Brave (Contours of the Heart Book 4)

by Tammara Webber

More often than not, I returned to the table, cash in hand. I was legendary.

  Of course Cynthia would want me.

  “As for pay, you would move from a salaried employee to commission based. If you average what Joshua and Megan rake in, you’ll beat your current salary by at least fifty percent. The top salesperson each month also earns a nice little bonus.”

  I hardly cared about the pay, which made me feel like more of an entitled brat than I already knew I was. On the other hand, cheating Joshua out of said bonus would be its own reward.

  “Give me a few days to think about it?”

  “Certainly. Take your time! I’d love to have you settled before the holidays though. If you could let me know by Monday, we’ll have time to get Ashley and Isaac on board and get your offices swapped since you’ll need to be downstairs to be available to potentials. This will make Vegas next month even more fun! I can hardly wait to have you on the team.”

  Take my time? Monday was only five days away. But it would get me past my performance evaluation.

  • • • • • • • • • •

  Friday morning, I walked next door to Isaac’s office at nine thirty sharp. His door stood open, and I paused just outside of it to watch him for a moment before he saw me. He was reading over a printout, probably my evaluation, while tapping his lower lip with one long finger. That hand had cradled my face just before he kissed me and launched a hundred no-holds-barred fantasies.

  Eyes flicking up to mine as if I’d spoken that wayward thought aloud, he held my gaze, and a reckless, unprecedented thought drifted through my mind. What would I surrender to win his heart?

  We’d barely spoken all week, and he was looking at me as if committing me to memory, and I wondered if he knew about Cynthia’s offer? Hank might have informed him on the down low to ensure that he wasn’t blindsided by my departure. Or to give him cause for celebration. Good news! You may not have to manage the owner’s daughter for much longer!

  Uncle Hank wouldn’t say such a thing.

  Even if I left Isaac’s direct supervision, we would still work in the same small building, leading to the overreaching notion I’d returned to a hundred times since lunch yesterday. If being my boss was the impasse he couldn’t cross, I could eliminate it by reporting to Cynthia instead.

  If I’d wanted the job she had put on the table, it would have made sense on every level to take it. Higher pay. The opportunity to rub Joshua’s nose in failure. The possibility of coaxing Isaac to see me as a colleague, not a subordinate. Persuading him to meet me in the middle – to see that I was already there, wrapped in a white flag.

  But I didn’t want the job.

  My guilt over Chaz had caused a soul-deep avalanche, and part of me would always feel shame for causing him pain. But somewhere under the rubble, I’d begun to feel the first sparks of desire to fight my way out. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I would find that girl I’d once been, rip the fake-Erin mask from her face, and tell her she was enough until she believed it. I would forgive her for not being perfect. I would absolve her for losing her way.

  “Erin, come in,” Isaac said.

  You’re a McIntyre, I heard.

  chapter

  Twenty-five

  My parents were preparing for the Ellises’s annual Ugly Christmas Sweater party, held on the first Friday of December. There was always a prize for the ugliest sweater—something like a bottle of Macallan, to foster real competition—and if Daddy didn’t win this year, I did not want to see what could defeat the grinning, homicidal-snowman sweater he was wearing.

  I had a web series to catch up on and every reason to escape pointless efforts to make sense of real life, so I was in the kitchen heating up an entree from the freezer. The lady who catered Mom’s parties and the occasional brunch also offered personal-chef services, so my mother rarely cooked now. Once a week, she ordered from an extensive menu like a noblewoman in a period piece, and voila, Chef Laurie prepared and delivered gourmet meals, à la carte items, and desserts to our freezer once a week. Everything was tasty, but none of it topped Isaac’s freshly prepared omelet.

  The microwave hummed, my sesame-crusted scallops in wasabi over buckwheat noodles rotated, and I pressed two fingers to the ache in the center of my chest. I had promised myself not to summon my supervisor tonight in thought or deed, and there I was, standing in the kitchen, breaking that vow. I shoved that night and his cooking skills and his kiss from my mind, only to have those musings replaced with our interactions earlier, during my review. Trying to expel him from my thoughts was like digging in dry sand. It was wasted effort. He kept refilling my mind.

