Harlequin Romance September 2021 Box Set by Andrea Bolter

Author:Andrea Bolter [Bolter, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

“MR HAWTHORNE?”

Bennett Hawthorne lifted a quieting finger towards the voice at the office door while he listened, hard, to the message left on his phone by the head of his insolvency division...

Dammit.

Word on the street had been that simply by signing with Hawthorne Consultancy, Metropolis Air was set to be released from their involuntary administration order, the firm’s brand of zealous forensic accounting and future planning as good as a golden ticket out of bankruptcy.

The street had been misinformed.

Bennett felt the dig of his short blunt fingernails in his palms, and slowly unfurled his fingers.

It was a blow. Time now concertinaed, the team would need to be scrappy and smart to pull this off. But hard work wasn’t the problem. He relished the physical and mental satiation that came with hard work; the kinds of days where he fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.

It was just that this week, of all weeks, he could have done with an easy win.

If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the exact timbre of the attorney’s voice, dry and sober, as she’d sat on the other side of his desk and read from a sheet of paper. “Clancy Finlayson passed peacefully in her sleep a week ago Friday. Cause of death, cancer of the pancreas. Cremation took place three days later. No funeral, by request of the deceased.”

A wash of pity had passed over the attorney’s face at the last, as she apologised, prodigiously, for the delay in passing on the news, assuring him that the timing had been stipulated, in unflinching detail, in the will.

It had been written that he was not to be disturbed.

Disturbed.

They’d had their issues, he and Clancy, but he struggled to accept she’d actually believed that was how news of her passing would affect him.

Then again, disturbance could account for his wandering mind, the fitful sleep, the fact he’d listened to the rumours about Metropolis Air and believed them. All reverberations from that initial hit. He only wished he knew when the aftershocks would end.

Bennett pressed finger and thumb into his temples.

No. Likelihood was, he could do with a day off. To see daylight while outdoors rather than through the floor-to-ceiling windows in his office suite high up in The Shard. To watch something more diverting than the Bloomberg channel.

But with the volatility of the current market, finance was fast, furious, and fragile. Cowboy investors and workaday drones, old apparatuses and new technologies, government turnovers and special interest groups were all scrambling to find their feet in the new order. If he stepped off the treadmill, he’d lose traction and never catch up to where he was today.

Clancy’s voice echoed in his head. “Life is change, kid. Making hard choices on the fly is all we can do. It’s also short as hell. Don’t you dare mourn an old lady who had a good run; worry about your own life.”

“Mr Hawthorne—?”

Ben rubbed a hand over his face, tossed his phone onto the couch beside him, and looked to the younger man hovering in the doorway.

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