HowMuchYouWantToBet (13 page)

“Two, to be exact. One studio for painting and one where pottery could be glazed and glass blown. I could do it all. He wanted me to do it all. I drew the line at the paintings. That was all I would do under his name. If I ever decided to become an artist under my own name, I wanted my work to stand out for itself.”

“No, you didn’t want to be figured out,” he said

She rubbed her arms, trying to bring warmth into her chilled skin. “Maybe, but I never did try it on my own. At least not under the Sullivan name.”

Gib seemed to digest this new bit of information. “How many years have you been putting art on the market under a pseudonym?”

“Only once, and I haven’t had the courage to do it before or after.”

“Why?”

“I made a promise.” She unfurled her fist and laid a hand over her coffee cup.

Hearing the words, Gib felt as though his solar plexus had been hit, but it wasn’t what was said that made him move toward Neil and take her into his arms. When she buried her face in his shoulder, he held her tighter.

“He left me a letter. He was always obsessed with death, even before my mother and sister died. He wanted me never to tell.”

Anger churned in his gut at the man who was no longer alive but whose memory still haunted Neil. The anger burned deeper when Neil’s shoulders shook in his hands and began to cry.

He’d never known her to shed a tear, and he hated her father for pushing her beyond her limit. The woman he knew was strong and resilient. The woman he worked with every day was intelligent, unbendable and beautiful. If anyone other than her father had told her to keep that secret, Neil would have pinned them to the wall. Her reaction spoke volumes.

The ache in his chest grew. He wanted to make it right and didn’t know how. Where do you start to mend something so broken, so fragile, that the slightest touch could break it again? Gib didn’t know. “He’s dead now, so why are you still keeping his secret?”

“A Sullivan doesn’t soil her parent’s name for fame.”

He was damn sick of that Sullivan pride of hers, even though it was one of the things he admired most about her. “That’s not a good enough reason.”

She pulled from him. Her eyes distant and guarded. “I needed to tell you.” The swipes to get rid of the tears were angry jabs.

Gib finally asked the question that had bothered him since the night before. “What did you and Chez talk about?”

“He wasn’t threatening, at all, he just seems to have really changed. He wanted me to come clean. He said he’d back me, if I did.” She bit her bottom lip until it turned white.

Her reaction told him what she couldn’t say in words, and his chest constricted at the hopelessness of the situation. He’d find a way to fix it, but for now there was only one thing he knew to do. Enveloping her in his arms, Gib kissed her deeply and soothed her in his own way.

That conversation with Neil still weighed on Gib’s mind when Monday came around. Leaving her to work out her frustrations at the site was all he could do for her. He hated the feeling of being unable to do something, but now he had his business to tend to, and later he’d find a way for Neil to do what she so wanted to do.

As of ten o’clock that morning, Gib was the sole owner of Winnfred Automotive and Glastic Games, along with all their various subsidiaries. In the meeting room of their downtown offices in San Francisco that afternoon, he gazed at the faces surrounding the large oak table. It seemed like nothing but eyes stared back at him, all with board-of-director gazes, steely and unshakable.

Eight of the men attending actually were directors on the company board. All of them had been sharks too long and looked gnarled by time and unhappy to see him at the helm of the table, but none had enough stock to overthrow what had been done or, thankfully, what he was about to do.

The others were heads of departments—marketing, sales, research and development—together with the general manager who oversaw employees for both companies.

Gib was in deep and felt it, as he began. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for bringing the reports I requested. The numbers are as I expected.” He stilled when his father strutted through the side door. Gib nodded to him and continued. “Over the past year, sales have leveled off…” “We are doing as well as expected for this kind of company.” The protest came from Benson, one of the younger board members, his gnarled hand curled into a fist. “The car market isn’t what it used to be.”

“Don’t make excuses. Hear the boy out before you try to explain something that doesn’t need explaining,” Winn barked. Immediately Benson closed his mouth.

“As I was saying, the sales are not as they should be nor what they used to be, and I’m going to bring in a team to help deal with this issue.” Gib ignored the collective mumbles around the room. “No one is going to lose a job as long as there is full cooperation.”

