The kid had no idea. Lee was dead because of him. Because of the mistakes Arthur had made. Mistakes he desperately needed to remedy before someone else got killed.
Troy’s hand slid over the straight black hair he slicked back with pomade, and Arthur bit back a laugh. Who did the kid think he was? Fucking Elvis Presley?
Troy had his mother’s pretty face, but a weak chin and devious eyes. When it came to women, his old man’s money made up for it.
“I need to talk to you about the latest developments in the Poseidon deal,” Troy said.
“What about them?”
“Surely you can see this whole thing has gotten out of hand. The helo crash was only supposed to be another accident. No one was supposed to get killed. Garrett wasn’t even supposed to be aboard. For God’s sake, his brother’s a detective. His whole family’s connected to law enforcement in some way. All hell would have broken loose if he’d been the guy who took a chunk of rotor blade between the eyes.”
Arthur leaned back in his chair, making the springs squeak. He was forty pounds overweight and had a heart condition. Too bad the guy who’d killed his son hadn’t shot him instead—saved everybody a lot of trouble.
“You’re the one who came up with the idea,” Arthur reminded him.
“True, but—”
“You and Reese Garrett have a history, as I recall. You went to college together. According to your dad, Reese beat your ass at pretty much everything you competed at, including women.”
“I don’t like the bastard. That wasn’t the reason I suggested we try to take over the deal.”
“No?”
“Dammit, we need that platform. Our market share is in the toilet. First those North Texas wells fizzled out, then we hit a couple of expensive dry holes. We’re on the verge of bankruptcy. We have to do something to save the company.”
“We are doing something. Soon as Garrett pulls out, we’ll be taking over the purchase of the rig.”
“We should have bought the Poseidon when it first came up for sale.” The rig was the best deal to come up on the secondary market, located just ninety miles off the coast and a good, steady producer.
“We didn’t know it was going to sell so cheap,” Arthur reminded him. “Now, with all the accidents, it’s worth even less than it was then. If we take over Garrett Resources’ position, we’ll be able to raise the capital we need to close the sale. Once we own the platform, we can expand even further into offshore drilling. Our market share will go back up and the company will be worth something again.”
Troy fell silent. Until recently, the kid was used to living the high life: trendy designer clothes, accounts at the finest restaurants, a silver Porsche Carrera. With business way off, he had to be worried as hell.
Arthur shifted in the leather chair behind his desk. “I say we keep at it awhile longer. Garrett is good at his job. All the problems with the rig, he’s bound to be thinking of cutting his losses. Once he backs out, we step in and close the sale.”
Troy nodded, the hint of a satisfied smile on his face. Arthur had a feeling he was doing exactly what the kid had intended from the start.
“I don’t like it,” Troy said. “But I guess we’ve got no choice. I’ve got a couple more things already lined up. We can move forward with those, but if Garrett still doesn’t back out, we need to try something else.”
“Agreed,” Arthur said. But there wasn’t anything else to try. He had already exhausted every avenue he could think of before his new partner had talked him into this crazy scheme.
He glanced at Troy, saw something dark in his eyes. The kid was far more ruthless than his father, something Arthur had only recently discovered. A real wolf in sheep’s clothing and used to getting his way.
Nothing Arthur could do about it, and he had his own problems to solve. He only had one more son. Daniel was the best thing he had ever done is his misbegotten life.
Arthur didn’t want to lose that son, too.
* * *
Reese sat at his desk the following morning. He hadn’t slept well again last night. After his meeting at police headquarters, he and Kenzie had returned to the office. Immersed in an important budget meeting, he’d had no time to talk to her. The abuse she’d suffered at Lee Haines’s hands was just one of the things they needed to discuss.
As CEO, juggling his busy schedule, keeping all the balls in the air was never easy. Now he was in the middle of a murder investigation. And there was Kenzie. Everything about his attraction to her screamed wrong place, wrong time.
Wrong person.
Still, when he’d seen her first thing that morning, he’d felt the same kick, the same fierce pull of attraction that had drawn him to her from the start. He’d wanted to take her right there in his office, forget his problems and satisfy the hunger he felt just looking at her. He’d wanted to drag her down on top of his desk and bury himself as deep as he could possibly get.
He’d wanted just to hold her.
For the past few hours, he’d managed to force thoughts of her from his mind and concentrate on work. Then her familiar rap again came at his door, the door opened, and she walked into his office.
“Derek Stiles is on the line.” The color was back in her cheeks, her shoulders squared. Just the sound of her voice made him hard. “He’s calling about the Poseidon. He says it’s important.”
She was wearing a peach knit skirt suit with a perky little peach-and-blue print scarf. She was back on her game, he could tell, ready to face whatever lay ahead. Her resilience was one of the things that attracted him so strongly.
“Put the call through.” Forcing himself to ignore the lust he shouldn’t be feeling, he slid the Poseidon file out of the stack of folders on his desk. It was all on his computer, of course, but he liked to have the actual paperwork in front of him.
He flipped open the file and looked up at Kenzie. “I’d like you to sit in on the conversation.”
She nodded, sat down in her usual chair across from him, smoothing her skirt as she crossed her legs. He thought of those pretty legs wrapped around his hips, and his groin tightened.
He hit the speaker button. “What’s going on, Derek?”
“Sorry to start your day off on a sour note, but we’ve got another problem with the rig.”
The way things had been going, he wasn’t surprised. “What is it this time?”
“Gas leak in one of the platform pipes.”
He flicked a glance at Kenzie, saw her make a note on her iPad. “How serious is it?”
“They found the leak and repaired it, but the foreman says it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”