“No one wants to hear from you,” Charles said. “What would you know about working?”
“She knows what we all do, Charles,” Roberta said with a long-suffering sigh. “Maybe more since she actually tried to follow her dream. She wasn’t very good at it, so now she needs a new dream.”
“Why are you so rude?” Ashley asked, her disgust apparent.
Roberta shrugged her off. “Because I’m old and I can be. You’ll find something very freeing about not having to worry if some man thinks you’re pretty, honey.”
Ashley frowned. “The truth is I don’t actually like men and I’m sick of pretending to.”
“Then you have half the secret of life,” Roberta announced. “Rene, come here.”
Rene chuckled. “Oh, I’ve learned the other half, Roberta, and that’s that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.”
A little smile curled up his aunt’s lips. “Good for you, honey. But please come here because it can be hard for me to hear, and you’re not yelling like Charles and our little protestor here.”
Put like that, he couldn’t refuse her. He moved in. “Why did you want me here, Aunt Roberta? I made myself plain last night. I’m not going to beg for this job. And even if you decide to vote me back in, some things are going to change. I’m not going to come to the board for every single decision I have to make, especially when it comes to what’s best for our employees. We owe our employees, too, and we owe the next generation. My father was a good steward, and one of the things he taught me is that we owe it to our children and grandchildren to keep this company strong. I cannot promise that I’ll give the stockholders everything they want, but I’ll do my best to ensure this company is around for whoever runs it after me.”
Roberta nodded. “You don’t have to convince me. You had my vote before I came here, and you have it now. How you treated the little weasel there convinced me.” She pointed to Gabriel. “He did something he shouldn’t have, but you showed him mercy. I know I don’t look like a woman who would appreciate that, but I do. Especially when it comes to family.”
A bit of hope lit inside him. He might be able to have exactly what he wanted. “I meant what I said. Things have to change. If you trust me with the company, you have to let me run it. And I want to buy Darois House. It shouldn’t be connected to the company. My mother will buy the house at market value and the money can be split between the shareholders.”
Marietta sighed. “That might get me a small yacht.”
Charles practically stared a hole through him. “I don’t agree to any changes. I promise you, Rene, I’ll fight every new project you run by us. And you will run everything by the board. You want an extra breath, it’s going to have to be approved by me.”
That was what he wasn’t going to do. “Then you should feel free to take that CEO seat and see where it lands you.”
“He can’t.” Rene’s mother stepped up, the file now in her hands. “He’s going to lose his shares because you’re not the only one who can hire a private investigator. He sent these over just after you left this morning. You’ll find this file has all the evidence we need to prove Charles was working against company interests.”
Louis stepped in beside her. “And if you read the bylaws of the company pertaining to family stock ownership, you’ll see that there’s a clause covering a stockholder actively harming the company. He or she must relinquish their shares immediately at the current value. Charles, you don’t worry about the company anymore, because you are no longer a part of it.”
Charles had turned a nice shade of red. “Do you really want to do this, Rene? You really want to make an enemy of me? I won’t take it sitting down. I’ll sue the company and every board member.”
Roberta stood and stared at Charles with a glare even Rene found a bit intimidating. “You stop right now. You will not sue anyone, and you will allow Rene to do what he needs to do. You got caught, Charles. You did the crime and you will be punished for it. Rene, he has children. Are you going to show them the same grace you gave to Gabriel?”
“His stock can be held in trust for his children.” He had no need to kick a couple of innocent kids out of the family that could take care of them for years to come. “But he doesn’t get a vote.”
“I will not allow this.” Charles’s hands were fists at his side.
Roberta got into Charles’s space. “You have to give this ridiculous feud up now. My brother picked Ross to take over. I understand that you think your father should have fought Ross for the job, but he didn’t want it. I also know that somewhere in the back of your mind you wonder if Ross isn’t your daddy, too.”
The whole room seemed to still.
Sylvie had moved close to Rene, her hand on his back as though to let him know she was here with him.
Charles thought they were brothers?
“I don’t have to wonder,” Charles spat back. “My mother told me. It’s disgusting how everyone holds that family up as some glowing example for the rest of us. Cricket, you pretend like you were some love match, but we all know Ross married you for your money.”
“Hey.” Rene started to move toward his cousin, but his mother got in the way.
“Charles, my marriage might have been complicated, but there was love there, too,” his mother began. “And I knew about Ross’s relationship with your mother. He didn’t love her. He was surprised when she married his brother. And he couldn’t be your father. I don’t know why she told you that except to get some sort of revenge, but honey, it’s not possible.”
“She told me Ross was my real father,” Charles insisted. “They were having an affair behind your back.”
“I don’t believe that, but even if they were, Ross had a vasectomy a month after Rene was born. Getting pregnant again would have been dangerous for me, so he made the hard choice to protect me,” his mother said. “You’re twenty months younger than Rene. It’s not possible.”
Rene was still absorbing the fact that Charles thought they were brothers.
“You didn’t know?” Sylvie asked him quietly.
“Of course he knew,” Charles said. “He’s always known.”
“I didn’t. I’ve never heard this rumor.” He was reeling a bit. “Charles, I didn’t know you thought that.”
“Liar.” Charles brushed past him. “This isn’t over. I won’t let you do this to me. And I’ll release everything I know about your wife.”
“Go for it,” Sylvie said. “It’ll be fun to be the center of a scandal for the five minutes it’ll take to figure out it wasn’t me.”