Her executive assistant, Mariana Hernandez, poked her head through the doorway of Raven’s office. “That was a thing of beauty.” Mari always eavesdropped on Raven’s conversations. Not that Raven minded. She viewed them as mentoring exercises. Mari was smart and ambitious. With the right kind of support and training, one day, she could be an executive, too.
Raven popped two migraine busting pills from the industrial-sized bottle in her desk drawer and washed them down with iced green tea. “No, that was an example of brains over stupidity. And a contractor’s unbelievable arrogance and entitlement. Look at what they were doing while they were supposedly fixing their broken mainframe.” She spun her monitor around so Mari could see @HighwaytoKel’s account.
Mari stepped closer and peered at the screen. “What a liar. And ew, gross. Seriously, Vegas, strippers? How cliche could they get? What were they thinking, traveling across the country in the middle of the week?”
Raven shrugged. “They probably figured they had everything wrapped up, left town to party, then got back and realized something was screwed up. If he’d just been honest, I might have given them time to fix it. But he chose to lie. Now it’s going to cost them a whole lot of money.”
Mari laughed. “I love it when you’re ruthless.”
Raven shrugged. “They brought this on themselves.”
The intercom on the phone buzzed, and a high-pitched, faintly familiar, female voice ordered, “Raven, come to the board room immediately.”
Mari’s eyelids stretched wide. “Who the hell—”
“Was that . . . Tiffany?” Raven asked.
Tiffany Paulson was the youngest child and only daughter of Paulson Diagnostics’s CEO, Billy Paulson. She’d recently graduated from Drexel University with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. Raven had sent flowers and a check for her graduation and had yet to receive a thank you card for either.
“Maybe? I haven’t seen her around in a while,” Mari answered.
“Was there a meeting on my schedule?”
Mari shook her head. “Not until eleven. And that’s with the accountants. Not the board room.”
A prickling sensation rose on the back of Raven’s neck as she stood. She reached for her Prada suit jacket and slung it on. This was no casual meeting. She needed her professional armor.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Grab your laptop. You’re coming with me.”
Raven strode into the boardroom in her stilettos, with Mari at her side, and appraised the situation in an instant. Tiffany was in her father’s chair at the head of the table. Her three older brothers, Dumb, Dense, and Dimwit, were seated along the left-hand side of the table. Their father was nowhere to be seen, but a female, brown-skinned stranger, wearing a killer Gucci suit with hair pulled into a severe bun, was situated in the far corner of the room.
Raven’s stomach clenched, and although she could already guess the answer, she asked, “What have you done, Tiffany?”
“What I should have done a long time ago.” Tiffany’s bright blue eyes gleamed with revolutionary zeal. She looked as if she’d just toppled the Tsar of Russia, bayonetting him herself.
Oh, holy hell.
In the near dozen years Raven had been working as a corporate fixer, she’d heard stories of families turning on each other to take over companies, but it’d never happened to her. Until now. There had to be a way to stop Tiffany before things spun out of control.
Raven took her usual seat at the opposite end of the conference table, and Mari sat at her side.
“Where’s Billy?” Raven asked.
Tiffany smirked. “Daddy’s been outvoted. I told him to go home, but he’s locked himself in his office.”
Of course. Tiffany and her brothers had recently received some additional shares from their grandparents’ trust. Together, the siblings’ shares were worth more than fifty percent of the business. She must have convinced her idiot brothers to back her against their father.
Raven could only imagine Billy’s heartache. His grandfather had started the business a hundred years ago. Back then, it was a pharmacy that also sold simple medical gadgets that his grandfather invented and had patented. When his grandfather died, Billy’s father took it over. He expanded the business, selling many different devices, but the diversification didn’t allow the company to master any particular area, so it was never especially profitable.
When it was Billy’s turn to run the company, he went the other way—focusing on a specific niche—and specialized in diabetes monitoring. He’d built a strong foundation and a solid, reputable business and had been smart enough to bring Raven on to help take Paulson Diagnostics to the next level. Now, just as he was about to achieve his ultimate goal, his own children had undermined him. Billy had to be weeping behind his locked office door.
Raven turned to Billy Jr., aka Dumb, the oldest and smartest of the brothers, which wasn’t saying much. “Are you really okay with turning on your dad? This might destroy your relationship with him forever.” There was no “might” about it. Coming back from a betrayal this deep would be impossible.
Dumb shook his head. “Nah, Tiffany said he’ll come around when he sees how much money we make from selling the company.”
Dense nodded. “Tiffany knows what she’s doing.”
“What they said,” Dimwit agreed.
“Good grief,” Mari whispered.
Tiffany most definitely didn’t know what she was doing. None of the Paulson children did. But rather than screaming that at the top of her lungs, Raven kept her emotions in check and laid her palms on the cool glass conference table. “Don’t do this, Tiffany. This company has come so far already, and we’re on the cusp of exponential growth.”
Tiffany rolled her eyes. “I’m so tired of your promises. You talk a good game, but all you’ve done since you showed up is fire our cousins, cut our expense accounts, and screw up our relationships with our old suppliers.”
Raven bit back a laugh. “Your cousins didn’t work here but were drawing salaries that cost us a million dollars a year. We couldn’t justify expense accounts when you four weren’t on the payroll, and as for those suppliers, they hadn’t modernized their technology. Our new suppliers are better, cheaper, and more advanced. Those reforms pulled the company out of debt. We’re about to launch a new device that will be an industry game-changer. This company will be worth billions.”
Tiffany raised a skeptical brow. “Yeah, well hopefully-maybe-billions won’t pay off our student loans. But for-sure millions will.” Tiffany smiled as she cast a sidelong glance at the beautiful, well-dressed woman sitting perfectly still in the corner.
“Who is she?” Raven asked.
“None of your concern,” Tiffany shot back.
Raven gestured to the woman in the suit. “Who do you work for?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” the woman uttered with the self-assurance of someone who worked for a company with a colossal bottom line.
Raven turned to Tiffany. “Come on, at least tell me what company is swooping in here to give you these for-sure millions.”
Tiffany smiled. “It’s a done deal. The papers were signed with Sun Co, LLC, this morning.”