  “Erin, come in,” he had said. I’d taken the chair in front of his desk as he slid my evaluation across the dark surface. “This is your copy. The original”—he gestured with the one in his hand—“will go into your file in HR.”

  I looked over my copy, skimming the self-review and skipping ahead to the sections he had completed, rating my performance by bubbling a circle for each attribute, like a Scantron exam. Outstanding for Punctuality, Initiative, and Problem Solving. Exceeds Expectations for Productivity and Judgment. Meets Expectations for Communication.

  “You basically gave me a C for Communication?”

  He arched a brow and waited for me to recognize why.

  I continued to keep client confidences to myself, a periodic cause of frustration for him, though he’d grown more tolerant of it. Sort of. “Ah.”

  “I expect you’ll keep that C. As you implied once upon a time – it’s working, isn’t it? Also, you’re following the procedure you’ll want to follow when you’re a licensed counselor.”

  I blinked. “You believe that will happen?”

  He folded his hands on top of my review. “I believe you were meant to do it. Moreover, I attended one of the most challenging grad schools in the country, and you’re capable of doing the same.” He pressed his lips together and shook his head, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Quit smirking at my saying moreover. It’s a perfectly ordinary word.”

  “Sure, if you’re forty. And maybe a liberal arts professor.” In reality, I found his old-fashioned vocabulary sexy, but teasing him about it was too easy. When he rolled his eyes, I bit my lip and decided I’d have to let him off the hook and tell him so, soon. Not now, but soon. “What about you? Urban planning?”

  “Where did you—?”

  “The books on your dresser.”

  He picked up a pen and tapped it against his opposite hand. My casual observations rattled him. He tried so hard to be unknowable. To keep his personal life entirely separate from his professional life. One night and one unexpected mutual friend had botched that objective.

  “It took me a little while to realize what I want to do with my life,” he said. “Believe it or not, there’s a shortage of little boys aspiring to optimize land use and infrastructure. I don’t think I knew what it was until I was in grad school.”

  “But now you know. So what are you going to do about it?”

  He stared at me across the expanse of his desk. “The hardest thing to do when you realize you’re off course is make the decision to get back on.” He wasn’t just answering my question; he was challenging me to do the same. He turned the page on my review, and I did the same with my copy.

  Under Suggestions for Improvement, he’d written: “Work on asking for help, advice, or support when needed.” Under Commendation: “Erin is a strong client advocate. She listens and sincerely cares that clients are satisfied. She tackles challenges head-on, isn’t afraid to think outside the box, and learns from her mistakes. JMCH is fortunate to have her.”

  The doorbell rang in the same two-second span the microwave finished heating my dinner. Jack scampered and yipped his way down the stairs, ran to the front window, and commenced barking. His stubby legs were just long enough for him to see out the low window. A moment later, the intercom beeped and my mother’s disembodied voice said, “Erin, check on that, would you?
Probably just a delivery.”

  I’d changed into yoga pants and a UT sweatshirt when I got home from work, but my feet were bare and chilled quickly on the marble floor. The sun had just set, and the automatic lights surrounding the house had begun to flicker on, along with thousands of white holiday lights encircling columns and tree trunks and strung artfully through branches and wound between the pointy finials of the wrought iron fence.

  Every year after we got back home from Colorado, Mom had our house professionally decorated inside and out—a rare dissimilarity between Nana and Mom. The results were always stylish and magazine-spread worthy. Reindeer-themed one year, white and silver with red accents; Victorian the next, everything blue and gold. Whatever the designer recommended—whatever was au courant—cool and hip and impersonal.

  This year’s trendy holiday motif was angels. Outside, they sat and stood along the roofline and gables like joyful gargoyles. Inside, they perched on mantels, were featured on velvet stockings, and covered the tree in silvery angelic poses.

  Checking the peephole and expecting to see our UPS guy dashing back to his truck after leaving a pile of boxes by the door, I was not prepared for the person standing on our front porch.

  I pulled the door open. “Isaac?”

