“I don’t know,” Danielle said quietly. “You’re being too vague.”
“It wouldn’t be anything illegal,” Sam told her. “It would be perfectly legal, and it would be upfront. Just some real estate operations. It’s a place for us to focus some efforts on legit business, instead of on...the other stuff we’re involved in.”
Danielle didn’t believe her brother, and she hated the fact that she couldn’t believe him. Sam and his friends had never—in all the time she’d known them—had an issue with the fact that the Bey family enterprises were almost entirely illegal, or at the very least skirted the edges of legality. She couldn’t believe that he or the organization wanted to go legit.
Even in the case of the Sokolovs, Danielle knew that Nikolai was somewhat of an outlier; the majority of the family was firmly invested in drugs, trafficking, and similar pursuits. Nikolai himself wasn’t entirely—to the best of Danielle’s knowledge—interested in getting out of the family business.
He liked having legit businesses, but Danielle was fairly certain that those were mostly a hedge against being caught up by the Feds for tax evasion—the same thing that had caught so many other members and bosses in organized crime. Where they couldn’t get evidence of murder, theft, or other things, they almost always managed to eventually find evidence of fraud or tax problems—and that put a person in jail just as readily.
“I’ll think about it,” Danielle said. “Send me a proposal with details, and I’ll think about showing it to Vic.” Sam frowned.
“Vic?” He shook his head slowly. “Sis, why are you dating him? He’s your boss.”
“He’s a good man,” Danielle replied. “He likes me and I like him. He’s fun to be around.” Sam shrugged.
“As long as you don’t go throwing yourself at someone who might replace you in a month,” Sam said warningly.
“He’s not going to do that,” Danielle countered, feeling a bit piqued at Sam’s assertion.
“Dani—he’s a billionaire,” Sam said. “We don’t even make the kind of money he’s made. He could buy a wife from Sweden if he wanted to, or Russia or wherever. He could buy a wife here, if he wanted to.”
“He doesn’t want to, clearly,” Danielle pointed out, her voice tart.
“I’m just saying,” Sam said. “It might be a good idea for you to take the offer we could give you—because Andersson could decide tomorrow that he doesn’t need someone to run his charity programs, but if you got us an ‘in’ we could pay you enough that it wouldn’t matter for a while...you could take your time finding a new job.” Danielle rolled her eyes.
“I don’t want a new job,” she said. “And I’m not some 19-year-old naive little girl. I’m twenty-five. I know what I want and I know how I’m going to live my life.” Danielle rose to her feet. “Do you want to have coffee and talk about other things? Because as far as the current topic of discussion is concerned, I’m done.” Sam looked at her for a long moment and Danielle suspected that he would try and press the point.
“I’ll have a cup of coffee,” Sam said, and Danielle moved to pour him one, turning her back on her brother and thinking as she stepped through the kitchen. He was going to find some way to try and make her do what he wanted; she knew it. It wasn’t fair.
He claims to want me to be happy, but he just wants me to be happy on his terms, she thought. If he really wanted me to be happy and wealthy and that’s it, he would accept that trying to get Victor involved in some kind of not-quite-legal dealings would put my job on the line. She poured coffee for her brother and refreshed her own cup, adding a little more sugar and milk to hers.
“So how are things outside the business? Are you still seeing that girl—Shanice, was it?”
“Shanice and I are good,” Sam replied. “I’m still seeing her, but things aren’t all that serious.”
“You’ve been seeing her for what—three months now? Four?” Danielle wagged her finger at her brother. “You’d better be getting serious with her, or you’ll lose her.” Sam chuckled.
“She isn’t even that serious,” Sam countered. “She’s pretty much just into letting things flow.” Danielle dismissed that with a snort, but the air between her and her brother was—for the most part, she hoped—cleared, and they began talking about other things.
She had a hair appointment to go to that afternoon, but she thought that she could probably get her brother off the topic of using her new position to further his career with the Bey family by giving him an “in” with her boss for long enough that he wouldn’t insist on it before he left.
In the back of her mind, Danielle tried to decide whether or not to even tell Victor about Sam’s appearance on her doorstep. She had no intention of going through with what Sam wanted; she was convinced that his plot—the business that he wanted Victor to invest in—was not going to be something she could, with any credibility, present to her boss.
She was also sure that even if he did send her a proposal, it would not be legitimate or fully upfront. It would be something that Sa
m would think she could approve and put her name behind to the man she was seeing; and then the truth of the matter would out. She didn’t want to risk losing her job with Victor, and even more than that—now that she and he had started dating, making their relationship that little bit more complicated—she didn’t want to risk losing him.
By the time Sam had left, Danielle decided that she would give him a few days to come up with a proposal, and then look at it. Depending on what Sam presented to her, she could decide whether or not she would even tell Victor about what her brother wanted. In the meantime, Danielle thought, she would keep the visit as much to herself as possible. She made a mental note to make sure never to go to any of the areas where Sam’s guys tended to congregate, so they wouldn’t be as likely to see her and Victor out and about. It was the most she could do to try and protect herself from her brother’s schemes, and to keep those parts of her life separate.
But Danielle thought bleakly that no matter what she did, there was going to come a point in time when she simply wasn’t going to be able to keep Victor and Sam as two separate parts of her life; eventually, they were going to have to meet. She could only hope to delay that meeting as long as possible.
Chapter16
Victor got the buzz from his receptionist that his lawyer had arrived and began to minimize and close the windows on his computer so that he could focus entirely on the meeting ahead of him. It had been three months since Danielle had started working for him, and two months since she had begun spending his fortune in earnest on different charities, crowdfunding projects, and organizations.
He had trusted her, and looked over her reports before giving her the go-ahead to send the money the places it needed to go, but his lawyer had insisted on working with his accountant to make sure everything was on the up-and-up, and that they would have quarterly meetings as a sort of “check-in.”
The door buzzed and Victor pressed the button to let his lawyer into his office, thinking about Danielle just a short distance away from him, hard at work as usual; as soon as he finished with Brad, he would go and see her. Victor smiled to himself at the thought. Ever since they had started officially dating, things had been better than ever between them—especially their during-work trysts. Danielle had stressed out for a little while about Sam finding out about them, but then, after about a week, she had said that her brother hadn’t come to her about any kind of business deal he wanted and so she had decided that if he already knew she was dating Victor, there was no reason for them to be careful in arranging their dates.