The room became instantly quiet and the eyes were no longer trained on him but on his father.

Gib tilted his head, waited for any response. His father stayed silent. Gib lifted his brow in surprise and said, “My father, Winn, was an incredible man for running this entire corporation by himself with only slight help or opinion from others. However, it will no longer be run exactly the same way. Within the next month there will be a new CEO in charge of everything to do with the automotive division. There will be another to do the same for the software company, and both hires will answer to me. Also within that time frame, I’m going to be adding a new division to the helm that we call Winnfred Corporation.”

Finally Winn spoke, his face tinged a deep red, his words gritted out through clenched teeth. “And what will that be, Gibland?”

Gib tried not to wince. His father only called him by his full name when he was mad. He was a grown man, but still that tone could make him want to confess. He thought of Neil, how she had been awed by the blueprints for his house, and he thought of her recent tears, her need to still keep her father’s secrets and do what he wanted her to do.

“A firm of architects.” Gib spoke directly to his father with his answer.

Winn nodded stiffly and kept his mouth shut.

The meeting continued, with Gib directing each department on what they needed to do and what reports to compile, discussing complaints from employees and improvements that could be made.

When the meeting was over, Gib’s sigh reflected his thought that the new CEOs were going to be very busy men.

Most of the board of directors had bum-rushed his father when the meeting adjourned. Winn had waved them away, telling them it was fine, not to worry, but when they had gone his whole demeanor changed.

“What the hell do you think you’re trying to do?”

“I’m trying to run a business the way it should be run, so that later on down the line I won’t have to lie to my wife about the actual amount of hours I spend in the office.” Gib could see his father’s anger sobered by the comment. “Does Mom know you’re here?”

Winn glanced uneasily at the door to the conference room. “I wanted to drop in and see what you planned. You didn’t feel the need to tell me…”

“Because you worked half your life and, unlike most people, you don’t know what a vacation is. Taking over your company doesn’t mean I have to take over the way you lived. When I have a family some day, I want to be there.”

“I never neglected you.” Winn sounded hurt.

Gib sighed. “Not in the way you think. I had a roof over my head, food in my belly, and Mom. You’d come to my baseball games when you could.” Gib couldn’t bring himself to say,
But the business was always first.
Winn seemed to shrink in the large chair for a moment, then he smiled. “Your mother is going to be so happy.”

Gib frowned at his father’s abrupt change of attitude. “Why?”

“You’re in love with Neil. Victoria’s been rambling about talking Neil into letting her do the wedding when you two finally see what’s right there in front of you.”

Gib plopped into the chair next to his father, not able to deny what his father was saying. The whole time he’d talked of family, it had been with her in his mind, Neil’s swollen belly from his child, her waiting for him at their home. He spied his father’s grinning face. It wasn’t often he had to agree his father was right.

“So what do you plan to do?”

“I…” He stopped as the thought came to him. “How many Nathanial Sullivan paintings do we have at the house?”

The question seemed to throw Winn, “I don’t know, maybe six or so.”

“Were all of them painted before his wife died? Or after she died?”

“I think maybe two of them were after her death. Why?”

“You get a chance to pay me back for taking over your company and giving it to outsiders.”

“Damn straight, you’re going to pay.” Winn leaned forward, and for once he looked uncomfortable in his three-piece suit. “What do you have in mind?”

CHAPTER 13

“Nothing like a warm beer to put that look on a face.”

Neil raised her head at Anna’s voice and saw her friend standing at the table with a tray of beers in her hands. The dim light in The Tavern caught the red highlights in Anna’s hair. She didn’t look like anybody’s mother.

Neil gestured to the drinks. “So the plan is to get me stinking drunk?”

Anna smiled at her. “Barb, Janice, and Linda are coming soon.” Anna tilted her head and Neil felt like she was under a microscope. “Looks like you’ve got a lot on your mind.” She set the tray down in front of Neil and slid into the booth. “But then again, you always look that way.”

Neil hadn’t noticed, but how could she expect the life she was leading not to leave its mark. “I’d rather not get into it right now.”

