Page 60 of His Gift
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure if I want any part of it either,” I said, then turned and walked down the stairs faster than I knew Walt could come after me.
Only when I made it to the sidewalk that ran beside the Pullman Center did I realize those words could have meant something else to Walt. It wasn’t that I didn’t want anything to do with Shawn anymore. Quite the opposite. But my thoughtsstarted to spin off into all the ways I might be able to convince my alpha, and Walt, too, to leave the family and foundation that was their entire world to go do…something else.
I had no idea what that could be, though. I had no idea?—
“Well, well. Look who we have here.”
I jerked to a stop and glanced up to see Rick Deluca standing on the sidewalk in front of me, blocking my path. Another alpha dressed all in black stood just behind him, and beside him stood my dad.
“Looks like I’m going to get my merry Christmas paycheck after all,” Dad said, rubbing his hands together as the three men approached me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Shawn
It felt wrong to walk away from my omega when so much was going on. That was the problem, though. So muchwasgoing on. If I didn’t deal with the recalcitrant donor for the event, then that could cause problems down the road. It would be a nightmare if one bad apple spoiled the entire bunch, ruining this event and potentially future events as well.
What sucked even more was that the very fact that one of the companies who had originally donated their services but was now reconsidering because they wanted to be paid. It sucked because it just proved everything my dad had just said about the wealthy people we’d spent our whole life around being fickle, touchy, and unreliable. At least some of them. I knew from my philanthropic experience that there were a lot of good people out there, too, but that didn’t mean Dad was wrong about the awful ones.
“I was given to understand that the local and regional press would be covering this event,” Bob Meyer, the head of LicenseIncorporated, complained to me as we stood in front of their booth inside the event hall. “We need the optics of this for our annual report. Shareholder confidence is down after we had that little slip earlier this summer, and we need to turn it around.”
I had to marshal my patience. “That little slip” in the summer was one of their top executives being caught falsifying profits while skimming off the top. There had been a shake-up in management and I’d thought I could trust the new CEO, but now I was having second thoughts.
I was having second thoughts about everything.
“This is still a wonderful opportunity for you and your shareholders,” Papa said, his disgust with Bob practically oozing from him. “Or were you hoping for a bunch of photos with emaciated children smiling as you handed them a teddy bear? Is that what Christmas is all about to you?Optics?”
“It’s nothing like that,” Bob sputtered, rushing to save face.
“Whatever the problems License Incorporated has had over the last year,” I said, “you guys offer solid, entry level employment opportunities. Someone down the ladder did your entire company a huge favor by setting up one of the best on the job training programs of any industry in the tri-state area. That’s why you were invited here, not so we could scratch your back while you scratch ours.”
Bob looked taken aback by my blunt statements. “The very least we could ask in return is compensation,” he said. He glanced past me, then brightened a little as he said, “Tristan, back me up here.”
My heart bounced up to my throat as I turned and saw my dad striding across the event hall. He looked like he should be leaving footprints of flame on the linoleum where he stepped. Worse still, neither Enzo nor Walt were with him.
“What sort of trouble are you causing, Bob?” Dad asked without a hint of irony.
Bob flapped his jaw for a moment as he tried to figure out whose side my dad was on. Finally, he said, “Maybe we could come to some sort of arrangement to trade services. My people will continue to appear and interview people at this job-fair-slash-Christmas-supper you’ve got going on and in the new year, you could?—”
“You signed a contract to provide employment services at my son’s event free of charge, and you will be held to that contract,” Dad said without an inch of room for negotiation in his tone. “I suggest you tend to your employees and make certain your booth is displayed attractively before the invitees arrive or I’ll have to have our legal team take a look at the fine print of your contract to see if you are in breach of it.”
“Come on, Tristan,” Bob said, laughing nervously.
Dad just stared at him.
“Alright,” Bob said at last. He turned away, muttering, “What a bunch of cold bastards, the entire family.”
I wouldn’t have cared about those words one way or another, but in that moment, they hit me hard. Bob was right. We were a bunch of cold bastards. We always had been. This whole time, I’d thought I was being good and working to please my parents, but in fact, I was turning into someone as cold as they were. I didn’t want that anymore.
“That’s the end of that,” Dad said, like he’d been solely responsible for getting Bob in line.
I didn’t care if he took credit for the entire supper event. I knew what was important to me, and he wasn’t there, by my side, where he should have been.
“Where are Enzo and Walt?” I asked, standing taller as I faced my father.
“You don’t have to worry about them, they’re taken care of,” Dad said.
Something told me he meant that phrase very differently for Enzo than he did for Walt.