  He paused before replying, like he was surprised to see me, though he knew I lived here.

  Jack tore around the corner, ran up to Isaac like he intended to take his leg off for a snack, and began sniffing and jumping on him. Isaac offered a hand and Jack growled, licked it, and resumed jumping.

  “Jack, get down,” I said. He ignored me, per usual.

  Isaac was wearing a lightweight tailored coat over what he’d worn to work, where I’d left him an hour ago, and he was holding a two-inch stack of documents. For a moment he seemed to be deciding whether to leave without saying or doing what he’d come for, and then he said, “Good evening, Ms. McIntyre. I need to speak with your father.”

  His formality would have hurt, but it didn’t make sense. I started to ask, Are you okay? but Daddy, in his hideous sweater, appeared in the foyer and turned toward the door.

  “Isaac. What’s happened? Is there a problem?”

  Mom appeared on the stairs, but she stopped halfway down, listening. Jack ran to cower behind her legs when Daddy spoke.

  I felt the same draw to Isaac I’d felt for months, but he trained his gaze on my father as though I weren’t there.

  “I’ve come to bring you some information.” He didn’t move to hand over the documents in his hands. “I’m going to leave this with you, but first I’m going to give you a warning you don’t deserve.”

  Daddy scowled, but the attempt to look stern in that sweater was beyond his ability. “I’m not sure what you mean by that—”

  “I’ve found evidence of fraud and embezzling inside JMCH.”

  Daddy’s glare was replaced by shock. He blinked, openmouthed. “What the— Jesus Christ.” He stepped back and gestured. “Come on in. Let’s go to my office—”

  “I can say what I intend to say right here.” Isaac paused. I felt my father’s impatience build, mistaking caution for indecision. He’d started to interrupt when Isaac said, “I took a job at JMCH with a specific goal in mind—to find evidence of illegal activity. Because of what I knew of you, I believed you incapable of running an aboveboard company.”

  “That’s a goddamned—”

  “My uncle was Ezekiel James.”

  Daddy jerked at the words, and my mother’s short gasp from the staircase was audible.

  Isaac, filling the doorway like an avenging angel, reacted visibly to neither of their responses. “I see you remember his name. Good. Maybe you’ll remember that because of your greed or your racism or some combination of the two, you cut him out of the company he helped develop. You stole his design concepts and the location he’d scouted and proposed. You betrayed his trust.”

  Daddy swallowed but said nothing, his jaw steeling and his eyes burning into Isaac’s. I was glad for the door at my back. My God, no wonder he’d wanted nothing to do with me.

  “In my mind, a dirty cheat is always a dirty cheat. All I needed was the evidence to ruin you. But it didn’t go down like I thought it would. It made me a little angry at first. I’d come to wreak vengeance, not render aid. But then I saw the beauty of it. The betrayer becomes the betrayed. Fitting, really.”

  A chill passed through me like a ghost. A fine mist of rain began falling behind Isaac, and when the wind gusted, I smelled the clean, sharp scent of it. I felt the cool moisture settle on my face and the tops of my feet. The slate stones of the sidewalk and circular drive began to darken in the glow of the landscape lighting. My father was silent, awaiting his sentence.

  “Leo has been taking kickbacks from certain contractors. They bid an amount he feeds them ahead of time, beating out other bids. JMCH includes that expense in the cost of the home. When the contractor is paid, Leo takes a bit off the top. A few hundred here, a couple thousand there. In finance, we call it a haircut. Paid for by JMCH and, ultimately, our clients. He doesn’t do it often, and only with certain contractors. Like his friend, Phil.”

  “Godfuckingdammit.”

  Isaac continued. “What I couldn’t figure out was how Hank hadn’t caught it before I came on board. Few people can pull that sort of thing off for long without it being noticed. I found it when Leo’s numbers didn’t mesh with Erin’s. The foremen used to turn them in to me directly. Now she’s in the middle, getting information directly from clients and correcting discrepancies. He should have realized he was in more danger of getting caught, but he was too stupid or greedy to stop.”

