Page 53 of So Close

“You’d do that,” she said. “You’d snatch Beachcrest away from me, renege on our deal before it’s even done, just because you’re having a dick-measuring match in your head with some guy from my past.”

She should have known better than to give any piece of herself to him. Now he was doing what men—what rich and powerful men—did in these situations. He was using his money and his power to control whatever he could control—and in this case, that was her.

And she was so fucking disappointed in him she couldn’t speak.

But mostly, she was disappointed in herself. For letting him feel like he had any right to make decisions for her—

“No!” he said.

“What?”

“No. You misunderstood me. I’m not talking about reneging. Or snatching anything away from you. The opposite in fact. I’m saying—”

He swallowed, hard.

“Auburn. There’s something I need to tell you.”

A fist squeezed in her belly, a warning that whatever it was, she probably wasn’t going to like it.

“Do you know what ‘overleveraged’ means?”

She shook her head.

“It’s when a company has taken on too much debt.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly.

“My company. Home Base. It’s overleveraged.”

The words came out slowly, as if they pained him. He closed his eyes, and an expression like grief came over his face. It took her a moment to recognize it for what it was.

Shame.

“Trey.”

He opened his eyes but wouldn’t meet her gaze. “We had more than half a billion on the balance sheet. Operating budget for two decades. Everyone thought it was a good time to grow. So we did. And then something that was too big to fail failed, and we were locked up in it, and overnight we went from being able to meet our obligations for five-to-ten years to being able to meet them for less than two months.”

She was starting to see. And her stomach hurt. Not so much for her—although she was getting the sense of how his revelations would affect her—but for him. She didn’t think many people knew what he’d just told her. She didn’t think Trey Xavier would admit what he was admitting to most people in the world.

But he was telling her.

As scared as she was, as bad as this news was, she was warm all over, and she wanted, more than anything, to reach out and hug him.Holdhim.

God, how had she gotten here? And—how did she get herselfoutagain?

“I scrambled, trying to find a way out. I found a buyer, which was a miracle in and of itself. It’s a good buyer, a good sale. If I make the sale, I’ll come out a winner instead of a loser. I’d be able to start another company—instead of not knowing if I can keep my house and my car. And chances are good that my people—a hundred and fifty employees, to be exact—could keep their jobs. But to make that deal go through, to make that sale, I have to be able to keep the company running long enough for the deal to get penned and signed.”

He took a deep breath. “I’m just a few weeks short of money. That’s it. Just a few weeks. Nothing in the scheme of things. Except…” He closed his eyes. “Everything is leveraged.Everything.”

Slowly, slowly, the last piece fell into place for Auburn. “Everything except Beachcrest.”

“EvenBeachcrest. It’s mortgaged almost to the hilt, thanks to my grandfather. Which means—”

“That the only thing you can do is sell it.”

He closed his eyes again, and she could see the pain etched into his features.

“The last thing I wanted, you have to believe me, is to sell it out from under him. God.” His tone was fervent. “But then he had the heart attack, and he said he was ready to retire, and I thought—here’s a way out. It was like being handed my salvation, Auburn—”

---