An Unexpected Christmas Baby

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Not that any of this had to do with his first night with a newborn, or was in any way related to the question he’d just been asked. It was simply a reminder of the mode of thinking he was bringing into the meeting ahead. The life ahead.

  Emotionally, Stella’s leaving hadn’t hit him as hard yet as it was bound to, but he knew he wasn’t going through that again—a rejection after he was fully committed. A rejection based on something over which he had no control and couldn’t change. He was the son of a convict. He’d grown up with her as the constant in his life. Loved her. And the child she’d borne on her prison deathbed. If someone was going to have a problem with the baggage he carried, at least he’d know up front. No more hiding.

  He’d had enough disappointment for one lifetime.

  “Obviously she didn’t like being in a room alone,” Tamara was saying while thoughts flew through Flint’s brain at Mach speed. “She needed to be close to you, but probably not right up to the bed. I’ll bet if you keep her playpen in your room, but along the wall, and put her to bed there, where she can be aware of your presence, you’ll both sleep better.”

  He nodded, finding the concept of a baby in his room with him every night a bit...alarming, but was not completely unfond of the idea. “You seem to know a lot about children.”

  Her lips tensed again. But then he wasn’t sure as she almost immediately smirked and said, “Mallory’s my closest friend,” as though that explained everything.

  And he supposed it did. If Mallory shared the details of her work life on a regular basis.

  “How did you two meet?” High school? Grade school, maybe? He knew plenty of people whose friendships went that far back. Whereas he didn’t have any from a year ago. Or the year before that.

  Other than Stella and Alana Gold, Flint had avoided personal relationships outside one-night stands.

  He had clients who went almost as far back as high school, though.

  “We were in a women’s group together,” Tamara said, glancing at his phone and then quickly away. She turned, facing the room, as though looking for their lunch.

  “Businesswomen?” He wasn’t going to try to explain his curiosity, but Tamara had arrived in his life at a critical time and, as a result, he felt drawn to her.

  That was what he believed, anyway. “We were all women who worked, yes,” she said. Then added, “Mal’s one of the brightest, most successful women I know, on all levels. She’s savvy and makes good money. Her day care is always close to maximum capacity, and yet she hasn’t become hardened by the shadow sides of business ownership. Like the people who don’t pay on time, or at all. The ones who find fault with everything. The hours. Nothing gets to her. She’s a nurturer to her core.”

  He nodded again, not sure why she was selling her friend so hard when he’d already signed a contract with her. The deal was closed. But he liked listening to her talk. Liked how the gold rim around the green of her eyes glistened as she spoke about her friend.

  Hell, he liked just sitting across the table from her.

  She was there on business.

  “You said you had some things to discuss with me?” He’d answer whatever questions she had and was fully confident she’d find nothing wasteful in the way he worked. Then he’d see if maybe she’d have dinner with him sometime. Just dinner. Nothing to do with business.

  “Only some clarifications,” she explained, taking a sip of her iced tea. Over the next twenty minutes, through the delivery of lunch and eating of same, she talked about several of his dealings during the years. Her questions were strictly from memory, no notes. She asked for justification of certain expenses, mostly making sure that she understood things as the way she thought she did.

  He enjoyed talking to her about work even more than talking about her friend. He was good at what he did. One of the best around. And she was a quick and avid learner.

  She also seemed genuinely interested. More than Stella had ever been.

  He talked about the money saved in throwing one lavish, weekend-long yacht party for a number of investors, rather than many expensive dinners with individuals, mentioning not only the obvious savings on the event costs, but other advantages—like the adrenaline that kicked up when investors talked together about investments.

  “Everyone wants to get in on the best deal,” he reiterated as the waitress cleared away their plates.

  “You drive the market, affect stock prices, by persuading everyone to invest in one thing,” she said.

  He shook his head. “We discuss the market, in small groups and as a whole, and where we think the trends are headed. Not everyone invests in the same way. They all get excited about investing in whatever they think is the best bet after all conversations are through.”

  She smiled as she studied him. “In other words, you drive their desire to invest,” she summed up.

  “Maybe. They have to want to invest to get involved in the conversation.”

  The bill was delivered and he reached for it. He’d suggested the place, but when she took it from him, he didn’t try to stop her. This was her lunch, he knew it would be expensed, and he didn’t want to insult her. But he hoped there’d be a next time, and that it would be his treat.

  As he’d observed earlier, she’d been put in his path at a critical time. And she already knew all about his mother. She’d seen his employee file, so she’d know about his own troubles eight years before. And she’d met Diamond Rose.

  She was only with him because she had to be. He didn’t miss that point. But if she accepted a personal invitation...

