Page 7 of Colton's Secret Weapon
On what grounds? A phone call? A tone of voice? Because the man hadn’t actually issued a threat. Except by way of stating the obvious. Whaler’s business was failing. The longer he waited to sell it, the less it would be worth.
Unless Mitchell found a way to help St. James Boats succeed.
“I just need to take care of things here,” Dove said, glancing around the office. “If Dad can start turning a profit again, we don’t need to worry about the business losing value.”
Her words so oddly aligned with his own thoughts that the response popping into Mitchell’s head seemed perfectly logical.
“I might be able to help with that.”
He regretted the words the second he said them. Most particularly when Dove flew toward him. Threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.
Before stepping back. “Thank you,” she said. “What’s next?”
“You go do what you normally do in a day and give me time to get that far.”
She was already heading toward the door. And Mitchell’s gut tightened. “Dove?” he called her back a second time.
She turned. “Yeah?”
“I’m serious. You be careful with that Fletcher guy. Block his number. And if he shows up anywhere near you, err on the side of caution and call the police. Tell them I told you to, if it comes to that.”
Sometimes it helped to have a big-brother cop.
With a nod, accompanied by a smile so huge it felt like another hug, the woman finally left Mitchell in peace.
And five seconds later he was on the internet via his phone, looking up every Brad Fletcher within the area code he’d been able to make out on Dove’s screen.
He might never come up with a feasible plan to get Whaler’s business back to health, but he could damned sure see to it that the old captain’s daughter didn’t fall prey to its demise, too.
Chapter 3
Freed from chaperoning Mitchell Colton in her father’s office, Dove got to work helping out on the docks. While she didn’t know anything about general maintenance or fixing the boats—her father had always insisted that was men’s work—she’d been helping with tourist check-in on and off since her father had used his savings to buy his own boats and start the business.
She had also adjusted her class schedule at the studio to free up Saturday mornings when her father had been forced to let Oscar go.
The adjusted schedule was temporary. As was, Whaler hoped, the termination. He was ready to rehire Oscar as soon as the man got sober.
Holding the position open was part of what was hurting the business. While most of the revenue came from boat rentals, Whaler used to make good money with the chartered excursions he and Oscar had run on a regular basis. He’d had to take those outings off the St. James Boats offerings at the start of the current tourist season. With Oscar gone, and as much as Whaler was drinking, he’d made the responsible choice, in terms of client safety.
The best choice, of course, would have been to curtail his own drinking. Something he was managing to do on a case by case basis as special requests came in for excursions. He’d blowcompletely sober before he went out and when he got back, too. An hour later, no way.
As she headed to her studio before lunch, needing an hour of self-provided therapy before her afternoon classes began, Dove still hadn’t heard from Mitchell Colton with any kind of plan. She found herself thinking not about what that silence meant in terms of her hopes but about the fact that the lawyer hadn’t pointed out the most obvious solution.
Bob St. James had to sober up.
With a failing business that wasn’t going to happen.
If he was sober, the business would bounce back.
Catch-22. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg. She’d been diving headfirst into emotional pools of bad energy with her lack of solutions every time she thought about convincing her father to try and go even a day without getting drunk.
But if Mitchell could find a way to help her save the business in the interim, her father would sober up. She just had to believe that.
On a wave of hope, she climbed the stairs to her studio, key in hand to unlock the door. And stopped just short of reaching to slide it in the slot it matched. The doorknob was tilted at a downward angle. And the quarter-inch gap between the jamb and the front of the door told her that it wasn’t latched. Pulled closed, but not tightly.
Curious more than anything else, she pushed a shoulder against the door. Hanging back enough that if someone was inside, she could call out and be heard by Repo customers at the bottom of the stairs.
When no sound came, she cautiously took one step and then another. Could be there’d been a leak from her bathroom and maintenance had had to get in to fix it before it damaged goods in the store below. The plumbing was old. She’d put in requeststo have it fixed but hadn’t pushed because she couldn’t afford to have her rent raised.
