~ * ~
"Grady signed those?" Walter asked once they were all seated in his office, nodding at the folder he'd left with her father yesterday.
Paige dragged her attention off the piles of paperwork on Walter's desk, the grimy machine parts and samples of bedposts on the floor, the mirror frames and drawer-pulls littering the top of the filing cabinet.
"I, um, think I gave you a wrong impression when I called. I just-" She had read somewhere that ‘just' was a word women overused, too often framing themselves as a subordinate. "I need more information," she asserted.
Then she tried to cross her legs and accidentally bumped her toe against Sterling's work boot. He had extended his legs into her personal space. He didn't pull back, too busy looking at something on his phone, but his sprawl felt deliberate, like he was invading her territory.
Get out.
He flustered her. Yesterday had not cleared the air at all. It had left things more cloudy than ever and even a bump of shoes reverberated all the wrong kind of pangs in her. The kind of painful sexual awareness that came of an unrequited crush.
And if he wanted to be in this meeting so badly, why was he texting? Such an annoying man.
"What kind of information?" Walter forced her to drag her attention off his son.
Facing Walter was like dealing with a surly, dopey bear.
Tucking her feet beneath her chair, Paige addressed him with her prepared speech. "It's difficult to advise Dad on whether this is fair compensation when I have no background on the company's financial picture."
‘I' statements were very non-threatening and would hopefully get them off on the right foot.
"You want more money."
"That's not what I said." She pinched one fingernail between the thumb and finger of her other hand, reminding herself to keep this professional.
"Let me explain how this works." Walter was oh-so-patronizing. "The company owns life insurance policies on both your father and I, based on half the company's worth. If he had died from this recent heart attack, this is exactly what would have been paid to me, making it possible for me to buy out his heirs without going broke."
"So if you died, Dad could buy your share?" Paige said, tilting her head to somewhere between naïve and dumb blond.
Beside her, Sterling made a noise, as capable as she was of seeing how things were working.
"No," Walter said with a glacier's worth of chill. "If I died, Sterling would use my benefits to buy your father's share. This is Roy Furnishings."
He punctuated with a hard stare.
"This check is exactly what the life insurance policy on Grady will pay: fifty-percent of the company's net value as shown on the most recent year end statement. I'm taking a loan and I'll keep paying the premiums for his policy out of my own pocket." He touched his shirt magnanimously. "Knowing that eventually that policy will clear the loan. Meanwhile." He tapped a window envelope, then pushed it across to her. "If you need a copy of the financial statement, it's in your folder."
"Yes, I looked at that." Paige took the stapled document from the folder and set it on the edge of Walter's desk with quiet rejection. "Since it hasn't been audited-"
Sterling jerked forward in his seat and snagged the papers.
"There's nothing wrong with our books." Walter glared at the way Sterling flipped pages.
"I don't mean to suggest there is, only that they haven't been professionally examined." Paige kept her expression neutral.
"Audits are expensive and disrupt the office."
"I know what audits do."
"We had a formal one done by the I.R.S. seven years ago. They didn't find anything to complain about."
"Are you serious?" Sterling's voice had the snap of a leather whip.
"That was the last one? Seven years ago?" Paige had heard worse, but-
Walter flushed. "Grady and I agreed that a family business doesn't need to waste profits when we're here to oversee things every day."
"The bank didn't require better security against the line of credit?" Paige asked.
"Bill Thacker knows he's welcome to view our operation anytime."
And practice the LFBA secret handshake while he was here, no doubt.
"Dad," Sterling rebuked. "Bill must have advised you-"
"When I want advice, I ask for it, son."
Oh, smackdown.
There was a lengthy silence. Paige barely breathed, not looking at either man as she waited for them to decide who would blink first. The tension was so thick it filled the room like smoke.
Sterling tossed the statement back onto his father's desk.
"And you never do," he said, slow and low.
"Don't worry about the lack of an audit," Walter said to Paige, ignoring his son.
"I have to." It was hard-wired into her, given her profession, but also her upbringing. "Quite frankly, if you were taking my father's advice on accounting practices, I should be very worried."
Walter's chair squeaked as he leaned forward. "Our procedures are fine. Olinda does our books. You trust her, don't you?"
"I do, but without an audit this offer is an educated guess at best. I can't counsel Dad to sign it."
"He's a grown man. He can sign whatever he wants."
"You can pressure him, that's true." Paige tried not to reveal how tense this confrontation was making her. "But I have his power of attorney while he's in the hospital." She'd insisted on setting one up after his first heart attack. "But you know as well as I do that once he's released, his salary will be covered by your very excellent health insurance. It will be months before he has to think of coming back to work. He can afford to drag his feet and I'll tell him it's in his best interest to do so."
He would anyway, happily. Her father was enough of a prick to enjoy sticking it to old Walt. The contempt between the men went both ways.
"Bitch."
"Dad!"
"Meeting over." Paige gathered her purse, looking for somewhere to put her feet that wouldn't tangle with Sterling's legs.
"The fee for an audit would come straight off the top of this check." Walter stood as she did, rapping his knuckle on the desktop near the envelope.
Sterling stood too and folded his arms, glaring at his father, jaw pulsing.
"You're going against our partnership agreement," Walter accused. "I can buy him out anytime for half the company's worth."
"Do you have a copy of that agreement? Can I see it?" Paige asked.
Walter scowled, hesitated, then dug out a blue file folder from his bottom left hand drawer and flopped it onto the desktop. He couldn't even hand it to her nicely. Such a pig.
Paige picked up the file and started to square it with the folder she still held, but Walter frowned. "That's my copy. Read it now."
She considered asking for a copy, but Sterling moved closer.
She stiffened in surprise, feeling his body heat radiate into her, practically feeling like she'd stepped under a broiler. "What are you doing?"
"I've never seen it either." He obviously expected her to read it now.
She pulled out the pages and dropped the dusty folder onto Walter's desktop, then put a small arc into the pages to hold them straight, but she could barely make sense of the words, feeling hypersensitive of Sterling, pressure from Walter.... In the back of her mind she was thinking of Olinda, and obligations to Britta and the rest of her family as she skimmed for what she was looking for. They were going to hate her for stalling, but- There.
She indicated the paragraph with her thumb, glancing at Sterling's tightening expression as he recognized what it meant, too.
"It says, ‘fair market value.' It doesn't matter what your Year End Statement says the company is worth. You're supposed to pay fair market value."
"What the hell do you think this is?" Walter waved his hand at the papers she'd spurned.
Paige shrugged. "That tells me what the company would be worth if you were to liquidate today. You're not in business to liquidate. You're in business to make money and expect to." Paige wrapped her purse strap so tightly around her hand it cut off the circulation. "So you need an appraiser and I'll warn you now, the appraiser will want an audit."
Call me Sister Mary Sunshine, she thought, as Walter's expression darkened to murderous.
Heart pounding, she pretended calm as she looked for a way around Sterling so she could reach the door.
Sterling didn't notice, too busy staring at his father, while Walter said, "See? They're programmed to go after the dollar and she doesn't care who she has to screw to do it."
"Oh Christ, Dad-"
"Actually I'm extremely selective about whom I screw," Paige spun back to say. "So you can stand down from suggesting I'd target you."
"You cheap, mouthy-"
"Dad!" Sterling barked. "Shut the fuck up."