Chapter Twelve

Chase ended the call with Max and instantly called his sister upstairs.

The third floor of the main headquarters of Stone Enterprises had been an empty space when his father had died. Instead of expanding the company, which was not what Stone Enterprises needed at that time, Chase and Alex agreed to move the offices of Chase’s shipping company, CMS, to a new location. Trying to run his own company and being available to pull his weight at Stone Enterprises became increasingly difficult when they were in opposite directions of the city.

While there was still construction going on in his new office space, and some of the staff had yet to make the transition, the core of CMS had been transferred over.

The office phone number Chase dialed was answered by his fiancée.

Hearing Piper’s voice always put a smile on his face.

“Good morning, Alex Stone’s office, how can I help you?”

“Let me count the ways.”

The prim and practiced voice faltered, and Piper laughed. “I have got to get someone in IT to flag your name when you call from your office.”

“Don’t bother—you’re not going to be at that desk for long.”

“You’re firing me?” she teased.

“It’s called maternity leave.” And when and if she wanted to return to the office, Chase would not want her in the executive secretary seat. She’d be a Stone and was too damn valuable to be answering phone calls and setting up appointments. But that was a conversation for another day.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Is Alex there?”

“She’s on a call. Do you want me to interrupt her?”

“No, I’ll come up.”

“Have you talked to Mr. Smith?”

Mr. Smith was how they referred to Max when anyone else could hear. And in the executive office space, someone was always in earshot unless the door to the office was closed.

“Yes.”

“I’ll let her know you’re on your way.”

Ten minutes later, Chase sat beside his fiancée on the sofa in what was once his father’s office. It had changed a lot since he and Alex had taken over. The office was now exclusively Alex’s. Chase had taken over the office of Floyd Gatlin, the vice president of Stone Enterprises, and a meeting room space was converted into Floyd’s new office. A move that didn’t sit well with the man. Then again, nothing had sat well with him since Aaron’s death. His access to the corporate jet for weekends in Vegas with his mistress was not part of the new management agenda. And the fact that Gatlin believed he’d be in the CEO office after the death of his boss had left the man bitter.

“Max met with the reporter.”

Alex shook her head. “I don’t like this.”

“I said the same thing. According to Max, she’s trying to make a name for herself and can’t do that by writing fiction. He believes she’ll be able to get the parts of the story we want out at the same time we’re holding a board meeting.”

Alex paced the room. “Why a tabloid? Why did the person that tipped off the media choose a tabloid?”

“I think I have the answer to that one,” Piper said.

Chase and Alex both turned to Piper.

“Mainstream media wouldn’t chase a name connected to your father like a tabloid will. Tabloids need sensationalized crap to sell copies. The Times doesn’t.”

“You have a point,” Alex said.

“It was a woman, by the way,” Chase said. “The person who tipped off the media.”

The room filled with silence.

“Melissa,” Alex muttered. “It has to be her.”

“I think you’re right, but why?” Chase agreed.

“Havoc,” Alex pointed out. “The woman hates us and wants us to fail.”

“She wants more of the pie. If she undermines your credibility here, there’s a chance someone on the board will push hard to investigate Aaron’s trust, when she can’t,” Piper said.

“We need to come clean with the board fast. Rip off the Band-Aid. Is the PR person ready to go?” Alex took a seat behind her desk.

“For what you’re paying her? Yes,” Piper told them.

“This is what we need to do,” Alex started. “Chase, get Max on board. Piper, call ... what’s her name again?”

“Christina Kelly.”

“Call Ms. Kelly ... set this up for tomorrow night. We meet at the mansion. Is that good for both of you?”

“Why the mansion?” Chase asked.

“Because Melissa knows we both dislike the place, and if she’s watching us or has people watching us, she’ll be tipped off that we’re mobilizing if we do this at either of our homes. The mansion has gates, and we can hire extra security. We’ll set up a board meeting for Friday. Tell them we’re finally prepared to vote on the Starfield acquisition.”

“And this reporter?” Chase asked.

“We’ve hired someone to guide us on that. I say we let her. And we need Cadry there.”

“What is our lawyer going to do?”

“Affirm Max’s vote on the Starfield acquisition.”

Chase glanced at Piper. “So we are voting?”

“If Max is willing to, yes. If he needs time or wants more information, Cadry will need to be witness to his wants. Time the board will not like hearing is being extended.” Alex moved at light speed. Already, her fingers were flying over her keyboard.

“I thought we were going to ease Max into this.”

“That was before the reporter showed up. We have a small window of time to be proactive instead of reactive. Set up the board meeting for Friday.”

