Chapter 15: Proposal

Oh, damn! He did it again! The author used my voice and locked me out of what was going on! Do you have any idea what happens to a character when the author takes off on a subplot? It’s not pleasant.

I was just holding Anya in my arms and thinking I needed to shave as soon as we got home so I wouldn’t scratch her delicate skin when we got around to doing whatever we were about to do. Nice, right? So, did I get Anya or Romy into bed for some nookie?

The author says, of course, we slept together. Yeah. Slept. We’ve been sleeping together for a month. And as wonderful as it is to have those two beauties in barely-there nightwear snuggled into my arms, sleeping is not what was on my mind.

Instead, I have memories of spending hours and hours working on the proposals for the Global Warehouse and Distribution development and dodging the prime embezzlement suspect, Marcus Reynolds Sr. I constantly felt like someone was watching me. I’d catch glimpses of a person slipping around a corner or ducking behind a tree. I was getting to be a little paranoid.

I guess it isn’t paranoia if they’re really after you.

Since I don’t have any other real memories, I’ll tell you about working on the damned proposals. Yes, that’s plural. Even though I hadn’t signed the transfer documents at the brokerage, Jeff had declared that I was the CEO of Davis Construction. Since he was the only one casting a vote, I had to manage the development of the Davis portion of the proposal as a subcontractor for Miranda K. Sounds easy, but it included getting letters of commitment from a dozen other contractors we’d worked with to handle a good portion of the project.

Things were a little testy with some of them. They’d heard about the sabotage and vandalism at our sites and were reluctant to get involved with that kind of risk. We had to show them all our improved security measures and some results from implementing them. The new cameras and security personnel we had on the job, including riding shotgun on shipments, had smoothed things over quickly at the Starlight Office Building and it was fully enclosed with the rest of the work all happening on the inside.

While I was working on that, I had to keep working at Miranda K, scouring the books and turning over evidence to Agent Grant at FinCEN. I wished he’d moved a little faster, but their agents were spread thin with the amount of money laundering that was taking place in the country. The rise of Cryptocurrency had made financial crimes more difficult to trace and to recover funds. The latest was that the SEC was getting involved because of suspected securities fraud. And before any of them got their acts together, Marcus had skipped the country.

I met frequently with JR at the company. He was crushed that his father had defrauded Anya. It was clear he didn’t think of the company as Miranda K Development, but rather as Anya Kendall. That’s where his loyalty was and he’d do anything in his power to protect her.

It could have been bad. He knew I was living at Anya’s house, but Romy was much more open with her affection and he assumed I was involved strictly with her.

JR was a really talented young architect. The drawings for the Global development project were exquisite. His team was performing well, inspired by the young genius. But his plan was weak. When it was stacked up against our actual resources, it looked like we were biting off much more than we could chew, even with the additional subcontractors I’d managed to get committed.