Chapter 11
Notes:
Cornelius and Terry need more airtime. RIP my OTP. Living on crumbs.
Rowan
“Thank you for coming on such short notice.” Rowan addressed the room as they all settled around a huge oval table in the conference room.
“You said it was urgent.” Troy was stacking folders on top of each other on the table, glaring at Rowan for making him come in so early.
He hated peopling before breakfast. Extroverted as he was, he liked his peace and quiet first thing to cradle his numbers and facts.
Rowan had thrown a wrench in all those plans.
Raina sat next to him in a blue power suit with shoulder pads and seven-inch stilettos, pleased as punch to be there, apparently. When Rowan had reminded her that she wasn’t a part of this project she’d simply said “Dad” and that had been that.
“There have been some proposed changes to the initial building design that will stall construction until the architects can get it back to us.”
“Wasn’t the construction already stalled?” Cornelius asked, his glasses, tie and floating pencil the only things indicating he was sitting in the seat across the table.
Rowan sighed. “Yes, Cornelius.”
“Proposed by who?” Troy asked, bewildered.
Rowan crossed his arms over his chest. “Me.”
“What are you up to?” Raina narrowed her eyes.
“There’s a new prospective client who needs a considerable change to their display. The usual won’t cut it. It’s a very…eccentric hoard. They’d like to include apartments,” Rowan said.
“Who is this client?” Troy asked, shuffling through his papers and looking stressed. “I’ve seen nothing of this.”
“They contacted me personally and I told them I would handle it. They’re a very important client and they’d like their identity to remain a secret.”
“What kind of cloak and dragon shit is this?” Raina demanded. “You don’t talk to clients. You don’t have people skills.”
“My people skills are just fine. Right, Cornelius?”
The tie quivered. “Uhhhh…”
“See?” Rowan said, glaring at his sister.
She snorted. “Does Dad know about this?”
“I sent him an email this morning.” Rowan gave her a smug smile. He didn’t say that he hadn’t looked at the response yet. It was Schrodinger’s inbox.
“New plans are going to take at least a month. We have to get the whole thing signed off again with building regulations and legal!” Troy’s hair was sticking up on end just thinking about it.
“This new client will be worth it,” Rowan said firmly. “And this way the building moves forward.”
“How?” Cornelius asked. “Isn’t that bitey human still there?”
“I’ve sorted that, Cornelius.”
“You have?” Troy asked. “Since when?!”
“I worked over the weekend, of course.” Rowan coughed. Even he was having trouble with his own bullshit. “It was very…productive.”
Raina’s intelligent eyes saw right through him, but she placed a hand on her husband’s arm. “Calm down, honey. This is a good thing. As soon as everything is approved again it’ll be smooth sailing.”
“I need to go crunch the numbers,” Troy muttered, shaking his head.
He got up, taking his papers with him.
“The rest of you can get back to work too. I’ll inform you of your new workflow as we wait for the project to resume,” Rowan said.
The team shuffled out of the room, whispering to each other.
Only Raina stayed behind…and Cornelius.
“Is there anything you need, Cornelius?” Rowan asked.
“Oh, uh, no. I was just assigned to take the minutes and you’re both still in here,” he said, his cat print tie seeming to adjust itself in midair. It was ginger cats today.
“Right. Well, the meeting is over, so you can finish that up.”
“No, Cornelius, stay,” Raina drawled, tapping her claws on the table. “I want a record of me murdering my baby brother.”
“Uhhh…” The floating glasses looked between them, pencil poised over his paper but unsure whether to really write that down.
“We’re fine, Cornelius,” Rowan said with a forced chuckle. “She’s just joking.”
Cornelius looked back at Raina’s serious face, her piercing stare driving daggers through Rowan’s forehead. He laughed uneasily as he gathered up his things. “Sure. Whatever you say.”
His tie, pencil and glasses scurried from the room.
Rowan closed the door behind him firmly and turned on her. “That was unnecessary. Poor Cornelius was about to have a heart attack.”
“What are you really up to?” she demanded, getting up and bracing her clawed hands on the table. “And why are you sending my husband spiraling?”
“I’m not up to anything.”
“You’ve always been a terrible liar.”
“I’m fixing our problem.” That wasn’t a lie and he could tell she saw it. “Haven’t you been encouraging me to do things my way and stop doing everything Dad wants?”
“Don’t flip this around and use my own words against me, you little shit,” she grumbled, but there was no heat in it.