Chase knew his sister was right, but damn, he wished they had more time. “We’ve only known our brother for two weeks.”

“It’s unfortunate it has to be this way. The only upside is the board can’t fault us for holding back Max’s existence after we found him for any length of time. The delay up until then was all on Dad and his will.”

“That doesn’t mean they won’t.”

“The weekend is going to be a shit show,” Piper exclaimed.

Alex lowered her head in her hands. “Much as I hate to say this, I think we might consider hunkering down together in Beverly Hills. We thought Dad’s death was a circus—this is going to be ten times bigger.”

The three of them released a collective sigh.

“We need to go shopping.”

Max stared at Ms. Kelly with surprise written all over his face. He’d been at Aaron Stone’s estate for all of thirty minutes. Outside of introductions, Ms. Kelly hadn’t said five words to him.

“You don’t like my clothes?”

“It has nothing to do with personal preference and everything to do with appearances, Mr. Stone.”

“Smith. Mr. Smith.”

Ms. Kelly, who asked that she be addressed as Ms. Kelly, was in her mid- to late fifties. Her long hair was going gray, and unlike most women her age, she was embracing the look and enhancing the gray with black undertones that looked like something you’d see on the cover of a magazine. She was rail thin and wore a suit jacket over a matching pair of pants with a white shirt.

Alex, Chase, Piper, and Max were all dressed relatively casually, although Alex always seemed to wear a step up from casual.

The lawyer was exactly as he’d been the last time. Suit, tie, and a stiff back.

Max was in jeans, a flannel shirt, and a pair of tennis shoes.

And since when did he take any time to notice what everyone was wearing?

“Are you changing your name?” she asked.

“Why would I do that?”

She looked at him like he was nuts. “Why wouldn’t you?”

Max saw indifference in his siblings’ eyes and went with his gut. “My name stays the same.”

“People will still call you Mr. Stone.”

He shrugged. “That’s on them.”

“Regardless, we need you dressed for the cameras that will swarm. First impressions are critical.”

“Suits and ties aren’t my thing.”

“No one is expecting you to look like a version of our father,” Alex told him. “But she’s right. The board is used to business attire. We need to grab their respect as quickly as possible and not give them anything inconsequential to focus on.”

“My clothes will do that?”

“Unfortunately,” Piper said.

“I got you. I’ll recruit Nick. This is right up his alley. You tell him what you like, what you don’t like, and he’ll have you wearing clothes you will wish you’d had your whole life,” Alex said.

“Who is Nick?”

“A friend,” Alex said.

“You’ll love him,” Piper assured Max.

“Glad that’s settled.” Ms. Kelly waved a hand in front of her chin. “Can we clean this up a little?”

“You don’t have to,” Chase told him.

“I’ve been thinking about doing it anyway. But I’m not shaving it off. I’m not going to look like you,” he said, pointing at Chase.

They both laughed.

Ms. Kelly removed a small laptop from a case at her side.

They had convened in the massive living room, where the sofas could fit six people and the chairs would swallow a petite woman.

“I looked you up on social media—”

“I’m not there.”

“That works to our advantage,” she said. “Everyone who has ever known you is going to come out. Kids you went to school with, employers, coworkers, teachers, neighbors ... Your newfound wealth will give them their fifteen minutes of fame, and they will jump at the chance to be in front of a camera. What do you expect your friends will say?”

Max found the question odd. “I don’t have a lot of close friends.” Jeff was the closest he had, and that was more work and less weekends.

“Nobody lives in a bubble.” Ms. Kelly made eye contact and didn’t look away.

“Ahh. I work with a guy named Jeff.”

“What would Jeff tell a reporter about you?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I’m a hard worker?”

Ms. Kelly slumped slightly in her chair. “Let’s go at this a different way. How much do you drink?”

Max lifted the water bottle at his side. “Not often.”

“Drugs?”

He shook his head.

“What about as a teenager?”

“Why is that relevant?” It felt like this was becoming an interrogation.

She sat taller and folded her hands in her lap. “If you took gummies in high school, we spin that as any teenager exploring the things their friends were into. Adderall, you were driven and wanted to stay focused. Cocaine equates to a lack of a father growing up and you running with the wrong crowd. If you were cooking your own meth and someone wants to blackmail you to keep that out of the press, I want to know now. This isn’t judgment, Mr. Smith. It’s public relations. And like it or not, everything in your life will become public knowledge. The juicier it is, the quicker it will be found.”

Max paused . . . blinked.

Things started to come into focus.