  He waited until they were almost back at the office, until they were talking about the weather, clearly not a business discussion, before he asked, “Would you be interested in doing this again sometime? Not as a date, but just having lunch together? If you come up with any more questions about what we do at Owens, I’d be happy to answer them, and you’ve given me so much insight on raising newborns, I’d just like to say thank you.”

  Anything later than lunch involved Diamond Rose, and he wasn’t ready for that.

  “I...” Shaking her head, she let her words trail off.

  She was going to turn him down. He was more disappointed than he’d expected to be, but waited for what would no doubt be a polite brush-off.

  Or, God help him, was she going to report him to Howard for sexual harassment? He hadn’t touched her. Or indicated that he wanted to. He’d just invited her to lunch.

  He started to sweat anyway. In his experience, based on who he was, his background, people were more apt to assume he was guilty than the guy next door. Even if he was the guy next door.

  That mess eight years ago had nearly stolen any hope he’d had of making a decent life for himself.

  His mother’s death three days ago had stolen even more...

  “I’d actually like that, thank you. I’m pretty sure that between now and then I’ll come up with more questions and the way you explain things, enough but not too much...” Tamara said after a noticeable time had passed.

  Flint had no idea why she’d changed her mind, but he was certain she had. And he was glad of it, too—enough so that he wasn’t going to question his luck.

  He’d press it, though. “Sometime this week?” he asked. He had a business lunch scheduled for the next day. “Thursday?”

  “Thursday would be good.”

  Okay, then. That was set. He’d been off-line from Diamond Rose for at least twenty minutes and from commodities reports for almost two hours. Holding the door open for Tamara, he thanked her for lunch, told her to contact him if she had any other questions, then wished her a good rest of the day and hightailed it to his office.

  Keeping to his priorities was paramount. That was a promise to Alana. And to Diamond Rose.

  Chapter Nine

  Tamara was too busy Tuesday afternoon to think about the co
mplexities of her lunch meeting. But they were there, a steady presence in the background of her day. She’d visited the head of every department. Had looked at their bottom lines.

  Finding very little, even as an efficiency expert, to offer her father, she started to feel overwhelmed. She had some ideas on making the mail room run more smoothly. Thought maybe a delivery service would work better than the current system of having a driver on-site, ready to go if the need arose. Yes, the driver handled other menial tasks when he wasn’t driving, but they were tasks that could easily be incorporated into the daily routines of several different employees.

  None of which was going to make a damn bit of difference if she couldn’t find something really out of place.

  Granted, she’d only gone over one broker’s files in depth—Flint’s. There was at least a week’s worth of information to weed through, already downloaded on her computer that morning, pertaining to all accounts and monies. Everything from commissioned earnings to an annual fund-raiser to benefit underprivileged children that her father had been running around Christmastime every year since Tamara’s first miscarriage.

  Next, she’d be looking at supply purchases and expense reports.

  And figured she could study numbers, tally up columns, run down bids and purchase orders for months and still not find what she needed.

  At the end of the day, she went to her father. She needed to know more about the specifics of what his accountant had found.

  “I don’t think it’s Flint Collins,” she said the second she sat with him on the solid leather couch at the far end of his office. He’d poured her a glass of tea with ice. And had a shot of whiskey for himself.

  One shot. That was what he had every day before leaving the office. His way of unwinding, he’d always said, of leaving the stresses of his business day right where they belonged.

  “He’s worked too hard to get where he is to jeopardize it over money,” she said. That was her gut instinct. At least, that was what she called whatever it was that was driving her to want to help him.

  “I went through every single client transaction, Dad. Every expense report. Granted, I didn’t study every line item, or look up every purchase order, or check actual filed expense reports against his reimbursements. But I did look at a lot of them, and at overall figures. I couldn’t find ten cents that had been misappropriated. Now, if he’s claiming expenses he shouldn’t be, that’s something I can check, but I need more concrete information or I’m wasting valuable time spinning my wheels.”

  Naïve of her to think she’d just open up a ton of files and come across some glaring discrepancy. Or even a slightly buried one. She was used to comparing figures others didn’t look at—like expenses and supplies for each person compared to others working the same or similar job. Looking for waste.

  Not looking for a crime.

  “I found a couple of people ‘stealing’ from the company I was at a couple of months ago,” she continued, half afraid he was going to be disappointed in her. Which made no sense, considering her parents had been her biggest champions her entire life.

  So why the feelings of guilt? As if there was something going on she didn’t want him to know about?

  “They worked different shifts and were taking turns clocking out for each other so they’d both get overtime pay when they weren’t even working their forty-hour shifts.”

  “And, of course, expense reports not gelling with actual receipts and time stamps has come up more than once, since clamping down on misuse of those perks, or cutting back on some of the more extravagant ones, are the easiest ways to save a company money.”

  Howard sipped his whiskey. He was frowning as he studied her.

