She threw her purse into the car, then leaned on it, sighing heavily.
"You know as well as I do that the offer on the table is bullshit." She flicked a look at him that dared him to argue.
He pushed his hands into his pockets. "It's an opener," he qualified. "Better numbers come through negotiation."
"I'm not trying to get more money to be a jerk. Half is half. If the company is worth more, yes, Dad would get more, but the company would be worth more."
"I understand basic math," he said flatly.
"Has any money gone into that place since we were working there in high school?" She searched his gaze, hers reflecting the same disbelief he was trying to ignore because it would mean he should do something. The eye contact went on a little too long, started to become something else.
She looked away, blushed a little, and muttered, "It's like an interactive museum."
He snorted, trying to get a grip on whether he was amused or horny or frustrated or annoyed and filling with despair. All of the above.
"Listen, I think an audit is a good idea," he admitted. "But you can't do it if you're working there, can you? That would be a conflict of interest."
"My findings could be questioned in court, but purely for the purposes of arriving at a figure for a buy out? If your father agrees to my doing it..." She shrugged. "That's for him to decide."
"So that's what you want to do? Work at the factory, audit the books-"
"I don't want to. But Dad's tired. It's not the heart attack talking. He's ready to retire."
It would be a lot easier to resent her if she didn't look so miserable. Or make so much sense when she lifted her clear-eyed gaze to his.
"That factory has weathered some rough times. It's solid. It could be a much stronger enterprise with a fairly modest investment. That's my gut feeling. Selling when it's declining is dumb. Letting your dad run it further into the ground, while their best salesmen is off sick and we wait out an audit... That's even dumber. Buying Dad out is quite a cash suck, too. If I were sitting down with clients, I would tell them it's not in the factory's best interest to buy out a partner right now. I would suggest getting new blood in there and acting like they want a future. I would tell my Dad to hold onto his investment for at least a year because it's going to appreciate."
Sound advice and pretty much what he would say, too.
But.
"That new blood is you?" he prompted.
She fingered through her keys, mouth going down at the corners. "I don't want it to be. I really don't. But Dad will sell otherwise and..." She looked up at him, brow furrowed. "If it was just Dad looking after his own retirement, I'd tell him to do whatever he wants. But that money has to stretch for a lot of people."
"So you're going to do it? Take over from Grady?" Forget throwing a Hail Mary. He was throwing the whole damned game. Fuck.
"I'm going to go for a nice long drive, then sleep in my own bed. I'll think about at least doing an audit to settle on a fair price, hopefully come up with a better solution. Let your Dad know I'll call him Monday."
She opened her car door and slid inside as fat raindrops beginning to patter around him.
Texas, suddenly, seemed a long way away.
Chapter Seven
Paige spent the weekend coming to terms with everything, ignoring the phone, sleeping on and off through the day, talking to her employer, then talking to her Dad again, making him an offer he couldn't refuse. She would trade away her weeks in Palm Springs so he could have the timeshare now; he would give her full control of his share in Roy Furnishings. Full.
She didn't want to do it, but she kept coming back to what she hadn't quite said aloud to Sterling: if she took on the partnership in the factory, she could sell when she thought the price was right and take control of how to disburse its value. She could make sure her mother, Olinda, even Rosie if it turned out to be necessary, received what her father owed them.
At least her boss had given her a leave of absence for six months, not wanting her to quit outright.
She sighed, wishing she could have stayed in Seattle and pretended none of this was her problem. Instead she had to work up the courage to leave her car and enter the Roy Furnishings building. It was like staring at shark-infested waters, knowing she had to dive into them and could only pray she would reach land before she was torn to shreds.
Ugh.
Paige unwound her white fingers from the steering wheel so she could run them through her hair and felt the catch of hairspray. Damn it, she'd forgotten she'd pasted it so carefully into place. Now she'd go in there with bed-head, instead of possessing an air of sophisticated authority.
Confidence was ninety percent the outward appearance of it. At least, that's what she'd always told herself.
Fussing her hair back into place while craning her neck to see herself in the rear view mirror, she acknowledged that she was kidding herself, thinking she could make a worse impression than she already had. Walter was going to welcome her as warmly as a barium enema.
At least Sterling wouldn't be here. It would be her and Walter, and hopefully six months at most.
Forcing herself to leave the safety of the car, she walked across the parking lot and entered the glass door of the entrance.
To a world of silence. It was like The Quiet Earth in here.
"Hello?" she called.
The computers were outdated and not worth much, so no one was likely to rob them, but this was weird.
"Hello?" Paige called again, reminding herself she worked here now. It was okay to wander through the archway and past Olinda's abandoned desk, down the hall to glance into the empty break room.
The absence of the hum of machinery inside the factory walls kept her from climbing the stairs. Perhaps something had happened out on the floor?
She cautiously pushed into the world she'd only glimpsed briefly, years ago when she'd worked in the office. The temperature dropped five degrees and it smelled like sawdust and metal out here, with an underlying waft of cool, outside air.
The receptionist she'd seen last week was standing just inside the door. She turned her head and whispered, "Walter expected you fifteen minutes ago. He started without you."
Started what? Paige followed her gaze to where everyone was gathering in a group.
Oh, goody. Walter had rallied the troops for a public stoning.
She tried to fold her arms against the chill, but her briefcase was too heavy in her left hand and her other one was full of purse and insulated coffee mug.
Walter stood head and shoulders above the gathering, standing on a platform that had been raised by a forklift. He was addressing the crowd like a politician delivering his stump message.
Oh, goody. Worse than a stoning. Speeches.
His voice echoed off the concrete walls and his expression was predictably under-enthused. "...it's not just our product that is meant to last for generations. The company has been handed down over the years as well. Today we're in that position again."
He was reading from something, glancing at people in the front row as he spoke, behaving so not impressed it was hard to watch.
At least he was making an effort to smooth things over. She relaxed a fraction, grateful for the small favor. Unless he intended her to stand beside him and address the crowd herself, at which point she'd hold her breath until she fainted.
"New blood is a shot in the arm..." Walter stretched his arm forward as if struggling to focus on the page, frowned at what he was reading, then, without referring to the written speech, said to the front row, "but it needs to be tempered with experience. So I'll still be here, taking an active role in the running of the company."
Was that supposed to be a warning?
Walter wasn't looking at her. He was staring at the people closest to him.
Paige went onto her tip-toes long enough to see the dark curly hair of Evelyn Roy, Walter's wife, along with some of the long-term Roy employees: Olinda was up there, and so was Quinn, the factory foreman, an enormous African American who had intimidated her back when she'd worked here that summer.
"In fact, I'm not so much handing over the reins as training my successor," Walter said. "Because one day Sterling will own the company, but not yet."
Paige felt as though she'd broken off the heel of one of her pumps, staggering a step as she absorbed the shock. And then Quinn shifted and she could see the spikes of Sterling's blond hair, saw Sterling step forward and say something to his father, and watched Walter scan the crowd until he found Paige.
It hit her like a poison dart, that hostile glare.
"Sterling just reminded me. Grady's daughter will be standing in for him, but I'll buy her out as soon as possible."
All heads swiveled toward her. A hundred apathetic expressions turned avidly curious.
Wonderful. She couldn't feel more welcome. And since when was Sterling going to be here? Walter hadn't said anything about that when she'd called him. Although she'd kept the conversation very short, simply stating that Grady was retiring and she would be exercising the option clause until she could determine the company's value, at which point she would let him buy her out. They could talk more today, she had said.