Chapter 3
Chapter Three
EVERS
"Clive Winters is missing,"
My head jerked up, and the droning boredom of the meeting came into sharp focus.
"What did you say?" I asked, watching my older brother Cooper carefully.
He picked up a pencil and pretended to scribble a note in the file in front of him.
He wasn't taking notes. Asshole was fucking with me.
Clive Winters, a.k.a. Smokey Winters, was my case. Or, it had been until I'd fucked everything up, and my brother Knox had taken Clive off my hands.
Cooper opted not to answer, only raised an eyebrow at me. I turned in my chair to face Knox, slouched in the big armchair beside me, an absurdly-big gas station travel mug in his hand.
He gave me a bland look and said, "What?"
"You fucking lost Smokey Winters? How the fuck did you lose him?"
"Why are you so riled up?" Knox asked in that same bland tone he knew drove me nuts.
Brothers. I'd die for any one of them, but they were a bunch of assholes.
"I care," I said, gritting my teeth, "because he was your case."
Knox shrugged his shoulder and took a long sip of coffee. "If it meant that much, you wouldn't have blown the deal in the first place."
He was wrong. I'd blown the case because I cared. For the first time in my career, I'd tangled together business and pleasure and ended up tied in knots.
Knox was right. I'd fucked the whole thing up.
"Maybe if you'd joined the twenty-first century and stopped using paper files, none of this would have happened," my older brother Axel commented with a sly smile.
Axel ran the Western division of Sinclair Security and lived in Las Vegas. He wasn't in Atlanta often, but he'd shown up the night before, saying only that he was in town on business.
I hadn't had a chance to pry the details from him, but his presence at our meeting told me something was up. Something more than Clive Winters going missing.
Used to the ribbing but unable to ignore the urge to fire back, I said, "I like paper files. Fuck off."
Fuck off. The generic response to brotherly teasing. It worked about as well as it usually did. Not at all.
Axel had a point. Using paper files had been stupid. An old hang-up I'd refused to let go until it had been too late. These days there wasn't a scrap of paper to be found in my office. Every piece of case information was safely stored behind multiple layers of encryption.
I wasn't going to get caught again. Not that it mattered. The worst damage had already been done.
Axel wasn't ready to let it go. "How everything got fucked up doesn't matter. What matters is that Summer's father is off the grid. He's a ghost. We need to find him. Yesterday."
"Is that why you're here?" I asked him.
"In a way." Axel shared a long look with Cooper. "Show him."
Cooper pulled a page from the pile on his desk and handed it to me. Numbers in a list, arranged in columns, notes in Cooper's precise handwriting along the side.
Account numbers, dates, amounts. Payments. Or transfers.
I took in the names, the timeline. Money moving from a hidden account under a shell corporation we suspected our father had set up before he disappeared. Money moving from our father to William Davis, now deceased, and from Davis to fucking Clive 'Smokey' Winters.
Fuck me. This was not good.
Our father, Maxwell Sinclair, had disappeared five years before. We'd thought he died when his car shot through the railing of a bridge into a river swollen from rain.
No body had ever been recovered. A few months ago, information had come to light that suggested Maxwell Sinclair was no more dead than I was.
Dead or alive, he'd left us a mess.
I grew up thinking my father was the king of the universe. He protected celebrities. Royalty. Everyone loved him. Respected him.
That hadn't been enough for Maxwell Sinclair. Since well before I was born, my father had been dabbling on the dark side.
I could only assume he did it for the adrenaline rush. We didn't need the money. He'd inherited tens of millions from my grandfather, and Maxwell had always been good at making money grow.
A few years before he disappeared my brothers and I had taken over leadership of the company. Since then Sinclair Security had almost doubled in size.
Whatever my father was up to, it wasn't about money. From what we'd been able to uncover, he'd roped in an old friend, William Davis, and together the two of them had been into all sorts of ugly shit. Running guns, illegal adoptions, and worse.
The question was what the hell did Clive Winters have to do with any of this? My father and William Davis I could see. They'd been tight since high school, gone to college together, and William, who'd died recently, had been a nutcase.
I didn't have any trouble imagining William operating without a moral compass. And my father? I was learning I knew a lot less about Maxwell Sinclair than I'd thought.
