and endless criticisms at that big mahogany table.
It suddenly seemed like old timesthe dark furniture, the sideboard overladen with food no one would eat. Lord, he couldn’t wait to get out of this place.
He looked at Cade, who was seated at the table with a cup of coffee in his hands.
“Where’s Grant?” Zach shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. “I thought he’d be back from that meeting with the old man’s administrative assistant by now.”
Cade cocked an eyebrow and got to his feet. “And a charming good morning to you, too.”
“It’s late, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’ve got an eleven o’clock flight to Boston.”
“And you’re going to make it out of uniform?” Cade shook his head. “I thought all you banker types signed a pledge that said you had to go around in pinstripes.”
“I’m not a banker, I’m a stockbroker. And go ahead, pal. Laugh all you want. Just remember that in a couple of days you’ll be smiling prettily at an English version of me, trying to convince him to invest in your latest search for maybe-it-exists-and-maybe-it-doesn’t oil in— where’d you say you were going this time?”
“The North Sea,” Cade said. “And there’s no maybe about it, my friend. It’s at least as sure a bet as those investments you push.”
Zach smiled at the familiar banter.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And I suspect that if your fat-cat clients knew I could still beat you arm wrestling without breaking a sweat——”
“Still? What do you mean, still? You never beat me, not once.”
“Prove it.”
“My pleasure. Just let me take off my jacket
and——”
“Dammit, what is this? Are we kids or adults?”
The Landons all swung toward the door. Grant was standing just inside the room, glaring balefully.
“Grant?” Kyra said. “What’s wrong?”
Grant tossed a manila folder on the table, strode to the sideboard and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
A lie if ever I heard one, Zach thought. Grant looked like a man who’d just had the ground cut out from under him.
“Well?” Cade asked. “What did Bayliss want to talk about?”
Grant’s lips compressed. “Trouble.”
“Trouble?” Zach frowned. “What sort of trouble?”
“This sort,” Grant said.
He took the folder from the table, drew two stacks of papers from it and handed one to each of his brothers. Kyra looked at him as if she was waiting for him to hand her something, too. When he didn’t, she turned away and walked slowly to the window.
The minutes passed while Zach and Cade leafed through the papers Grant had given them. Finally, Cade looked up.
“What is this crap?”
“Exactly what it seems to be. Father bought an oil company in Dallas——”
“You mean, he bought a disaster.” Cade tossed the papers he’d been reading on the table. “And he let it go from bad to worse. Now it’s damned near bankrupt.”
Zach looked up and frowned. “Oil company? Hell, man, what are you talking about? What I’ve got here is an acquisitions profile on some two-bit Hollywood production company named Triad. The old man saddled Landon Enterprises with it, and now it’s about to sink like a stone.”
“You’ve each got different reports drawn up by Bayliss, but the bottom line’s the same. Father bought these companies not long before he took ill, and they seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle”
“Yeah,” Zach said, “well, when this Triad outfit goes down for the third time, it’s going to take lots of Landon dough with it.”
“The same for Gordon Oil,” Cade said. “Landon’s gonna take a nasty hit when it dies.”
Grant’s expression grew even more grim. “Terrific,” he snarled. “Landon went into the two firms to bail them out. Instead, we seem to have made them worse.”
Cade’s brows rose. “What do you mean, ‘we’, big brother?”
“Exactly what I said. As of yesterday, we are Landon Enterprises. And we will be, until we find a buyer.”
Zach looked at Grant, then at the papers he’d dumped on the table.
“Hell,” he muttered, as he gathered them up.
There was no point in arguing with Grant’s assessment. He was right, and the three of them knew it. If the Hollywood outfit and that Dallas company went belly up, they’d leave a blotch of red ink on Landon Enterprises’ ledgers big enough to scare off any potential buyer.
Something had to be done, and quickly.
“Okay,” Cade said, “tell Bayliss——”
“Bayliss retired, as of this morning.” Grant smiled at the looks on his brothers’ faces. “He said he was too old to face another Colorado winter. He bought himself a house in the Virgin Islands. He’s going to spend the rest of his days on the beach, sipping pina coladas.”
Zach cleared his throat. “I’ll phone Goodwin, then. Bayliss’s second in command. He can——”
“Goodwin’s tied up with a dozen other things.”
Cade tossed the Gordon Oil report onto the table. “Terrific,” he snapped. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” The men swung around. Kyra was glaring at them as if she couldn’t believe what she’d been hearing. “What’s the matter with you guys? Are you dumb, or what?” She shook her head. “And don’t waste your breath telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. A child could figure this mess out!”
“Kyra,” Zach said gently, “baby——”
“You’re the financial whiz in this family,” Kyra said, stabbing a finger in his direction. “You could fly out to the coast, take a look at Triad’s books and decide what can be done to help it.”
“Me? Don’t be silly. I’ve got people waiting for me in Boston. I can’t just——”
“And you,” she said to Cade, “the genius who knows all about oil…Would it be too much to hope that maybe, just maybe, you might be the one to check things out in Dallas?”
“Impossible! I’ve business in London. I can’t——”
“She’s right,” Grant said. “You two could get a handle on things faster than anybody else.”
There was a moment’s silence. Cade and Zach looked at each other, and then Zach threw up his arms in defeat.
“Two days,” he snapped, “and not a second more.”
Cade blew out his breath. “Yeah. Two days, and then…Wait just a minute.” He swung toward Grant. “What about you? Don’t tell me you’re the only one of us who gets to walk away from this mess?”
Color rose in Grant’s cheeks. “Not exactly. It seems a friend of Father’s named him guardian of his kid a couple of years ago.”
Zach and Cade began to smile. “Don’t tell me,” Cade said.
“Listen, we can change jobs, if you want. The twelve-year-old for the oil company or the Hollywood studio…?”
“No,”