“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Are you sure you didn’t know who Patrick Crenshawe is? I mean, his name is huge when it comes to mergers and acquisitions — and that’s before you even think about the power of the Silver Claw pack.”
I shrugged. “Positive. Think how much easier my life would be right now if I’d had a clue.” I laughed, but even to me, it sounded forced. “My typical luck, right? Sleep with a random guy and it turns out he’s trying to buy my company out from under me. It’s like dreaming you’ve turned up to school naked.”
“Yeah!” Wes laughed, too. “You couldn’t write it.”
“I think it’s maybe because at Rosary, I just liked to work. I only looked at the accounts that were handed to me for bookkeeping, and they were all small to medium-sized, and fairly boring, if that’s the right word.” I shrugged. “I didn’t need to be aware of much else.”
“Especially as you were hiding, anyway.”
“Yeah.” I nudged some of Dad’s paperwork around his desk. “I was pretty good at that part, to be honest.”
Wes and I fell quiet for a short while, looking through paperwork and working on a rough alphabetical system. I had no idea how to best organize all of this, or even what Dad had found in all of it.
That was another thing to ask Charmaine.
When she knocked on the door before bustling back through, she had her phone in her hand. “It was easiest to just call up the info on this for you to look at right here,” she explained. “He has like an entire Wiki dedicated to him.”
“Told you he was well-known to everyone but you,” Wes said, and I grimaced.
“Where shall I start?” Charmaine scrolled on her phone.
“Anything recent, I suppose.” I wandered back to my office chair and sat down to listen.
“Ooh! This is kind of interesting.” She lowered her voice like she was about to share a secret, and we all automatically leaned forward. “It says here that one of the companies recently acquired by Apex was absolutely riddled by scandal and has been investigated by the authorities shortly after the deal was done.” She stopped and raised an eyebrow. “Huh. Seems like he’d do his due diligence a little better, right? That kind of shit can’t be good for his reputation. It looks like the previous owners are on the hook for money laundering and embezzlement…”
She was still talking as my wolf stirred, and I took a deep breath of leather and the scent of money, of wealth.
Oh, hell. The scent of Patrick. Right where he wasn’t supposed to be.
Except I knew he was there even before he threw open the door because my body responded to his presence with lust and desire. But both Charmaine and Wes gasped and sprang away from our loose huddle as soon as he appeared.
Then with a single, silent jerk of his head, he dismissed my staff from the office.
Apparently, no one hung up on Patrick Crenshawe.
8
PATRICK
“Jackson!” I yelled out to him from my desk, being lazy as usual, and just expecting him to answer my call.
But that was what people did. I called their name, they came. I said jump, they asked how high. They phoned me, they spoke.
No one ever rang me up and terminated the call when I answered.
He appeared at my door. “What?”
“You want to reverse look up this number for me?” But really, I already knew who’d called. I knew it the moment I heard her breathing. My balls had tightened and I’d waited to hear her voice, too.
Then nothing.
She’d hung up.
Jackson sighed. “Really? Am I your vice president or your personal assistant?”
I smirked. “Well, if you really want me to answer that…”