Chapter 1: Unexpected

“No Fucking Way!”

Delaney glared, eyes flashing, hands curled into claws.

The two suit-clad lawyers looked nervously towards the door to the conference room, wondering if they could reach it in time. I suspected the secretary in the outer office had her hand on a security alarm.

Not a bad idea, all in all.

I carefully put my hand in front of Delaney while Sheree edged closer to her on the other side.

“Miss Dawes...” I wasn’t sure just what the hell the shorter lawyer thought he could say at that moment that might be a good idea, but I was sure the effect was going to be like throwing a can of gasoline on a bonfire.

Apparently, so was Sheree. She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Mr. Holden, I’m thinkin’ y’all might want to give us a moment alone here.”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but one more glance at Delaney was enough to convince him otherwise, and he headed out of the conference room with his partner in tow.

Delaney looked back and forth between us. “I don’t want it. Any of it. Tell them to take it back.” She almost snarled it.

Tara looked up from the stack of papers. “You can’t make that decision right now.”

“Bullshit. I’ve made up my mind. I don’t fucking want it.”

Holding up a page, Tara shook her head. “No, I mean legally, you don’t get to decide it until you’re thirty-five.”

I looked at her. “What?”

“The money is in a trust, and it is going to be held there for the next twenty years. It isn’t actually yours to make a decision about until your thirty-fifth birthday.”

Sheree tilted her head at Tara. “That’s kind of odd.”

“It’s more common than you think. Some people do it to prevent their kids from blowing through their fortune before they’re mature enough to handle it.”

“I can see that. Half them celebrity kids and heiresses in the news end up in rehab over and over before they’re even twenty. Or worse.” Sheree nodded thoughtfully. “Guess there’s somethin’ to learn stocking all those celebrity gossip magazines after all.”

Delaney gripped the table edge, trying to make herself calm down. “I don’t care. I don’t want it. I saw what it did to Calloway, and the kids at the school Mother made me go to. Fuck that. It turned them into monsters. It did the same thing to Mother.” She spit that last with more than a little venom.

Tara gave a sad sigh, and Sheree touched Delaney’s hand gently. “It won’t do that to you. I can tell.”

Face softening a fraction, Delaney looked at her. “I don’t want to take the chance. I’ll work for my money. They can give all that money to a charity. We don’t even know how much money it is. I won’t miss it.”

The exact amount of money was hard to figure out, since the will only listed various accounts, and those were under the control of the trust. But it might be almost a million dollars.

“They can’t do anything with it except invest it, and even then, there are all kinds of stipulations designed to protect the trust. Calloway understood money.”

“Why the hell would he do this?”

Tara shook her head. “There’s no real explanation, just a will naming Delaney and the usual contingencies. There are probably a half dozen others, but those look like the normal stuff. The trust will pay out for any educational opportunities she wants to pursue and includes what amounts to the best gold-plated health insurance policy I’ve ever seen. No deductible, no cap and it covers everything. Including dental.”

Sheree shook her head. “There has to be a reason.”

Holden stuck his head back in the room, then came in cautiously. “I have one more item; it’s a card to be handed to Miss Dawes directly.”

Delaney stuck her hand out in annoyance, then looked at the note card he’d given her. Shaking her head, she handed it to me.

An expensive linen note card with her name on the outside in very fancy script. On the inside was one word. A name.

“Darwin.” I pushed it over to Sheree, then looked at Delaney. “Definitely Calloway.”

When Delaney had asked Calloway why he’d tried to kill her, he’d insisted that it had been about survival of the fittest. Darwin. The man had tried to kill her because he thought that she might be his granddaughter, and he didn’t believe she was worthy of his name. Delaney was, to say the least, a bit offended by that. Not so much the attempted murder, I think she was starting to get used to that, but because Calloway and his son both decided she wasn’t “good enough.” The same reason Charlotte’s now-deceased husband had tried to have her killed. She’d outlived all three of them, along with several others who’d gotten caught up in their plans, so “good enough” was pretty damn arguable at this point.

Apparently, Calloway had decided that the argument had ended in Delaney’s favor.

We walked out of the law office into the sunlight, Delaney trudging reluctantly toward the car, head down. I wasn’t quite sure what she was grumbling, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a fond eulogy for Calloway.

This meeting hadn’t hit us completely out of the blue. We hadn’t expected to be directly impacted, but Sheree had seen Calloway’s death in an internet society column. She’d started reading the articles to try to keep an eye on Charlotte.

Charli had been acting ... odd. Tara and Tiffany had noticed that Charlotte was suddenly involving herself in a whirlwind of social activities, everything from attending every imaginable charity event to thousand-dollar-a-plate political fundraisers — for both parties.

Chapter 2 »