  “I didn’t want to prejudice you,” he said when she fell silent. “And I don’t want to hang Collins without giving him a fair shake,” he added. “I like the guy. He’s always done what he said he’d do. Every single time. Truthfully, I’m not even sure I’ll press charges if it turns out to be him, as long as he makes full restitution and agrees to get out of the business permanently. Only a couple of people know about the fraud at this point. My accountant, and you. For the overall health of the business, I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Sitting forward, he put his glass on the table, elbows on his knees, and faced her. “Who knows? You could’ve found something as simple as two expense account reports coming out of one business lunch.”

  “Two different people claiming the same lunch?” If it was done all the time, the money would add up. She got that her father didn’t want anyone in the company to know he was checking up on them, but something like that would’ve been easy for him to discover without her help and without raising too many alarms in his ranks.

  “More like two expense reports, each claiming half of one lunch when only one employee was there.”

  She frowned. She could see duplicity in that but... “If they each claimed only part, then the company wouldn’t be out any money.”

  Unless...

  “You think someone, say Flint Collins, has somehow managed to secure two expense accounts—both in his name? And is using one to reimburse himself and the other to treat himself to a more expensive lifestyle at the company’s expense?”

  He supposedly had that rich girlfriend he was keeping up with, although, to date, she’d seen no indication of another woman in his life.

  He’d asked her to have lunch with him. Partially, as a thank-you for helping him out with his sister. Not that she’d done anything. But would a man who was in a relationship do that?

  Immediate reasons came to mind why he might. Not least of which might be that he was unethical.

  “How much do you know about trading?” her father asked.

  She knew there were a lot of legal guidelines; that a lot of people had used a lot of different ways to cheat while doing it. And she knew that the world’s economic security revolved around the stock market.

  “Not enough.”

  “I thought not knowing too much would make it easier for you to find what we’re looking for, because obviously it’s designed to be missed by those of us closely involved. I also wanted to find out if it appeared that I was doing anything shady. If you were able to discover records that put you in doubt as to my culpability. I needed to know what someone looking from the outside would find, where a trail might lead, in case it led back to me. I’m not completely sure I’m not being framed. Luckily you haven’t found anything.” He stood, went across the room to a row of built-in file drawers and started thumbing through folders.

  She hoped that was true—that her father wasn’t being framed. Because she’d held that baby and it was messing her up. She was off her game, going to fail her father, if she didn’t get some help with this assignment. Maybe whatever he was looking for over there in the cabinet would make the difference, would give her a chance to deal with the way she felt and the effect it was having on her ability to do what she needed to do.

  This was why Tamara didn’t hold babies. Couldn’t hold them.

  Unlike Mallory, who’d held her son every day for almost five months before he’d died and took comfort from the feeling of a baby in her arms, Tamara had never been able to hold her own child. Not even Ryan, who’d been fully viable when he’d been born four months early.

  And while, for the most part, Tamara had recovered, the one thing she could not do was hold a child. It wasn’t as if a woman couldn’t live a full, productive, happy life without ever holding a baby. Particularly a woman who knew she was never going to have children of her own.

  Howard was back, handing her some files. “These are the basic rules of trading,” he told her. “You can find the same kind of thing on the internet, but this is something I put together for a college career day I was doing a few months ago. You won’t need to know any more than that.”

  She took the files.

 
He emptied his glass. “You ready to go meet your mother for dinner?” he asked. She’d taken a rain check the night before. Her mother had already cashed it in.

  They stopped by her place to drop off her car and then, in the front seat of her father’s Lincoln, she leafed through the material he’d given her—thinking of Flint Collins as she did.

  Getting glimpses of him in his world.

  Which was also her father’s world, she reminded herself.

  “Basically, what we’re looking at here is a pattern day trader. Someone who makes a certain number of day trades over a set period of time. Four or more in five days, for example. Day traders can trade with a large enough margin to buy and sell with less in the account than is actually being spent. But a pattern day trader has real advantages in that, for him, the margin is larger. He can trade for up to four times the cash value in the account, which about doubles the normal margin. That gives him what’s called ‘day trader buying power’ and is a measurable leverage.”

  She got enough of what he was saying to nod with some confidence.

  “Someone in Owens Investments is using my broker license, basically signing in as me, to make trades that rose to pattern day trader status. The log-ins were from various computers in the building—any of which I could have accessed, and all in secure areas out of view of surveillance cameras. They were made at various times throughout the day.

  “The trader was using monies from an account I set up for charitable donations,” he explained, “without ever really withdrawing money.

  “Whoever it was would make four day trades in a four-day period, meaning they bought and sold in one day, all small trades that lost nothing, but gained little, so no withdrawals were made. Then, on the fifth day, he’d use the day trader buying power to buy and sell for enormous profit.”

  Howard paused to take a breath as they approached the turn into the upscale neighborhood where she’d grown up.