Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 142976 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 715(@200wpm)___ 572(@250wpm)___ 477(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142976 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 715(@200wpm)___ 572(@250wpm)___ 477(@300wpm)
He eagerly ditched the laptop, hoping to scrub some to the visuals from his brain with whatever distraction his phone presented.
It was a text from his father:
Dad
Fucking Abernathy did an interview with Liam Marsh. It’s not good. PR recommends you respond with a few of your own. The happy, newlywed couple etc. Call Petra for details. She has something lined up already.
It was unusual for James Hawthorne to send a message like this himself. He would usually have left it to Petra—their PR guru—to contact Cade directly.
Cade frowned down at his phone, considering the terse message, before typing a response.
How bad?
Dad
Fucker is practically accusing you of kidnapping the girl. Saying she’s emotionally and mentally frail and vulnerable.
He’s been saying shit like this all along. What makes this different?
Dad
Heavy implications of sexual manipulation and physical abuse.
Cade stared at the screen in disbelief and fury.
What the fuck?
He should have known Abernathy would go there, but somehow, he hadn’t even considered that the man would stoop so low.
His phone rang. His father. It figured, the old man found texting tedious. He preferred barking directly at the person on the other end of the line.
Only his father’s voice was strained, tentative, and—alarmingly—quietly apologetic.
“I’m sorry, lad,” he muttered, sounding uncomfortable. “We should have seen this coming. Protected you better. Fuck, come to that should have just closed the deal and moved on. Left the girl out of it. She’s proving to be more trouble than she’s worth. But I didn’t think the dirty prick would resort to blatant fucking fairytales.”
“We’re not exactly dealing with a man of integrity here, Dad,” Cade said with a sigh, squeezing his nape as he tried to knead away the rampant headache that had instantly lodged itself at the base of his skull. “What’s the damage?”
“It’s left the Greenleaf people shaken, they’re hemming and hawing over the contract.”
Fuck!
“Jesus,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut as the headache migrated to his temples. “What does Petra think we should do?”
“She’s lined up a couple of interviews with the usuals; WSJ, Bloomberg, and a—uhm—segment on that Holmes@Home show.”
“Holmes@Home? Dad, come on, I’m not a fucking celebrity. Nobody who watches that show will know who the hell we are. It’ll look ridiculous and desperate to appear on something like that.”
“I agree. I’ve said as much to Petra. But she argues that you and Fern are young, good-looking and wealthy, the public are going to want to believe in your star-crossed lovers story. And public opinion—”
“Won’t matter to our investors and shareholders. And it won’t matter to Pete McPherson.” Greenleaf’s CEO.
This was turning into a goddamned clusterfuck. Cade could wring Abernathy’s throat with his bare hands right now.
He released his nape to scrub his hand over his face and sighed.
“Dad, there’s something else,” he admitted in a low tone, reluctant to give voice to the words. Once spoken there was no turning back. No pretending it was all just some mistake or misunderstanding. His life would be forever altered. “Fern’s pregnant.”
There was a long, fraught silence and Cade glared unseeingly out at the horizon, uncomfortably aware of his father’s every even breath on the other end of the line. He shouldn’t feel like a chastened adolescent and yet… he did.
His father finally spoke, a long string of invective that would’ve made a pirate blush.
“She looks like such a sweet, butter wouldn’t melt wee thing. I didn’t have her pegged as the type to pull something like this,” his father finally said once he’d run through his encyclopedia of profanity.
Cade’s glare deepened as he tried to puzzle through his dad’s baffling words.
“What do you…”
“Is the father in the picture? Is it that weasel, Wilson?”
“Jesus, no.” Cade hastened to reply, finally grasping his father’s misapprehension. “Dad, you don’t—” Christ. “Her baby is…I’m the father.”
This time he could practically hear his father’s absolute bafflement in the silence that followed. Cade ground his teeth, longing for some ibuprofen and a cold compress, and waited for his father to process his words.
“That’s a little fast, isn’t it?” The old man’s tone was wry and rippling with amusement. Cade bit back a groan. The amusement somehow worse than confusion or outrage or whatever else he might have expected. It made him feel like the butt of some cosmic joke.
“She’s two—nearly three—months pregnant. It was conceived at the gala.”
“That so?” There was determined neutrality in his father’s voice now. Which was unusual. James Hawthorne lacked subtlety and believed that tact was just another four-letter word.
“Yes.”
“I distinctly recall teaching you lads to always slap a rubber on ye wee rascals, aye?”
Their father had taken time out of his busy life—he’d literally had his executive assistant pencil it into his schedule—when Cade and his brothers were kids, to give them the frankest, dirtiest talk about sex and the dire consequences for “men like them” if they didn’t pack their own parachutes. He’d sat them down in his office, intimidating and larger than life as he glared at them from across his desk and over his steepled fingers. It had been the most uncomfortable moment of Cade’s life—recently usurped by his first encounter with Fern—and he and his brothers couldn’t look one another in the eye for days afterwards.