If AG denied any of the support Max was gushing about now, the company would look terrible. If they didn’t show up, AG would look uncaring. If they showed up and tried to set the record straight, Daxon could pick a fight and the press would have a field day.
It was a recipe for disaster—on every front—all on its own. But even worse than the press release was Sam’s response to it. He’d all but accused Alex of betraying the company by not sweet-talking the Jones family out of this idea, as if avoiding negative consequences for AG was the only reason he was even in town.
And JJ had just read it.
Chapter Twelve
JJ pushed the money through the ticket window. Get home. Just get home. Bolting from the scene wasn’t like her, but she’d been so wounded by the email she’d read on Alex’s computer that thinking clearly wasn’t possible. She clutched the train ticket in her hand and fumbled her way to the correct track. Gordon Falls was the end of the line—how fitting.
She hadn’t stopped gulping down air the whole dash to the station—away from Max, away from Alex, just away—and once she’d slumped into her seat in the train car, JJ forced herself to slow down her breaths. She felt the same level of betrayal she’d known in Afghanistan. And why not? What was so different here? Someone she trusted had, in fact, been sent to lure down her guard. She’d been duped again. Weak. Stupid. Useless. She set her teeth in resolve not to cry, not to give into the tidal wave of pain lapping at her heels.
The guys in the fire company and their silly antics? That she could take. Obnoxious was better than malicious any day. But deceit? Well, she’d just proved how poorly she handled smooth-talking deception, hadn’t she?
As the train pulled out of the station, JJ let her head fall against the window. I’m so stupid. I believed him. I let him in. Why? Why did I let myself be hurt like that again? If I hadn’t seen that email....
Her cell phone went off, and she didn’t need to look at the screen to know who it was. Of course he would call. Of course he’d have some compelling explanation, and he’d sell it like the consummate persuader he was. That’s why she had no choice but to leave, to not give him the chance to wind his way back around her heart.
Turning the phone to silent, JJ buried it in the bottom of her handbag. My heart. He broke my heart. It was a paralysis as devastating as Max’s, stunning her into thoughtlessness, unable to plan any response except buckling under the pain.
What have you got? Her commander’s advice for action under fire came back to her. What’s available to you? Find your high ground and hold it.
What high ground? She was back from war, poorly groping her way to a new life that wouldn’t settle, coping with a brother who was harder to handle than ever. There was no high ground.
There’s always high ground, she heard the commander say, his gruff voice filling the hollow panic in her head. Even if it’s an inch higher, take it.
Max. Max isn’t dead. This isn’t Angie. There’s still hope for Max. Sure, it felt like her heart had died, but that couldn’t matter. Not anymore. Her high ground, this time, was that she’d discovered the deception before it was too late. Alex Cushman had been exposed for who he really was, which gave her the advantage. Smart soldiers took the offensive when they had the advantage. Max had a war ahead of him, and if there was one thing JJ Jones knew how to do, it was wage war. And now, if the reaction from Alex’s brother was any indicator, they had a powerful advantage on their side.
Max had mentioned something about a new lawyer who had all kinds of ideas for how to get Max everything he needed to make the most of his new life. It had been the only time she’d seen anything close to optimism in his eyes. Revenge wasn’t the noblest of motivators, but she sure understood the lure of it for Max right now. Max needed a fight, and she needed to be his defender. She needed to prove to the world—and herself—that she was capable of guarding something precious.
If she hadn’t been able to guard her heart, then she’d make up for it by being able to guard her brother.
JJ fished the cell phone out of the bottom of her bag, noting with a sting that Alex had tried calling three more times. She deleted the two voicemails without listening to them and dialed Max’s phone instead.
“Missing the crippled kid already?” He’d taken to using that ugly term, and she hated it.
Still, it was a tiny step toward Max’s old off-color humor—the “don’t drown” of the cabin rules list—so she let it slide. “Something like that. Hey, when do you see that new lawyer again?”
