Daddy's Secret Deal

by J. D. Fox

  ​“What did she say her name was?” Olivier prepared himself to take note of it so he could investigate the person in question.

  ​“It was one of those weird American names,” Richard said dismissively. “Clara Coltrane, I think she said.” The last name lit up in Olivier’s mind. Did Genevieve have a sister? A cousin in the same industry she was in? He knew that it couldn’t be coincidental that the woman who contacted Richard not only had the same last name as his au pair but also somehow had heard about the business plans that he was involved in. Olivier checked himself; Genevieve’s parents had been involved in a scam that had seen them thrown in jail. It was entirely possible that someone else in her family was just as unethical, and had heard about the business opportunity the same way that connected people usually did. “What did she say? Is she going to invest?”

  ​Richard ate some more of his fries. “She is thinking about it. I believe that she’s low-priority, though,” he replied. “It looks as though she might have good connections to get people into it, though. The Coltrane family is big in New York finance circles—or, at least they were.” Olivier agreed with that assessment.

  ​“They got themselves into trouble, though. Right?” he tacked on the question as an afterthought, wondering how much information Richard had actually gotten.

  ​“The two in prison, yes,” he agreed. “More reason for other members of the family to find new ways to clean their resources.” Olivier murmured his agreement to that assessment and turned his attention back onto his duck. He would have to look back into things, that much was clear. He would also have to talk to Clinton, and see if his partner in this arrangement knew anything about the Coltrane family. If Clinton had sent someone to look into investing in the business, then that was fine—though it was strange that she would go to Richard instead of to him.

  ​They finished their main courses, and both accepted the cheeses the waiter suggested: local camembert, a small slice of bleu d’auvergne, and some chaource, along with a light salad to cleanse their palates. Since summer was almost over, Olivier decided to have the pêche sorbet royale from the dessert menu: fresh peaches, a peach sorbet, and champagne. He savored the taste of it, right up until he realized that something about the flavor of peaches and champagne reminded him of Genevieve’s lips, of the taste of her fluids as he’d devoured her. It wasn’t the same flavor at all, but something about the sharp sweetness of the dessert was just close enough to bring up the memory of their tryst.

  ​Olivier decided to make a few phone calls when he got home to see if anyone else in his inner circle had heard from Clara Coltrane; if she had approached Richard, he needed to know who she had gotten his name from, and why she hadn’t approached him. By the end of the dinner, though, Olivier at least had the good news that Richard was all in; the man would definitely sign on as an investor, thus funding the enterprise on the French end. With that in place, at the least, he could tell Clinton that they could finalize the rest of the details.

  ​“Have a good rest of your evening, Richard—maybe see about making baby number three with your pretty wife,” Olivier suggested as they parted ways. Richard chuckled and said that he would get right on that and that Olivier should bring Mathilde to play with his kids sometime. As Olivier left the restaurant and walked to the parking structure where his car waited for him, he ran through the people he would have to reach out to; he needed to find out what was happening and whether or not Richard had opened them up to liability. First, though, he determined to find out who this Clara Coltrane was, and how she might know about the plans that he had going on.

  ​Olivier felt more settled in his mind as he carefully pulled out of his parking spot and headed in the direction of his home. He would be back with his daughter soon, and even if Genevieve filled him with complicated sentiments, he could appreciate her presence in the house and the effect she’d had on Mathilde. By that point in the evening, Olivier was reasonably sure he would come home just in time to put his daughter to bed— but that would also mean that he had plenty of time to do some research into the new complication his business plans had taken on. It was no more than twenty minutes’ drive, and Olivier pulled into his driveway resolute on the issue and with a clear idea on how to deal with the situation— if, of course, he needed to take any action.

  ​“Papa! Papa! On a vu La Reine des Neiges! Et La Petite Sirène!” Mathilde threw herself against his legs, and Olivier chuckled.

  ​“She talked me into two Disney movies in one night,” Genevieve said. “I’m starting to think that might have been a mistake.” Olivier smiled at Genevieve and then, remembering his brief flash of reminiscence about her during his dessert, turned his attention back onto his daughter.

  ​“It is time for you to get ready for bed, I think,” he said, speaking English for his au pair’s benefit. It was hard, after a few hours of speaking exclusively in French, to switch back—but if he planned on moving to the US eventually, Olivier knew he would have to get used to switching between the two more seamlessly.

  ​“But you are only just home,” Mathilde complained.

  ​“I will be here when you awaken, ma petite,” Olivier said gently, but firmly. “T’as besoin de dormir, comme tous les petits.” Mathilde pouted, but as soon as Genevieve reinforced him, she started to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  ​“Genevieve,” he said, stopping the woman on her way to supervise his daughter.

  ​“Hm?” Genevieve met his gaze, and if she looked uncomfortable, it was no more than she had since they had had their tryst and he had made his ultimatum.

  ​“I meant to ask you: do you have anyone else in the finance business in your family?” Genevieve frowned in confusion at his question, and Olivier reconsidered asking it.

