Once Upon A Friendship. Tara Taylor Quinn

to object to Liam’s occupancy in the private sanctum without an appointment. He wasn’t the least bit intimidated by the woman who was known to many in the company as the battle-ax. She’d been around since Liam was too young to know what battle-ax meant. She liked him.

      He liked her, too.

      Bursting into his father’s office, Liam was ready for battle.

      Or he would have been if the door had opened. Turning the handle a second time, his sweaty palm slipped against the locked hardware.

      “What’s going on?” He turned to Gloria. “Where’s my father?”

      “He took the rest of the day off.”

      Liam glanced back at the closed door. “He doesn’t ever take the day off.” Not even on Christmas—though he did tend to work at home more often than not on holidays.

      Gloria shuffled a pile of papers, shrugged and said, “Well, he did.” She was glancing between her computer screen and the file folder she was sliding the newly aligned papers into.

      He could try to charm information out of her, but he didn’t. His issues were with his father.

      Besides, he knew now where the old man would be. Turning, he left the office without another word and went straight to his own. Where his father would have expected him to go first.

      Just as he’d suspected, Walter was there. Sitting in Liam’s chair. Surrounded by...not a lot. Other than the mahogany desk and matching chair Liam had picked out for himself when he’d been promoted to the thirty-sixth floor five years before, the room was stripped bare.

      “You work fast.” He leaned against the door he’d just closed. The thirty-sixth floor offices were soundproofed and what he had to say to his father had to stay between the two of them.

      “You signed the papers. I told you what would happen if you did.”

      “You had a spy at the bank?” Why the thought hadn’t occurred to him before then, he didn’t know. Walter was ruthless.

      And Liam felt stupid. Thinking he was going to walk right in and announce to his father that he’d refused to give in to his threat. And then deliver the speech he’d been rehashing for years. The one where he told his father how much he respected and admired him, told him that he’d continue to serve him, but that he also had to have a life, a mind, of his own.

      Building up to the part where he told him that while he still planned to give forty-plus hours a week to Connelly Investments, he was also going to more seriously pursue a career in journalism. Pointing out the benefits to the firm if he continued to rise to success in a world of internet information delivery.

      “A spy, Liam? You think we’re playing some kind of game here? Grow up, man.”

      He listened for the disappointment hiding in the derision in his father’s voice. The seemingly imperceptible note of fear.

      And missed them both.

      “I want to know about the conversation I overheard in George’s office this morning.” Liam stuck to his plan to fight aggression with aggression if he had to. If reason didn’t work. “Why would our head counsel promise someone an impossible investment return? Even at its best, the holding he mentioned didn’t promise those kinds of returns.”

      Liam had overheard just a small bit of the conversation, but enough to know that something didn’t add up. He gave his father the particulars.

      George had been on the phone and hadn’t heard Liam wander in. It had been before seven, before office staff started to arrive. Just before Walter had called Liam into his private sanctum to issue yet another threat—the one where he’d be cut off if he went through with the Arapahoe deal.

      Otherwise Liam would have asked the question earlier that morning.

      “That investment will not be impossible to meet.” Walter’s words were quiet. Deadening. “And you are no longer welcome here.”

      Steel could not have been stronger. Or more cold.

      “I heard what George said. I know that account. There’s no way it’s going to make that kind of return. I deserve to know what’s going on.”

      “How dare you practice duplicity and then stand here and demand answers?”

      Liam checked himself against the accusation of duplicity. The pause allowed his father to move in for the kill.

      “I thought you’d learned your lesson freshman year, Liam. Today you have proven that you did not. We cannot be a team, you and I. I can no longer trust you. If you will go behind my back, keeping pertinent information from me because your two harlots call your name, there is no end to the possibilities of other ways you could betray me.”

      “Buying that building had nothing to do with you, or with Connelly Investments. It wasn’t a lucrative purchase. Or a building you’d have any interest in. And they are not my, or anyone else’s, harlots. As I’ve told you before, they are family to me.”

      More family to him than Walter was.

      “You moved trust monies behind my back.”

      “My trust money. I’m a man, Dad. I have to be able to do some things on my own.”

      “But not behind my back. That trust money was yours, but it was family money.”

      “From my mother’s family.” Walter had met Margaret, Liam’s mother, after he’d scratched and clawed his way to his first million. She’d been born into the privileged life.

      “It was our money, your mother’s and mine, when we opened that trust for you.”

      Technically. It had been given to them at his maternal grandfather’s death, with the express wish that if they didn’t need it to secure their own futures it be put in trust for Liam.

      “If I’d told you about the building, you’d have done everything in your power to block that sale.”

      “It’s a stupid purchase. Those old folks are paying far below average rent. You’ll never be able to turn a decent profit.”

      “They’re paying all they can afford on fixed incomes.” Liam stated the more pertinent truth. “And we aren’t going to lose money on the deal. We didn’t go into it with an eye to support ourselves. Marie has her coffee shop. Gabrielle’s a lawyer. I told you that.”

      “And you, Liam? While you’re so busy exerting your manhood, you still expect me to support you?”

      “I earn every dime you pay me.”

      “You say you’re a man, but you didn’t tell me about that old apartment building because you were afraid.”

      The little bit of truth that lurked in the ugly words spurred Liam onward in a battle he didn’t want to fight.

      “I’m standing up to you now.”

      Going into business with Gabrielle and Marie...it had been his way to solidify his place in their future. To make the three of them, their little family, a brother and his sisters, legal. He’d done what he had to do.

      “You are standing only because you don’t have a chair to sit on.”

      The old man was sitting in the only chair left in the office. “What’s going on, Dad? What deal did I stumble on this morning that you don’t want me to know about? Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? This has nothing to do with a loser apartment building I sunk my own pittance into.”

      “You stumbled onto nothing more than a joke, Liam. A joke.” Spittle sprayed on Liam’s desk as his father repeated the word. “George was on the phone with Bob Sternan. They were mocking Senator Billingsley and his promises regarding the Indian land he recently purchased.”

      Land that his father had purchased, with a signed agreement from the tribe, and developed several years