“You haven’t gotten home to read my new post on the Personal Pages yet, have you? It went up just after you left, I think. Sorry, Tony asked me not to say anything to anyone until it went up on the site. We’re blowing the roof off this thing tomorrow. It’s gonna be awesome. Will you be there?”
“Absolutely.”
“’Cuz when we’re done, I’m going to be rolling in it. Ha! Literally. Look at me, I made a cripple joke.”
JJ cringed. “Stop that, will you?”
“Nah,” Max countered, “I’m just getting started.”
* * *
Alex slammed the phone shut for the third time as he walked up to the reception desk at the rehab center. He tried to wipe the fury from his face, smiling instead at the woman at the desk as if he was merely catching up with some friends. “Did Miss Jones come back up here a minute ago?”
“Excuse me?” Her cautious tone made Alex wonder if she was allowed to give out such information. This was, after all, a medical facility.
“Josephine Jones. She was just here visiting her brother, Max. I’m her ride, and I think she must have forgotten something and went back upstairs.”
The woman typed something into her keyboard and then peered at the screen. “Mr. Jones has had two visitors today, and yes, one of them was a J. Jones.”
Alex was dying to ask if the other one was a T. Daxon but he knew better than to push things that far. “Yeah, JJ. Is she back up there?” This seemed the most likely place for JJ to come after what she’d seen. Without Alex, she had no way of getting home except the train.
“She’s not come back. Maybe she’s waiting for you in the parking garage?”
Alex was pretty sure that wasn’t the case, but he smiled at the receptionist. “You’re probably right. Hey, Max is using the auditorium for that thing tomorrow, isn’t he? Is there a closer place to park than the garage? I’ve got some stuff for the press conference.”
She peered into her computer screen again. “The one at 11:00 a.m.? No, this is the best entrance. Mr. Jones booked the room starting at ten o’clock so Mr. Daxon’s office could bring things over, if you want to get here early.” She offered an excited smile. “They said there will be television cameras. It should be exciting.”
“A real media circus,” Alex said, meaning it more than just a joke.
He went outside, found a reasonably quiet alcove on the sidewalk in the next block and braced himself to dial Sam.
Not even bothering with “hello,” Sam let out a string of unpleasantries before barking, “And next time, answer your phone!”
“Congratulations, Sam. Every time I think I’ve realized what a heartless profit monger you are, you surprise me.”
“Excuse me for trying to protect the company we’ve taken years to build.”
Alex got right to the point. “I am not cozying up to the Jones family to protect AG interests. I can’t believe you even think that’s okay to imply. Especially in an email. An email JJ Jones just saw.”
“What’s Jones’s sister doing reading your company email?”
Alex knew Sam would respond that way. “I had my laptop open when I went to get her some coffee and an email with Max Jones in the subject line evidently came up. It’s not exactly squeaky clean for her to have read it, but honestly, given all that’s happened, can you blame her?”
Sam huffed loudly on the other end of the phone. “If you bothered to even read that email, how can you take her side in
this? They’ve brought Daxon on board. You know how that guy operates. There was nothing left of Vista Bicycles when he got through with them. You want to be destroyed like Vista?”
Vista Bicycles had knowingly marketed a defective cycle that had left three members of a university cycling team with traumatic brain injuries. Some part of Alex had always thought Vista deserved to go down, although it had been an ugly scene for all involved.
Daxon, of course, had always touted the near-billion-dollar settlement as the crown jewel in his shady career. The case had sunk to ludicrously personal levels, exposing not only company faults but shredding the lives of the six men who ran Vista along with the two manufacturing engineers who had ignored the fault. If there ever was a battle with no winners, the Vista case was it. Daxon was surely anticipating topping his previous record with a company as large as AG and a studio pocket to empty to boot.
“No, I don’t want us to go down like Vista. I don’t want Daxon involved any more than you do. But come on, Sam, did you really think I was cozying up to the Joneses for some kind of strategic advantage? Is that the kind of person you take me for?”
