going for a sexy schoolmarm look, I think. I just wanted to get this over with and get out of there. I closed the vault door and sealed it from the inside.

The implications of this did not come to me at the time. Unfortunately.

She had a lot of paperwork spread out on the reading table in the middle of the room. Some of it was photocopies. Anything older than six months was put on microfilm and the originals destroyed at a secure facility that specialized in that kind of thing. It was tossed in right in boxes and eaten by a huge, scary looking crosscut machine and the cuttings were incinerated. I think the machine was called an Industrial Macerator. Sounds pleasant.

“What am I looking at?” I said, leaning over the papers.

“I started pulling some of the paperwork on the accounts I told you about. Amsel is becoming involved with some very unsavory people.”