She sank back into her chair and looked at him.
“Do you know what you’re doing? If this goes wrong, there’ll be no hiding it from Dad, and then you’ll really need to have that talk. No more hiding.”
“It won’t go wrong,” Rowan said with a confidence he didn’t feel. But he also couldn’t turn back, something in his chest wouldn’t let him. He’d committed to the insanity that was helping Milo Tobitt.
“Well you better prepare what you’re going to say to him and Mom later about the whole thing. And maybe make it more convincing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Our family dinner? Don’t tell me you forgot.”
Rowan slowly filled with horror. “Cover for me. Say I’m sick. Say I’m blowing up the toilet bowl. Say I died. Cornelius can be a witness!”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Am I?” he demanded. “All they want to talk to you about is the twins. The rest of us aren’t so lucky.”
“Maybe it’ll be different this time.”
“It’s never different! And I’ll have to sit there and listen to Dad dictate my future and agree over shrimp tartare.”
“Get the beef, then. Mix it up.”
“I hate you.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know, the way to fix this problem is actually in your hands. If you’d actually talk to the man…”
“You know I can’t.” Rowan looked away.
Raina sighed. “Just come for a little while. I’ll help you beg off early. I’ll even field some questions for you. I have a whole folder of kid videos to distract them with.”
Rowan’s face softened. “Really?”
She got up and socked him in the arm. Hard. “What are big sisters for, huh?”
“Torture?” he grumbled, cupping his stinging bicep.
“Exactly!” She grinned with all her teeth before ruffling his hair. “You’ll survive until you buck up your courage, little dragon.”
And then she swept out of the room.
The end of the day and the impending Dinner of Doom rolled around too fast.
After successfully dodging his siblings and father for the day, he had no choice but to meet them in the lobby so they could travel over together and meet Ruben and their mother at the restaurant.
Riley was sitting in one of the plush leather seats by the reception desk, tapping away on her phone. She cast him one offhand look as he got off the elevator as acknowledgment before turning her eyes back to whatever it was she found more interesting right now.
Their dad was on the phone with his back to him, thank heaven for small mercies, while Raina was canoodling with Troy, who had finally calmed down from the conniption Rowan had sent him into.
Rowan felt awkward standing there with nothing to do and too much that he would never say bubbling under the surface.
It always felt like this, had done ever since he’d realized he didn’t want the future that had been set before him. The legacy that all his siblings had passed down the line, one by one, until it had landed on him. The last one.
He was their father’s pride and joy. The one who was going to take over and run the company exactly as he had envisioned it.
Sometimes being the youngest wasn’t the easiest.
Rowan was his father’s last chance and he was painfully aware of the expectations heaped on his shoulders.
He couldn’t let them fall.
“Rowan! There you are,” his father said.
Rowan blinked back into focus and forced a smile.
Rupert Rangecroft was as tall as the rest of them, his short, bright red hair peppered with white.
For a fifty-plus-year-old he was still remarkably spry, though dragons lived longer than their human counterparts, so that wasn’t surprising.
Rowan and his siblings all got their seriousness of expression from him, his features all prominent and strong, making him appear intimidating to anyone who ran across him.
But in personality he was affable, if very demanding.
“Dad.”
“I replied to your email about the project, but you didn’t respond,” he said, a hint of censure in his words.
“Sorry, I was swamped with work,” Rowan said.
“He had to hand half his workload to me,” Raina lied with faux anger. “You didn’t put me on the team just to be the whipping boy, did you, Dad?”
He chuckled. “Of course not, Raina. I’m glad to hear things are moving ahead, even with the complications. I was worried there for a moment.”
“There’s nothing to worry about. I have it all handled.” Rowan squirmed inside.
“I’d expect nothing less.” His dad laughed, light and with no idea of the weight he kept piling on.
“Do we have to talk shop all day? I thought we just clocked out?” Riley drawled, not looking away from her phone screen.
“You’re right, Riles. We should leave work at the office. Let’s go meet your brother and mother,” their dad said, checking his watch.
They hailed a cab and all piled in, Rowan keeping quiet for most of the journey, dreading what was to come.
As he stared out of the window, he inexplicably thought of Milo, wondering where he was and what he was doing. If he were here then none of the attention would be on Rowan. He would draw focus and Rowan would be able to breathe.
He found himself wishing he was.
Notes:
Milo, come save our Rowan. He doesn’t want to people anymore :(