“You were...”
Alex cut him off, the very image of JJ reading that directive from Sam fueling his anger. “Because that’s exactly the kind of person JJ now thinks I am, thanks to your email. That’s not me. It’s not anything close to me and you of all people should know that.” A passerby stared at Alex, and he realized he was yelling into his phone. He tried to calm his voice, but the anger and the strong coffee made him feel like he had a volcano inside. “It’s beyond what I can take, Sam. You are so far from the partner I wanted to build AG with that I can’t stand it anymore. This is why I took that leave. This is exactly why I felt like I had to get out of there.”
“Yeah, the guy who’s always on the run is exactly who you are. You romp around the world, playing adventurer. My brother the global do-gooder. Somebody had to stay behind and cut the deals that pay the bills, little brother, and it sure hasn’t been you. Do you know what our second-quarter profits would have been without that deal from Wander Footwear? They wouldn’t get you to New Jersey, much less to New Delhi. Thanks for rescheduling that without talking to me, by the way.”
Alex squinted his eyes shut and held his forehead with one hand, leaning against the wall of the building. The conversation was bad enough without feeling like he was hemmed in by concrete walls on all sides. When had things deteriorated to this? “They were fine with meeting next month, Sam. And we wouldn’t have those vendors at all if I hadn’t spent a year courting them. Since when do you give a hoot about my travel schedule? I’d planned this as vacation time anyway. I’m not even supposed to be there.”
Alex could hear Sam slam something on the desk. “You are supposed to be here. That’s the whole argument, for crying out loud. Get back on board, Alex, or get out. I can’t take this half-baked commitment anymore.”
They’d argued about Alex’s commitment to AG dozens of times over the past months, and Sam had said all kinds of things. This was the first time, however, Sam had told him to get out. The words hit him like the slab of concrete he was leaning against—cold and lifeless. Alex thought of half a dozen clever comebacks but ended up just hanging up the phone in disgust. “Getting out” had never looked so attractive. Trouble was, based on that last conversation, Alex now knew what he’d long suspected: if he left AG in Sam’s control, everything he’d built in AG’s name would soon be gone. The company’s integrity would go down in flames in a matter of months.
Maybe AG didn’t need Daxon to take them down—right now it felt like AG was headed down all on its own. Trouble was, no matter how he tried to dismiss it, Alex knew that if he let it happen, a huge chunk of himself would go down with it.
He stared at his reflection in the building’s dark glass, waiting for it to hurt. Thinking he should grieve the death of AG because it was already starting to die. There was certainly pain in the reflection, but it wasn’t what he expected. AG’s demise stung, but JJ’s scorn pierced him much harder. If he could only fix one thing right now, it had to be JJ, not AG.
Pulling up the train schedule on his smartphone, Alex saw that a train had left twenty minutes ago. That gave JJ more than enough time to dash out of the coffee shop and hop on it, which she must have done. Short of renting a car—or a helicopter—there wasn’t another way back to Gordon Falls. If he floored it, he could still beat her back even with her head start. And he would. He’d be waiting on the platform when she got off and he’d make her see the truth. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, wouldn’t let her go on believing he was the kind of conniver his brother had become.
Sam was right about one thing. It was time for Alex to make a commitment to what truly mattered to him. It just so happened that that wasn’t AG.
JJ Jones was about to find out just how stubborn Alex Cushman could be.
* * *
JJ had hoped the long train ride would calm her down, but it only gave her time for the anger to boil up further. She was a walking storm of resentment by the time she stepped off the train in Gordon Falls. Scanning the streets, trying to remember which one led home, JJ felt as if she could run there at a full sprint and still not burn off all the betrayal steaming in her lungs. As she stepped off the platform, she spied the last thing she wanted to see: Alex Cushman’s rental car. Growling, JJ started walking the other direction. She’d go a mile out of her way to stay out of that snake’s reach.