But Smokey Winters… Smokey Winters was a hippie stoner who coasted on alimony from his wife and a family trust he'd managed not to bleed dry. Occasionally, he supplemented his income by slinging weed.
He wasn't very good at it, considering he smoked half of what he was supposed to sell, but Smokey Winters was one of those guys who always managed to get by, one way or another.
I couldn't see him fitting into any puzzle that included my father and William Davis. Yet, here he was, in black and white, in numbers and dates and hefty transfusions of cash.
I stared at those numbers, at Cooper's neat handwriting, and my stomach drew into a knot. Cold, greasy fear settled deep inside me, tendrils spreading to my heart and up my spine.
Summer.
My father was into some bad shit, and if Smokey Winters was involved, that put Summer a hell of a lot closer to any of this than I wanted her to be. If her father was involved, she wasn't safe.
Fuck.
Summer.
Just thinking her name made me want to shut down, to get up and walk out of the room. I didn't want to think about Summer here. She shouldn’t have anything to do with my father’s mess.
From the beginning, from the first time I laid eyes on her, on those long blonde curls and her bright blue eyes, she'd made me crazy. Crazy and stupid. Never in my life had I screwed up so badly with a woman.
"Emma doesn't know about your fuck up," Axel said, not pulling his punch.
"I'm going to be around more until we figure out what's going on with Dad, and eventually she's going to want to come to Atlanta to see Summer.
I suggest you fix whatever you did before she finds out, or she's going to kick your ass. "
"I'm not afraid of your wife," I said with a sneer.
Axel only raised an eyebrow. "Liar."
"If you're not afraid of Emma, you're an idiot," Knox cut in.
I wasn't afraid of Emma Sinclair.
Okay, I was a little afraid of Emma Sinclair.
Emma was an excellent sister-in-law. A redhead with a sharp mind and a bombshell body, she'd hooked Axel the first time he laid eyes on her. She wasn't a ball buster, but she was tough, and she didn't take any crap.
If she found out I'd screwed over her best friend in the entire world? My ass was grass.
"I still don't get why you lied to Summer," Knox said.
"It was easier," I muttered.
"Easy, maybe. That's not why you lied."
Knox wasn't a talker. He saved his words, only using them when they'd do the most good. Or the most damage.
I didn't want to hear what he had to say, but there was no chance he'd let it go.
I should have kept my mouth shut. I didn't.
"Really? Then tell me, oh, wise one, why did I lie?"
"Because Summer Winters scares you shitless. You do know you're not Dad, right?"
Heat flooded my brain and I saw red. Only force of will kept me in my seat.
I ground out, "Shut the hell up. You don't know what you're fucking talking about."
Knox knew exactly how close I was to taking a swing at him. He only sipped from that ugly oversized mug and said, "Go ahead, be pissed. Doesn't make me wrong."
I was. And it didn't.
"Knock it off," Cooper said, eyeing both Knox and me. "Why he lied doesn't matter. It's done. He fucked up and now he's going to fix it."
"Why am I fixing it? If I fucked up so badly why don't you put somebody else on the case?"
Just the thought of one of my brothers 'fixing things' with Summer made the knot in my stomach wind tighter. She wasn't mine anymore, if she ever had been. That didn't mean one of them could have her.
I handed the paper with the banking information back to Cooper. He took it, shaking his head at me in exaggerated patience and a little pity.
"It has to be you. Believe me, I like Summer.
I'd love to spare her dealing with you. You'll be lucky if she doesn't try to kill you in your sleep.
But it has to be you. Summer is our best chance right now at finding her father.
Knox and I are going to keep on his trail, but he's vapor.
Summer, we can track. And the perfect opportunity just fell into our laps. "
Under his breath, Axel muttered, "You're gonna love this one."
"What? Is she all right? Did something happen to her?"
Cooper shook his head. "Summer's fine. You remember she does work for Cynthia Stevens?"
I nodded. Summer's job was odd, but she was good at it.
She was a kind of virtual assistant for a handful of high-profile people.
For some she was hands-on, traveling to work with them a few days a month.
Some she interacted with only over the Internet, managing their email or social media.
Booking flights and arranging appointments.
Whatever they needed, Summer handled. I'd known she worked for Cynthia Stevens here and there.