  I’d thought he was just too stupid to add. It had never occurred to me that my brother would steal from his father’s company.

  “One of the things you’ll need to check is whether safety standards were met. There’s a chance—given what happened with the Anderson home—that quality was compromised on some homes, going back years. I didn’t find evidence of city-inspection bribery, but I didn’t look very closely. It’s a possibility.”

  My parents would be ashamed of their son’s deceit, of course, but I knew them too well. They were as embarrassed that someone outside the family had caught it as they were that it had occurred. Daddy sighed heavily and held his hand out. “Thank you for bringing this to—”

  “I’m not finished, Mr. McIntyre.” Another pause. No interruption this time. “I mentioned that I couldn’t figure out how this petty skimming hadn’t been caught. Last week, I finally made the connection. What a surprise to find that the trail didn’t lead to you. My first clue was evidence that a JMCH construction crew had recently performed extensive upgrades on an employee’s home. A slight conflict of interest, but nothing major—until JMCH picked up the tab for it. It was overreaching, and it was the reason I started digging in places I hadn’t dug before. JMCH has been paying fake contractors, vendors, and suppliers from accounts Hank Greene controls. The money is being routed to offshore accounts. Millions over the past decade. I didn’t bother to go back farther than that because this is not my problem. It’s yours.”

  He handed the heavy document stack to my father, who almost dropped it. Daddy’s face was pure fury—the face of a man who wanted to tear the door off its hinges and throw punches into walls. Most people would be terrified of this enraged version of my father, terrified to relay this sort of news to him. Isaac’s expression exhibited no fear.

  “I suggest you call Russell Spellman and start discussing what legal avenues to take. Get Rhett up to the building to lock down the system and copy Hank’s hard drive before he can cover his tracks. Tomorrow morning at the latest. If it were my decision, I’d do it tonight. Feel free to have him take me off clearance. I have copies of everything I need to prove what I’ve told you as well as the fact that I’m not involved. I’ve cleared out my office and wiped my computer. I’ll cooperate to provide legal evidence, but I won’t be returning to the office.

  “On
e last point. I care about the people I work with. That’s why you’re getting that stack of documents and this heads-up. Most of them are good people, and I hope for their sakes you can fix this. For your own sake, I don’t care one motherfucking iota.”

  “Is Zeke— Is he… is he okay?” My father’s question was pathetic, and he knew it. He wanted some sort of absolution. Some sort of It All Worked Out In The End.

  Isaac did not give him what he wanted. “After your betrayal, my uncle went back to construction. He eventually started his own company, but he didn’t have a rich father-in-law as a financial backer, and high-interest business loans don’t have any give. Mere wobbles in the housing or construction sectors put him underwater. Just after his second bankruptcy, he lost his little sister, Lila—my mother. He took out a life insurance policy not long after we buried her. A week past the two-year clause prohibiting payout after suicide, Pop and I found him.”

  My father’s face lost all color. My eyes glassed with tears as Isaac delivered those blows, reliving the painful memories with every word. His hands, now empty, were balled into fists, and his narrowed eyes held no mercy.

  “If you have something to say to him, he’s buried at Oakwood. Don’t bullshit me with your justifications or regrets. I’m not hearing them.”

  He moved his gaze to my mother, who was standing, white-knuckled, at the bottom of the staircase across the foyer. “Mrs. McIntyre, my aunt Selma wanted me to pass on a message. She’s grateful to you. The two of you were friends once upon a time, she said, planning lives and babies together. Until out of the blue, there was no partnership between your husbands and no friendship you would claim. ‘She dropped me like trash,’ she said. ‘It hurt, and I felt like a fool. But I learned who and what not to trust.’ I’ll let you decipher what she meant by that.”

  I was going to be sick. My stomach heaved, my face burned, but my hands and feet were so cold I was shivering. My family had done those things to Isaac’s family. I hadn’t been wide of the mark, likening us to Romeo and Juliet. But I was not his sun, and a McIntyre was a McIntyre just as a rose was a rose. He did not love me, and I was both heartbroken and thankful, for his sake, that he didn’t.