“Hey!” Alex yelled from the open car window.
JJ kept walking, even when she heard his tires crunching the gravel on the train station parking lot behind her.
“Hey. Let me explain.”
That was the last thing she needed. “Oh, I think your brother, Sam, has done all the explaining I’ll ever need, thanks.” She didn’t allow herself to even look at him. “Leave me alone.”
Alex gunned the engine to pull in front of her, heading her off. When she tried to walk around the car, he got out and reached for her arm. “What you read...”
“Is all I need to know. And trust me, it’s more than enough.”
Alex stood in front of her. “It’s wrong. What you read is not the truth. Not about me.” How did he make his voice sound so convincingly desperate? Did they teach that in business school?
“It sounded a lot like truth to me. And it explains so much. Wow, Cushman, you’re a real asset to the company.”
“Did you even bother to read further back? The email Sam’s message was in reply to? Or are you simply going to judge me by the words my brother puts into my mouth?”
That stopped her. She’d been so blindsided by what she read in Sam’s passage that she hadn’t bothered to read any further. Although, really, what could he possibly say to undo what she’d seen? Hadn’t he already proved his skill for pulling down her guard? JJ stopped walking but didn’t offer a reply.
“And, please,” he said, looking genuinely pained, “don’t call me Cushman. I’m Alex. I’ve always been Alex—I haven’t changed.”
Now there was more fuel for the fire. “Except when you were Bing. Who was it who suggested keeping names and backgrounds out of this?”
Alex put his hands to his forehead, squinting his eyes shut. JJ had to give him points for good acting; he looked genuinely distressed. “Okay, look, I admit things don’t exactly add up in my favor here.” He put his hands down and stared at her. JJ ignored what the look in his eyes did to her stomach. The man was a master salesman—she couldn’t forget that.
“Yes,” he admitted, “Sam had the stupid idea that I should stay close to you and Max to keep things from getting adversarial. But if you read through the rest of that email, if you’d have heard any of our phone conversations since Max fell, you’d know I thought the whole plan of his was vile and underhanded. I don’t do business that way. My arguments with Sam—the whole reason I was taking time off from AG—were over the fact that I can no longer stand the way he does business. I did not, no
r would I ever, offer my support to you purely in the name of company interest.”
JJ crossed her arms over her chest. “But should it happen to line up nicely with company interests...?”
“It didn’t factor in!” Alex shouted. “I don’t think that way. Come on, JJ, you know me.”
“Do I?” She allowed the words to contain all the snarl boiling up inside her right now.
“Yes. You do. Don’t let one stupid, misguided email undo all the time we’ve spent together.” Alex grabbed her hand. “Look at me. I mean, really look at me, JJ. Was what went on between us manufactured? Do you really believe I could fake this? That I’d want to?”
He was already doing it. Alex was already pulling down her defenses even though she’d seen clear evidence of what had really transpired. JJ could no longer trust her emotions here—Alex had shown her that.
“I believe Alex Cushman could sell anything to anybody and make them believe they’d wanted it their whole lives.”
Alex slammed his hand onto the roof of his SUV so hard JJ was surprised it didn’t leave a dent. “You won’t see! You’re so sure someone else has duped you that you won’t even open your eyes!” He glared at her, his eyes dark and cold. “Max is the one getting duped, JJ. I know this Daxon guy, JJ, I’ve watched him dismantle companies and lives. He’s all about money. He’s not about justice, and trust me, he doesn’t play fair.”
“Nothing’s fair about what happened to Max.”
“I’m not opposed to your brother getting compensation for what’s happened to him. I’m absolutely in favor of it. But this won’t be a straightforward settlement—things just went to another level. Daxon is a predator. Give him a loose cannon like your brother and he’ll do so much damage your jaw will drop. I don’t want to see you and your family dragged over the coals, but that’s exactly what Daxon will do.”
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