Chapter 15

I took note that Evie said nothing at all about Daphne Bergendorf. She either had no opinion, or felt like an outsider despite how hard we worked to make her an equal in our relationship. We were pretty tired, so she might just have been feeling sleep coming on instead of keeping her opinion a secret from us.

The new day brought new challenges.

“Lord Terrance, we have a labor problem in Texas.” The phone call was unexpected. The General Manager of one of our manufacturing plants was communicating up through channels, to give me fair warning about a pending work stoppage. “The union that was not generally accepted by the workers has chosen to call on our employees to walk out to protest our not forcing every employee to join their union.”

After talking to our lawyers, everyone agreed that it was a nuisance maneuver to try and trick us into giving them a stronger position against he will of the workers and Texas law. The message we sent back came to them by way of a lawsuit for interference and their Hail Mary pass failed spectacularly.

The week was full of troubles and the never ending attempts to cheat us got to me after a while. When we were approached by a consortium of banks headquartered in Bahrain offering fifty percent above market value for all our US holdings, I met with everybody involved and was shocked to discover that the major stockholders were thrilled to take the money and walk away while the economy was cooking and investment opportunities were everywhere you looked.

“Terry, just accept the truth. Daddy never fought to keep anything once the stock owners chose to sell. He said that the cost was more than the gain, and that pretending to be gearing up for a fight always drove the stock price higher, which meant the very people trying to buy him out were creating the environment where the price they were going to have to pay went up each day.”

She made such good sense that I did exactly what Chasen Wellington did. We raised money, bought back stock, sold excess property, handed out retirement packages and did whatever it took to make the German bankers think we were going to fight tooth and nail against their takeover plans. Eventually the stock prices leveled out at about thirty percent higher than average and we accepted the ‘hostile’ takeover and walked away with billions.

The IRS was thrilled.

The bankers in Bahrain were welcome to our union thugs.

Deirdre, Evie, and I took a long cruise on a private mega-yacht and talked about Daphne Bergendorf.

“Let’s talk,” I announced one morning after breakfast, somewhere on the high seas. “You two keep pressing me to work out a deal with Bergendorf to join forces through marriage.

“I don’t want to.” The set of my jaw must have telegraphed my determination, because Deirdre stopped before saying whatever she was about to say, and changed her position on a dime.

“Terry, why not just sell those divisions to Bergendorf and be done with the whole thing?”

She was right where I was going. I had zero desire to spend years married to Daphne in return for some fabulous protection offered by government agencies that could change leadership anytime in the next twenty minutes, leaving us out in the cold while saddled with a wife I never wanted.

“Do you think that’s the only way out of this?” With MI6 and the Israelis wanting our defense specialty operations to merge, maybe a sale was the best way to put it to bed permanently.

The three of us talked it over for hours before conferencing in our chief legal officer and CFO. They nearly jumped for joy at our question, because they wanted to separate us from defense manufacturing while the market for our plants was high, and were afraid to offend me and Deirdre by suggesting that we sell off some her father’s legacy.

Apparently MI6 and Israel were happy as clam, because they provided the financing for Bergendorf to close the deal, avoiding opening our books to any foreign banks and their shadow ownership groups. Because both governments took the lead in the deal, we avoided taxation on both ends, and walked away cleanly.

After all was said and done, it occurred to me that getting the Wellington Companies out of defense was exactly what MI6 wanted all along.

Daphne Bergendorf never did date me after the U2 concert. We didn’t even attend the NFL game together. She didn’t want her parents thinking that she was considering marrying me. Evie felt a bit sad at not getting to make a run at Daphne’s what was under Daphne’s industrial strength pantyhose, but sacrifices have to be made for the greater good, so there you go.

Having dodged a tax bullet while making a butt-load of money, Deirdre, Evie and I headed to Wellington Castle in Scotland to relax for a few months and consider what to do next. We had spent months working through the estate in terms of who inherits how much, and how to structure things to protect us against the various governments and their brutal tax systems.

The answer was quite simple.

We moved everything into a complex series of trusts and sold off everything that wouldn’t fit nicely into that formula. Our tax attorneys worked feverishly to put it all together, have it passed thru multiple hands to be checked for strategic defects, and then finalized it all in front of a roomful of lawyers, auditors and tax experts. Once I was satisfied that the holdings were safe from the thieves at the EU, as well as the US and British tax people, we headed to the states to enjoy a more bucolic summer.

The castle in Scotland had quickly become my favorite home. Once all of the Wellington holdings in America were sold off, and all of the interested governments were satisfied that they had stolen all they could from us in the transaction, the allure of staying in Texas, North Carolina, or one of the other places where Chasen Wellington had purchased apartments, condos, or homes, just lost its appeal.

At Castle Wellington we could enjoy tens of thousands of acres of agriculture and cattle. The lands were beautiful and far from the noise and pressure of city life. Evie and Deirdre felt freer to be with me like we wanted to be, instead of careful of our image, or Chasen’s reputation.

It was while we were in Scotland that I refocused my attention of personal protection, weapons, martial arts, and security. I hired the best teachers in the world to work me into better shape, and develop finer protection skills that would protect us in a pinch. My scrawny body went through another growth spurt, adding inches and pounds where they would do the most good. Instead of four-foot nine inches and under seventy pounds, I was topping five foot-nine and weighing almost one-hundred sixty pounds. The spurt caused Deirdre and Evie no small amount of joy as she could drag me back to London and shop for days and days for a new wardrobe, while updating theirs to go with my new threads.

Evie found several piano teachers of great skill. We were able to lure one of them to Scotland on a one-year contact, to expand my repertoire and improve my playing. The year flew by and between physical training and musical lessons, I felt good about myself in ways I’d never experienced before.

It was at the end of that year that Evie announced she was leaving us to head back to the states with my piano teacher. They had definitely bonded. Deirdre and I spent many nights together, while Evie snuck off to be with Bridget. They were a cute couple and I wished them well. Deirdre and I were content as any couple could be, and losing Evie from our bed didn’t disturb our relationship much, if at all.

I guess it was time for Evie to move on, just as she said.

Deirdre and I were quite happy going on as a couple once Evie went back to America with Bridget. For almost a year we played house in the big castle with all the gusto of teenagers just discovering sex.

It was through that year that Deirdre grew and transformed right before my eyes, from a playful, warm and loving woman, into a woman of true beauty and grace. Our years together hadn’t aged her as much as they completed her. Deirdre was naturally beautiful. Her face glowed with an inner light that drew me like a moth to a flame. The added years gently smoothed any rough edges around her face and sculpted her into a genuinely lovely looking woman. I loved to wake before her and watch her sleep, enjoying her innocent beauty, which was seemingly untouched by time.

As a lover, Deirdre was wild once the doors to our suite were tightly closed, and we were alone. Her tastes ran from soft, gentle sex, to out-of-control, sweaty, smelly, abandon-all-hope, rutting that lasted for hours. Deirdre occasionally liked to be restrained. We surfed the internet for sex toys to indulge her curiosity about bondage, settling for a variety of implements meant to heighten her sense of helplessness, but leaving her flexibility to slip out of them at any time.