“Okay, okay. What’s in this apocalyptically important email?”
“Ethan,” she said, trying her best for a gentle tone, “I think somebody’s been fooling with the TLD accounts.” The business wasn’t just any entity. It belonged to and was run by his family, and she didn’t want to sound like she was accusing them of impropriety. Though honestly speaking—if it had been some other company she would’ve given him a list that contained items like possible embezzlement, gross mismanagement and incompetence that bordered on criminality.
Ethan’s gaze suddenly sharpened. “What do you mean, ‘fooling with’?”
Ah, now I have your attention. “Several million dollars seem to be unaccounted for, among other things. Of course, you’ll have to get an audit team to know for sure.”
He swore.
“Look, don’t jump to any conclusions. I might be mistaken—”
He turned to look directly at her. After a moment she broke eye contact. “Right,” he said. “People like you don’t make mistakes.”
Kerri cleared her throat. “Oh. Well, thanks.” She fiddled with her spoon and yogurt. “Anyway, the numbers don’t look great.”
“How bad?” he asked.
“Long story short? The company’s bleeding cash.”
*
Bleeding cash.
What the hell? That wasn’t how The Lloyds Development was supposed to be. Jacob had always said he knew exactly what he was doing. Every Christmas, he toasted to another successful year. The money kept flowing to every member of the family who owned a piece of the company. Ethan had always received his share of the profits as well, direct deposited to his bank account every quarter like clockwork.
He didn’t particularly care about the money coming into his account. The TLD income was minor compared to his other business interests. But several members of the family depended on the dividend, some of whom were retired. Though the quarterly payments were generous, they needed to keep coming; quite a few of the family had expenditures that ate up the whole amount—yachts, fancy club memberships, private beaches, vacation homes. Most of them would be able to downsize if they had to. They could handle the scandal involving Jacob’s bigamy and TLD’s financial trouble. But not both at the same time. The humiliation was too devastating.
Had Jacob run to avoid facing the consequences of his mismanagement? Was the sudden “Vegas stripper wife” just a convenient excuse? He was a prideful man, and hated admitting mistakes or failures.
“Ethan?” Kerri said, her tone calm. Despite the cool “this is just business” expression on her face, her gaze flickered.
“How did you find the problem so quickly? I gave you five years’ worth of data.” Intentionally, as he’d assumed it would take her at least three months to go through everything alone.
“Oh, I’m just, you know. Good with numbers.”
“I’ll say.”
She shrugged. “It only takes one look for me to
memorize a column of figures, and I can do most kinds of math in my head.”
Ethan stared at her. “You have a photographic memory?”
“No, nothing like that.” She blushed. “It’s just this weird thing with numbers.”
“That’s amazing.”
Her answering smile was so uncertain, Ethan had to wonder if this was the first time anyone had ever complimented her on her gift. Perhaps her family thought a talent for math made her odd or something. “Well, I’m glad you found the problem so soon.”
“Was this something you suspected?”
“No. I actually thought the company was doing fine.”
“I see.” She took another sip of coffee. “The quarterly reports actually look pretty convincing on the face of it. But if you start digging into the line items…”
He nodded. “And none of us had any reason to do so.”
“Right. Jacob is family.”