“Okay ... Alcohol and pot were a thing. Started in middle school and followed me to high school. I tried something else at a party once, have no idea what it was. Hated it and didn’t experiment again. I didn’t sell or make drugs. I stole the liquor from the group homes I was in or the foster family I was with. There were a lot of them. The pot came from the same source. Or my friends got it from their parents’ stash.”

Ms. Kelly typed as he spoke.

“Any record?”

Max looked at Chase.

Chase answered before Max could. “That’s sealed.”

“How sealed?”

“We don’t have to worry about it.”

“I was a kid,” Max added. “I got in a few fights.”

She nodded. “Nothing as an adult?”

“No.”

“What will your ex-girlfriends say about you?”

That made him laugh. The image of the last woman in his life screaming that he was “emotionally unavailable” before storming out the door flashed. “I’m not a relationship guy.”

She kept typing. “No children?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“A hundred percent.”

Ms. Kelly looked up. “No man can be one hundred percent sure unless they’re celibate.”

Max’s gaze traveled to Piper, then back to Ms. Kelly. “I had a vasectomy when I was twenty-one.”

Piper gasped, and Alex asked, “What?”

He witnessed the disbelief of everyone in the room.

Max shrugged and didn’t add anything else on that subject.

Ms. Kelly took a few seconds to recover, then continued her questions.

Eventually, the spotlight went away from him and onto Alex and Chase. What kind of light did they want to shine on their dead father?

“Much as we want to call him out as the ass that he was, the company and the board need to see absolute professionalism,” Alex responded.

“And what about the mother? In our early conversation, you said she was still alive.”

“So far as we know,” Piper told her.

“Are you actively searching for her?”

“Yes,” Chase answered. “But we don’t want that known. She might run. Truth is, she took the child support and abandoned Max at the age of two.”

The lawyer finally spoke up. “She may even have to face criminal charges from the state since they were the ones on the hook after she disappeared. I’ll look into the details.”

Ms. Kelly turned to the lawyer. “Why did Aaron Stone ask that Max’s existence not be known until after he was found?”

“He thought it was in the best interest of Stone Enterprises and his children.”

She sat up taller and closed her computer.

“Under normal circumstances, I would write up statements and send them to all the media outlets at one time. Which I will do after your board meeting. This reporter ... is she able to get the statements out during the time of this board meeting?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Is a tabloid a concern?” Alex asked.

“It might work to our advantage. They publish the statement that we give to everyone, and she puts in a personal interview with all the things we want out there. If we have only one reporter that you’re talking to, we can control the quotes coming out of your mouth. Tabloids are often dismissed, but they aren’t always wrong. If the tabloid is only saying good things, the others will follow suit until they find dirt. And when they do ... and they will, we use this connection to spin the dirt as best we can.”

“How long do you expect this to go on?” Max asked.

“The first couple weeks will be the most intense. With any luck, a bigger story will come along. And things will spike anytime there is news at Stone Enterprises to share. Which I assume will be a lot in the next year. There’s a baby ... a wedding.”

“Not my baby or my wedding,” Max said.

“That won’t matter,” Piper said softly. “We’re all connected at this point. If you come to the wedding, the media will want to know how that was for you. If you don’t come, they’ll really want to know why you weren’t there. How does it feel to be an uncle when you didn’t have a family last month? If you date someone more than twice ... are you getting married?”

“It doesn’t really end, Max. It gets quiet, and then it revs back up. Chase and I didn’t deal with a lot of this growing up. Mainly because we were so estranged from our father. Our mom kept as much of that away from us as possible. And we were kids, and there are rules and laws about kids and the media. But as adults, we still had the occasional run-in with reporters and photographers. But since Dad’s death, it’s been nonstop.” Alex reached for her wineglass and sat back in the chair she was in. “It’s going to be a circus for a little while, Max. There’s no way around it. We think it would be best if we all spent next weekend here once the news breaks.”

“What’s the logic behind that?” Max asked.

“There will be news vans at our homes, waiting for us to come and go in an effort to learn more. Especially yours. How do you think you’re going to respond if you can’t get out of your driveway without reporters rushing you and cameras flashing?”

The image of his beat-up neighborhood infested with reporters made him grin. “I can handle it.”

“We’re going to be here,” Alex told him. “The gates and fences will keep the vultures at arm’s reach. We’ll hire security.”

“Is that necessary?”

Alex glanced at Piper. “The baby isn’t due for another five weeks, but you never know what will happen. If we need security to clear the place so we can get out of here, we’ll have them.”

Max shook his head. “I think you guys are overreacting.”

“Hopefully we are. If not, we’re prepared.”

Ms. Kelly placed her computer back in her bag and stood.

Kit, the dog that had been sleeping at Piper’s feet, looked up with the movement in the room and then quietly rested his snout on his paws.

