Page 22 of Point of Contention

Stepping in front of the wardrobe mirror, my face fell. I did not look like someone who was about to take the publishing world by storm. Again. If I was going to kick this internship’s ass, I needed to take a goddamn shower and brush my hair.

Chapter Eight

Cabot

The last time I strode into this meeting room, I’d been ready to take my rightful place on the throne. Now, in just under a month, I found myself once again surrounded by the shareholders, trustees, and people in power at Reed Enterprises. And, once again, they held my fate in their hands.

This time, however, was different than the last. When I entered the conference room now, five days since my father’s fabricated announcement, no one met my gaze.

Cowards, every single one of them.

I knew what they thought of me. They had ideas and assumptions about my lifestyle based on a few stolen pictures and narratives I couldn’t control. The media spun my relationship with Rylan into something sordid and dirty. ‘A sexual deviant’, they’d called me.‘A predator’.

Whether those gathered in this room would admit it outright or not, I’d disgraced them.

Disgraced the company, the brand.

My father’s name.

Worse, my mother’s legacy. She was all things good and redeemable, and I was… well, I was the opposite in their eyes now, wasn’t I? And it made sense to them, I imagined, that I could turn out to be cruel and abusive, tying my women up and ‘beating them into submission’—as I’d read in the Enquirer. Because if the trustees looked hard enough, they could see whatever they needed to see. They could make me something else entirely.

To fit into this new narrative, they’d see me as something else entirely. Now, I’d never been my mother’s prodigy but my father’s. A cruel, underhanded man. To them, my dominant nature was proof that I was all the things the news said about me. They saw what theywantedto see now. Everything they’d learned about me in the past few days told them who I was, regardless of who they knew me to be. Before.

I’d barely taken a seat at the opposite end of the table when my father rose to his feet. “In light of recent events,” he said, standing tall as he addressed the room, a smug smile tugging at his paper-thin lips, “I have decided not to step down.”

My breath caught. I scanned the faces of everyone else in the room, and found not a single expression of surprise. They’d known. They’d met without me, behind my back.

The door opened and I swiveled my head as Roderick Rombauer strode inside. As the son of my father’s longest standing friend, we’d grown up together.

And I despised him almost as much as I loathed his father—my godfather.

They were the legal team that handled the balk of Reed Enterprises dealings, but had guessed correctly that upon my father’s retirement, I would cease to employ them. They’d been scrambling for months, fighting for some fraying thread that would unravel my future.

As Roderick was also my father’s godson, I had no doubt he felt he was owed a piece of the pie.

My pie.

He smirked as he took an empty seat between my father and his.

Fury shot fire through my veins. It tensed my muscles and tightened my jaw.

I glanced beside me at Travis, whose face was a mask of resignation, though a muscle ticked in his jaw.

If I wasn’t CEO, he wouldn’t remain at Reed Enterprises longer than it took him to find another position elsewhere and possibly not even that long.

It wasn’t justmycareer hanging in the balance.

“As you all know,” my father said, “my son has so much on his plate now, what with the wedding and his young fiancé. She’s quite the handful, that one.” He chuckled and met my gaze as if we shared some big secret about Rylan Blake.

A rebuttal sat on the tip of my tongue, its bitterness making me desperate to be rid of it, but I remained quiet. I couldn’t give anything away, couldn’t let him know he’d ruined any chance I had of a future with Rylan Blake the moment he’d opened his mouth and lied publicly about our relationship.

I clenched my fists under the table, my knuckles turning white. This was supposed to be my moment, my chance to prove myself worthy of leading Reed Enterprises into a new era. We’d already concluded that I would lead; the committee came to a unanimous vote not even a month ago, and now they were ripping it out of my hands.

“I understand that some of you may have concerns about my decision,” my father continued, “but rest assured, I have the company’s best interests at heart.”

Did he? I had to wonder.

The man was fast approaching eighty-five years old. At what point didhiscompetence become a concern?

---