I Hate, I Bake, and I Don’t Date! by Alina Jacobs
53
Beck
“How could you not tell me?” I raged at Tess when we were in the car on the way back to Manhattan.
“I didn’t know,” she said quietly.
“How could you not know your own stepfather’s parents?” I sneered.
“Do you know all the sister wives’ parents?” Tess shot back. “You didn’t do any research into these people. You’re the big bad billionaire with all his rich, powerful brothers. You didn’t do any sort of background check on Ethel?”
I hadn’t, and I was kicking myself. Ethel was a high-society woman. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She went to the Hamptons in the summer and lunched with her other high-society friends during the week. I had thought her a bit overbearing but ultimately well-meaning. I had severely miscalculated.
I sent a text to my brothers, telling them we needed to meet with all the lawyers first thing Monday.
“You’re going to tell me everything you know about your stepfather and stepsister,” I told Tess. “We need to crush them. I will not have him taking Annie and Enola.”
Then I remembered Cressida.
“Are you going to fire her?” Tess asked.
I ran a hand through my hair then glowered.
I needed to fire Tess. But now that the stakes were raised, I couldn’t give her a reason to side with her stepfamily against me. I needed her on my side for a little while longer.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
My sisters were huddled in the back seat of the car.
I gritted my teeth. I was trying not to yell around them. Alistair’s comments about my being like my father had cut deep.
“Don’t worry,” I promised my sisters. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“We’ll order Chinese,” Tess told them. “Since you missed dinner.”
“Crab rangoons?” Enola asked hopefully.
“We’re eating a whole trayful.”
Monday morningwhen I arrived at the Svensson Investment tower, my brothers were waiting for me in the conference room. The other lawyer Svensson brothers, Josh and Eric, had come as well.
Everyone was grim faced.
I had spent the weekend picking Tess’s brain about weaknesses that her stepfather had, anything I could use to get leverage over him.
Unfortunately, it all came down to Ethel. Was she going to sign over the trust to him or not? Cressida was another wild card.
“Guess we never should have hired her, huh?” Walker asked as Josh called up a presentation on the screen. Cressida and Alistair’s pictures were prominent.
“And you also should never have gotten into a position where you were sleeping with your assistant,” Hunter said coldly. “Greg, why am I not surprised you couldn’t keep things under control here? How did you let this slide? Oh wait, I know, because you were too busy wasting time and money stealing Belle Frost’s tower like a toddler.”
“Once we have control, it will pay dividends,” Greg insisted.
“No, it won’t,” Hunter snapped. “You’re just as bad as Beck with his worthless logic of how it’s an absolutely fine idea to keep his assistant on payroll as his fake girlfriend as opposed to, I don’t know, firing her and simply hiring her as a nanny.”
“I was afraid Tess would leave if I fired her,” I admitted. “And then Ethel would fight for our sisters.”
“Well now we’re stuck with Cressida, and you still need to fire Tess, so great fucking job,” Hunter said.
“Are we going to lose Enola and Annie?” Carl asked.
Hunter made a disgusted noise. “It’s unclear. The uncle has as good a case as Beck or any of us do for custody because of the tenuous family connection. This thing could be in court for a while.” My brother closed his notebook. “In the meantime, anybody who doesn’t have a stupid idea on how to solve this problem, please let me know.”
I wasin a daze as I drove back to my office later after stopping in to talk to the girls. They had excitedly shown me their app, but my brain was too occupied with spinning the events of the last few days over in my head.
I needed a way to take their uncle out of the picture.
But I didn’t have any good ideas.
And if I couldn’t come up with something, I would never see my sisters again.