“I’ll have the statements for the press and an outline of what I think you should reveal to this reporter by the morning. More importantly, I’ll give you my suggestions on what shouldn’t be public knowledge quite yet,” Ms. Kelly said.

There were handshakes and quiet goodbyes before Chase walked her out of the house.

“Time to get down to some business,” Stuart said.

“There’s more?” Max asked.

Alex set her wineglass down and unfolded from her chair. “We’re able to get the board to convene on the premise of a vote we’ve put off since we took over,” she told him. “Our father was in the process of acquiring the Starfield hotel chain.”

Chase walked back into the room while Alex started to pace.

“Isn’t that an exercise in formality if Aaron had the majority shares and his vote is the only one that really counted?” Max asked.

“Yes, but much like a courtroom, the board has an opportunity to argue their points before the vote. In any event, this vote has been put off. We can’t vote with shares that aren’t ours. You have a twenty-one percent say. Stuart is here as a legal representation of your vote or desire to hold off on voting.”

“How am I supposed to vote on something I know nothing about?”

Piper handed him a folder that sat in front of her on the coffee table. “This is what the board will see.”

“No one here expects you to digest all of that, Max. Hell, I hardly know what it says,” Chase said.

“It says it’s a bad deal,” Alex huffed. “Starfield was in trouble before 2020, and they didn’t recover when life returned to normal. Yes, that makes them ripe for a sale, but even though it’s a bargain, it’s wrong for us.”

Max glanced at the papers. “I’ve never even heard of Starfield hotels.”

“They’re boutique hotels primarily back east. Half a dozen. They go by different names, but the company that owns them is Starfield.”

Max’s eyes landed on the price. “Is this right? Six hundred and fifty million?” Holy shit.

“That’s what it is. And Stone Enterprises can’t afford it. We need to be cutting, not adding,” Alex told him.

“Dad seemed to be in the process of acquiring every possible chain out there in the past ten years, more so in the last three. We’re not sure of his reasoning.” Chase took a seat next to his fiancée.

“He was obsessed with being larger than anyone else,” Piper told them. “I heard him say that many times.”

Max closed the folder and tossed it on the table. “Then you’re voting no.”

“We are. Our votes make up forty-two percent. With yours, it’s nonnegotiable. But if you voted yes, there’s a chance the board would be with you, and it could go the other way.”

“Which is why I’m here,” Stuart spoke up. “You have options, Max. Have you heard of a silent shareholder or silent partner?”

“Yes. It’s someone that has money in the company but doesn’t do the work, right?”

“Correct. In lieu of you taking a crash course in running a billion-dollar company and making six-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar decisions, we can tell the board that you are staying a silent partner for the time being. In essence, following the votes of Chase and Alexandrea and their expertise. You can change that at any time. This is verbiage the board will understand and can’t argue with.”

“That won’t stop them from trying to persuade you to break the silent thing and vote their way,” Alex said.

Max ran a hand down his face and shook his head. “I have no business spending company money I know nothing about. Maybe that will change down the road, but right now, no.”

“You can take time to think about this. You can listen to the arguments of the board before a vote,” Stuart said.

“If I follow you and vote no on this, is the company going to fold? Are we going to lose something?” Max asked, looking between Chase and Alex.

“No. Not in this case. It would take years and more millions to make this deal profitable. Look at it this way. It’s like saying no to buying a house. If the one you’re looking at doesn’t work for you, you walk away. If it’s out of budget and you’ll have to struggle to make the payment ... you walk away. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Max shrugged. “I’m not ready to buy a house. And I don’t want to invite a bunch of people I don’t know to talk to me about any of this.” He’d feel like an idiot. He imagined that everyone in that office had a fancy education. He barely scraped together his GED. “The smartest thing I can do is stay silent until I know enough to break that silence.”

Stuart handed Max a single sheet of paper. “I kept this as simple as I could while still being legal. In short, it says that you’re deferring your vote on this matter to Alex and Chase. My advice is that we verbally tell the board that you wish to remain silent. But to protect you, we avoid putting anything in writing until you fully grasp what that entails.”

“Protect me from who?”

“Us,” Alex said quickly as she pointed at Chase. “You have nothing to worry about with us, but as you’ve said before, we don’t know each other. I know if I were in your shoes and someone started shoving papers in my face to sign over my vote from now on, I’d second-guess their motives.”

“We never want you to question us,” Chase added. “We also know that trust needs to be earned. And that takes time.”

Max sat quietly for a full minute.

He might not know enough about his brother and sister to trust them as they said, but he sure as hell knew enough to respect what they were doing.