An Unexpected Christmas Baby. Tara Taylor Quinn

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СКАЧАТЬ her skin go cold again, she stared at him. Was it that bad?

      “Your well-being is one of the top factors that affects my emotional health,” she couldn’t help pointing out to him.

      With a nod, he conceded that.

      He was asking for her help. Nothing else mattered.

      “How soon can I start?” she asked.

      “That was going to be my question.”

      “When you finally got around to telling me you needed something...” The slight dig didn’t escape him.

      “I was going to tell you today. I was just having a bit of trouble getting to it. You’ve been through so much and I don’t like putting more on you...”

      “I make my living by having companies put more on me. It’s what I do, what I strive for.” She grinned at him. He grinned back.

      Her world felt right again.

      “So...is now too soon?”

      “Now would be great. But...there’s one other thing.”

      The knot was back in her stomach. Please, not his health. Had he waited until the stress had taken a physical toll before calling her? “What?”

      “I don’t want to prejudice or influence your findings, but there’s one employee in particular who I think could be the one we’re after. Although I wasn’t able to find anything concrete that says it’s him.”

      Pulling the tablet she always kept in her bag onto her lap, she turned it on. Opened a new file. “Who is he? And why do you suspect him?”

      “His name’s Flint Collins. I took him on eight years ago when he was let go by his firm and no one else would hire him. He’d only been in the business a year, but had good instincts. He was up-front about the issues facing him and looked me straight in the eye as we talked. He was... He kind of reminded me of myself. I liked him.”

      Enough to have been blinded by him? “Have I ever met him? Flint Collins?”

      “No.” Her father didn’t have office parties at home. And rarely ever attended the ones he financed at the office.

      “So what were his issues eight years ago?”

      Not really an efficiency matter, she knew, unless, of course, he was wasteful to the point of being a detriment to the company. But then, this wasn’t just an efficiency case.

      This was her father. And she was out for more than saving his firm a few dollars.

      “His mother was indicted on multiple drug charges. She’d been running a fairly sophisticated meth lab from her home and was dealing on a large enough scale to get her ten years in prison.”

      Had to be tough. But... “What did that have to do with him, specifically?”

      “The trailer she lived in was in his name. As were all the utilities. Paid by him every month. He had regular contact with his mother. He’d already begun to make decent money and was investing it, so he was worth far more than average for a twenty-two-year-old just out of college. Investigators assumed that part of his wealth came from his cut of his mother’s business and named him as a suspect. They froze his assets. Any investors he had at the firm where he worked got scared and moved their accounts. It was a bad deal all the way around.”

      “Was he ever formally charged?” She figured she knew the answer to that. He wouldn’t be working for her father as an investment broker if he had been. But she had to ask.

      “No. He says he had no idea what his mother had been doing. Seemed to be in shock about the whole thing, to tell you the truth. A warrant for all his accounts and assets turned up no proof at all that he’d ever taken a dime from anyone for anything. All deposits were easily corroborated with legitimate earnings.”

      “How’d he do for you?”

      “Phenomenal. As well as I thought he might. He’s one of our top producers. Until recently, I never suspected him of anything but being one of the best business decisions I’d ever made.”

      “What happened recently?”

      “He hooked up with a fancy lawyer. His spending habits changed. He bought a luxury SUV, started taking exotic vacations, generally living high. I’m not saying he couldn’t afford it, just that a guy who’s always appeared to be conservative with his own spending was suddenly flashing his wealth.”

      As in...he’d come into new wealth? Or felt like he’d tapped into a bottomless well? Or was running with a faster crowd and needed more than he was making?

      “There’s more,” her father said. “Last week Bill told me he’d heard from Jane in Accounting that she’d heard from a friend of hers in the office of the Commissioner of Business Oversight that Collins was planning to leave. That he was filing paperwork to open his own firm. Bill says he heard that Collins was planning to take his book of business with him.”

      She disliked the guy. Thoroughly.

      “He can’t do that, can he? Solicit his clients away from you?”

      “No, but that doesn’t mean he won’t drop a word in an ear here and there.” Howard slowly tapped a finger on the edge of his desk, seeming to concentrate on the movement. “As I said, money is a vulnerable business. His clients trust him. They’ll follow him of their own accord.”

      “So he’s going to be direct competition to the man who took a chance on him?” Hate was such a strong word. She didn’t want it in her vocabulary. Anger, on the other hand...

      “I left another firm to start Owens Investments.” Her father’s words calmed her for the immediate moment. “He was doing what I did. Following in my footsteps, so to speak. I just didn’t see it coming from him. I thought he was happy here.”

      “Unless he’s leaving because he knows someone is on to the fact that money is being misplaced.”

      “That’s occurred to me, too. About a hundred times over the past week. A guy who’s opening his own business doesn’t usually start spending lavishly. And if he was the decent guy I thought he was, he would at least have let me know his plans to leave. Which is what I did when I was branching out.

      “And, like I said, he’s the only one here who’s made any obvious changes in routine or lifestyle over the past year. I did some checking into health-care claims and asked around as much as I could, and no one seems to be going through any medical crisis that would require extra funding. I’m not aware of any rancorous divorces, either.”

      “So... I start now and my first visit is to Mr. Flint Collins.”

      Howard nodded. “We need to get a look at every file he has while everything is still here.”

      Which might take some time. “Do you know how soon he’s planning to leave?”

      “Technically, I don’t actually know that he’s going. Like I said, this is all still rumor. He’s given me no indication or made any official СКАЧАТЬ