At least that was partially honest. Neil had kissed Gib goodbye last night and let herself fall back into work. The rudimentary task had occupied her mind until five p.m. She had hoped confessing would eventually lift the weight she carried, make her hands stop itching to pick up a paintbrush, would let her father’s memory fade—it hadn’t.

The burden lay heavily on her mind because it felt like,
Now what?
Should she move on? Keep ignoring her circumstances, as she had been?

Reality, harsh and cold, no sugar coating allowed, required accepting her life as she made it. There was no option of turning back the hands of time, nor rectifying the mistakes that kept her up at night. To be perfectly honest, what was the point of living in the past, if there was no way to fix it? The weight of her reality could make any sane person depressed.

Neil curled her hand around the beer mug, meeting Anna’s gaze. “No, I’d rather not.”

Anna’s brow rose. “This is your last chance to escape, because now I consider you a friend. Friends don’t let friends mope over warm beers.” She motioned her head toward the door as Linda, Barb, and Janice walked in. “And they consider you a friend, too.”

A smile spread across Neil’s face. It had been a long while since someone, anyone, called her friend. This part of moving on she could do. “That sounds like a threat.”

“Wait until we upgrade from beer to whiskey shots. You’ll be quaking in those god-awful boots.”

Neil laughed and slid down the booth’s seat to make room for the gang. Janice and Barb moved in next to her. Linda elbowed Anna, saying, “She has a glow.”

“Hello to you, too,” Neil said.

Janice assessed her from the end of the table with a predatory look. “She’s had sex.” She sniffed the air. “Gib sex. I can smell his cologne.”

Impossible, Neil thought, and then smelled her shirt. Her stomach fluttered at his musky scent clinging to the cotton T-shirt wore.
Well, damn.

“The sure sign of the guilty,” Barb pointed out.

A moment too late to realize what she’d done, and since she was, Neil shrugged. “So, we had sex.” She wanted to add,
Really good, mind-blowing, toe-tingling sex,
but that would be bragging.

“What happened to him kissing like a fish?” Linda grabbed a beer, not taking her eyes off Neil’s face as she waited for an answer.

“Is that why you looked so upset when I sat down next to you?” Anna sat up with worry on her face.

“She was depressed after sex with Gib?” Barb’s shoulders slumped. “I had such high hopes for a man who looked like that. I mean look at his—”

“It wasn’t the sex.” Neil laughed. “You guys are horrible. What in the world would your husbands think, hearing you talk like this?”

Janice shrugged and reached for her beer. “They love us, and so do you. They’ve learned to live with it.”

Neil looked at the faces in front of her. How much had she gained by loving Gib? A better question, how much would she lose? And by trusting these women, how much better would her life be? Neil let out her pent-up breath and made a decision. “Who here knows about art?”

“A crap load,” Barb replied.

“What does art have to do with sex?” Anna took a sip of her beer, then added, “Other than if you do it very well it’s like an art form.”

Neil remembered how Gib had held her after she’d told him, how good it had felt, for one moment, to let the secrets go. She took another breath and said, “My father was Nathanial Sullivan.”

Barb choked on her beer. “You? No, I don’t mean it like that, it’s just…”

Linda handed her a napkin. “That might help take the foot out of your mouth.”

“Behave,” Janice interjected. “She’s trying to tell us something.”

“That’s good, you recognize his name.” Neil’s hands tightened around her mug. “Now, have you also heard of forgery?”

“Your father…?” Linda’s voice trailed off, leaving her speechless for the first time since Neil had met her.

She shook her head. “Me.”

“No,” Janice said.

Neil rolled her shoulders. “Under my father’s name.” She glanced down at her beer mug. “I’m going to need something stronger if I’m going to tell this again.”

“Don’t say anything until I get back.” Janice slipped out of the booth and spoke to the burly man at the bar. She held up five fingers and ran back to the table. “Go.”

“Aren’t you going to wait for the drinks?” Neil was stalling.

“That’s my husband,” Anna said. “His hands and legs aren’t broken. We come here about once a month, anyway, to get trashed and make a ruckus. He knows the routine.”