  ​“Since you have made the topic of your business affairs forbidden, I don’t think there’s any reason for me to discuss my own or any family connections I might have,” Genevieve said. Olivier considered arguing with her about it—pointing out that they were two different situations—but he knew that would just create another awkward situation. Better to let it fall to the side and do his own investigating.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ​Genevieve took a deep breath and set her phone down, scowling at the screen as if it were at fault for her situation. Sadie’s information had given her a great deal to go on, and now she’d managed to narrow things down even more. She didn’t have much time before she needed to leave to pick Mathilde up from school, and then she really wouldn’t have any time to herself for hours to come. She exhaled on a sigh, scowling at her phone again. “Just make the damn call,” she told herself irritably.

  ​She’d been poking and prodding for about a week in between her responsibilities to Mathilde, and so far Gen had discovered a few things about her employer that she was fairly certain he would rather she not know. For one thing, he had more in common with her parents then she was entirely comfortable with. As she’d gone through documentation that a former colleague had tracked down for her, Gen had been able to see the way that Olivier usually operated: he would come into a business deal as a sort of “facilitator,” getting people with less than legal business interests get in contact with others like them. He had specialized in moving money around for others like a kind of shell game: helping the wealthy put it in one account and then another, investing and withdrawing it, taking his cut along the way.

  ​It wasn’t the worst thing that Gen could have imagined, but she could see why he had stopped working for a while; the French government had started to suspect that there was more to his business dealings than just the immense luck of managing to get wealthy while a company had a meteoric rise and then an “unpredictable” crash. He’d gotten married, had a kid, and then his wife had died, and he’d stayed out of “the game” for a while longer.

  ​Digging into Olivier Laurent’s business affairs had forced her to get in touch with people who had abandoned her like the proverbial sinking ship when her
parents had gone down in their scandal. For that, Gen was not sure she could ever fully forgive them. She hadn’t told anyone what she was up to; just that she had decided to move overseas for a while, to “get a fresh perspective on things.”

  ​It was lucky for her that there were a few people from her old life whose hearts had grown fonder of her in her absence; that had made it easier to get the intel she had needed. She’d called around and finally found someone who knew someone who’d had dealings with Nicholas Caron, and someone else who knew someone who had worked with Richard Petit. Sometimes it struck her just how small the world was. Both of the men she’d investigated were wealthier than Olivier, but they’d had the benefit of being born rich— they had a greater willingness to take risks.

  ​In Richard’s case, she’d learned that aspect first-hand when she’d carefully made her call to him. Gen smiled wryly to herself, remembering the deception she had used and how it had all played out. It had been easy enough for her to get a friend from one of her old companies to vouch for her under an alternate name, just in case Richard decided to try and dig. She would be legit as Clara Coltrane, a relative of her actual family. Alex, one of the board members who had taken an interest in tech innovation and was getting ready to fly solo, had made it happen: she was in the system as a silent investor, someone who had a formal title and a technical vote on the company rolls, but essentially just lived off the trust fund the position provided.

  ​Richard Petit had been embarrassingly easy to make talk from Gen’s perspective. She’d met a dozen men like him in her old life: a little silly, older, but who thought of himself as a real, smooth ladies’ man. All she’d had to do was giggle a little bit at his “charming” accent and mispronounce some French words that she knew how to say correctly, and he was like putty in her hands. “I think that we could make arrangements to let you into the business,” he had said. “In fact, I would love to invite you to come to stay with my wife and children and me, outside of Paris, to discuss the possibilities.”

  ​Gen had demurred on the offer of staying with him but had managed to learn the situation at hand. In essence, a few American interests would be establishing a business in France that could bring in investment from both sides of the ocean. The primary purpose of the company would be to move money around; either to avoid taxes or just to clean it up. It was, Gen thought, an expansion on the usual MO that Olivier seemed to follow, especially given the involvement of another country’s wealthy people.

  ​What she didn’t yet know was which companies, in particular, were involved, and there were only a few people that Genevieve knew she could ask to get the answer to that question. “Just make the call and get it over with,” she told herself firmly. “You’ll get the answers you need, and you can put your worries to rest.” But she knew that wasn’t, strictly speaking, true; if it turned out to be one of a handful of companies she knew about— or people at those companies—then it would mean that Olivier was possibly in a good deal more trouble than he knew.

  ​Gen took another deep breath and exhaled slowly before picking up her phone and opening the Skype app. There was only one person that she knew she could ask who wouldn’t question her reasons for wanting to know: Dylan Woodsworth. He’d been one of the very few people that Gen had continued to talk to throughout the time when her parents were falling from grace. He’d gone through the same thing with his own parents when they’d both been in private school together, although his mother had managed to avoid jail time; the prosecution couldn’t prove she’d known about the scheme his father had been engaged in. She hadn’t even told Dylan about her plans, but she was reasonably sure that Dylan would tell her what he knew— if he happened to know anything.

  ​Gen keyed his number into the app from memory and tapped the call icon. It was a bit early in the day back in Manhattan, but knowing Dylan, he was probably up and getting ready to head into the office. She just had to hope that he would take her call. Gen waited as the phone rang once, then twice, and then a third time; she was prepared to leave a message before the line connected.

  ​“Hey Gen! I was wondering when you were going to come out of hiding,” Dylan said as soon as he came on the line. In spite of her worries, Gen smiled.

  ​“I’m not out of hiding just yet. It’s really more of a witness protection deal, anyway,” she told him. “But I do need intel on a situation I’ve heard some stuff about, and I thought of you first.”

  ​“Naturally,” Dylan said. “What can I do for an old friend?”

  ​“Don’t you mean your oldest friend?” Gen teased. “I was wondering if you’ve heard anything about a new international deal going down, with a handful of French investors to back the company on French soil and matched funding from US companies.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and Gen knew that Dylan knew exactly what she was referring to. No matter what he said to her, even if he tried to play dumb or say his hands were tied, he knew.

  ​“I know a few things,” Dylan said slowly. “But I have to be careful about what I choose to tell you.”

  ​“I understand, Dylan,” Gen said. “Whatever information you can give me from the US side will help me out. You know I’m good at digging stuff up when I know where to stick the shovel.”

  ​Dylan sighed. “One of the companies involved is Clarion Call Management,” he said. Gen’s heart— and stomach—sank. Clarion Call Management was owned by the Humphries family; the same Humphries family she had nearly married into. Even worse was the fact that her fiancé, Clint, had taken over the helm of the company about a year before her parents’ scandal had broken.

  ​“How involved is involved?” Gen hoped that Dylan would tell her that Clarion Call was just one among many; that her former fiancé had only a minimal role in the whole operation, something that allowed him to gain a little extra money but not anything that would put him in charge.

  ​“I can’t tell you absolutes, but my feeling is pretty involved,” Dylan said. “I’m not ground floor— I just hear about these things peripherally.”

  ​“Of course,” Gen said. “So the best person to go to, if I wanted the full details, would be Clint.”

  ​“From what I hear, he’d welcome the call, so you’ve got that going for you,” Dylan pointed out. “If you’re in self-imposed witness protection, why are you even digging into this?”

  ​“Just following some trails that lead back to someone I care about,” Gen replied.

  ​“Do I want to know, or would it compromise me to my friends and peers?” Dylan asked dryly.

  ​Gen chuckled. “Whether or not you want to know, I’m not telling,” she said. “But thanks for the heads up.”

  ​“Any time,” Dylan said. “You know how it is.” Gen nodded, even though Dylan couldn’t see her.

  ​“I hate to just pump you for information and move on, but I have to do something in about thirty minutes, and I need to get in touch with Clint,” Gen told her friend.

  ​“Give me a call on the weekend sometime when you can chat for a bit,” Dylan said. “I’d love to hear about your life off of the Finance radar.” Gen promised him that she would and ended the call, setting her phone down and staring at it once more. She knew she had to call Clint, but there were few people in the world she wanted to ever speak to less. She hadn’t really had any hard feelings towards her ex when the relationship had ended. After all, to have hard feelings, she would have had to have had actual feelings by the time she’d given him back the ring. It was more that she resented everything Clint stood for in her life: the way everyone had abandoned her, more or less, in the face of her parents’ disgrace, and the way her parents had humiliated themselves. The fact that he was possibly on the path to losing Mathilde her father to the French prison system didn’t help.

  ​“You have to call him and see what he says,” Gen told herself. “Maybe it’s reasonably above-board, no matter what you’ve found out.” She stretched her neck out, twisting it a bit and rota
ting her head around to loosen the tension she could feel down through her shoulders. Mathilde had decided that she wanted to try gymnastics and dance, and Gen had agreed to help her look into the classes. Now that she would have a bit more free time, Gen had begun trying yoga again, and she thought that if she saw this whole situation through, she’d dedicate entire days to the practice for her own peace of mind. But thinking about that was just distracting herself from what she had to do.

  ​As Gen thought he would, Clint picked up after two rings. “Gen?”

  ​“Yeah, it’s me,” she replied.

  ​“I’ve been waiting for this call,” Clint said, and Gen steeled herself for him to begin gloating. “Do you want the ring back?” She nearly dropped her phone.

  ​“What?” She had to work hard to keep her voice level and calm. That was the last thing she’d expected to hear from her former fiancé.

  ​“Sorry, I guess I’m getting ahead of myself,” Clint said. “You’re calling me, finally. What’s up?”

  ​“I just wanted to pick your brains a bit,” Gen said, falling back on the strategy she had decided on in the few moments before she had called him before she’d been sidelined by his ridiculous statement. “I’m looking to dip my toe into the money world again, and I’ve heard through the grapevine that you’ve got some hot prospects on the line.”

  ​“Where did you run off to?” That was a question Gen had no intention of answering.

  ​“I’ve sort of exiled myself,” she said, hedging. “But I’ve been thinking I might be interested in eventually making a comeback of sorts.”

  ​“I can definitely help you out there,” Clint told her. “If you really want back into the real world, I’d be happy to make that happen.” Gen stared at her phone for a moment, confused. She had broken things off at Clint’s request, more or less, to help him save face when her family’s reputation had been ruined by her parents’ crimes.