An Unexpected Christmas Baby (The Daycare Chronicles 2)

“I had quite a gig going until my junior year, when my mother got arrested again. I had almost enough saved to pay the minimum bail and went to a bondsman for the rest. I gave him an accounting of the books I’d been keeping with my little enterprise as a way of proving that I was good for the money. It’s not like I had any real asset to use as collateral...”

He rattled on, as if he shared his story on a regular basis. Flint hardly recognized himself but didn’t want to stop.

Talking to Tamara felt good.

“The guy was pretty decent. He paid the bond, without collateral, but told me he wanted me to check in with him every week, re

garding my business intake. He helped me do my tax reporting, too. Supposedly it was just until Mom showed up in court and he got his money back, but I kept stopping in now and then, even after she was sentenced to community service and in the clear. He’s actually the one who suggested I think about the stock market. He said I had a knack for making money. Turned out he was right.”

He didn’t hesitate to tell her the whole truth about this aspect of his background, in spite of the fact he never did that. He guarded his private life so acutely.

“Did you ever go back and see him? After you made it?”

He hadn’t made it yet. He wasn’t even sure what “making it” consisted of these days. He’d thought that opening his own firm, having other brokers working for him, earning good money, would be making it.

“He retired and moved to Florida when I was a freshman in college.”

And although Flint had given the guy his email address, had emailed him a few times, he’d never heard from him again.

“It was because of him that, years later, I started looking into offshore accounts,” he told her. “He fronted money, which meant that he had to make money. He used to do a bit of foreign investing. He’d tell me about foreign currencies and exchanges and the money he’d make. He also talked about security.

“‘Diversification equals security,’ he’d say. If you keep all your assets in one place, and the place burns down, you’re left with nothing. We like to think that our banks, at least the federally insured ones, are completely safe, and I feel that generally they are. But it doesn’t hurt to have assets elsewhere, just in case of some major catastrophe—there can always be another crash like we had in 2008. It’s not like it hadn’t happened before that, too.”

Okay, now he was reminding himself of Ross in an old Friends episode, going on and on about his field of paleontology and boring his friends to death.

“Sorry,” he said, reining himself in. It felt as though a dam had burst inside him, which made him feel a bit awkward. But not sorry.

“Actually, this is the kind of thing I was after,” Tamara said. “Greater understanding of how the investment world works. But...I thought offshore accounts were illegal.”

“Not at all. A lot of people use them illegally, because it’s relatively easy to do. But they’re not only completely legal, they’re a financially smart decision. Especially for someone like me who invests internationally. You just have to report any earnings over ten thousand on your taxes.”

“Do you do all your own taxes?”

“Yes.” He did everything on his own, for the most part. He didn’t like giving others the chance to make a mistake for which he’d be held accountable. “I meet with an accountant before I submit them, though,” he added, “because the laws change every year.”

Such a bizarre conversation. In a lot of ways, more intimate to him than sex.

And he’d started it.

“I’m sitting at the pool having a beer.” He felt bad about that, considering his baby girl had sent Tamara running to work. “I wish you were here, enjoying it with me.”

“I don’t like beer.”

“I have wine.” It wasn’t quite an invitation—he wouldn’t do that to her, since there were no guarantees he could avoid a replay of this afternoon—but he had to open the door.

“Will it keep a few days?”

“Absolutely.”

He asked her if she was free for lunch early in the week. They settled on Tuesday and Flint was grinning as he hung up the phone.

Chapter Fourteen

Sunday was about as bad a day as she’d had in a while. First with the aborted visit at Flint’s in the afternoon and then with the confirmation that he not only had an offshore account but that he did his own taxes. Things that someone with something to hide might do.

Neither fact made him a thief. But the circumstantial evidence pointing in his direction, along with a lack of anything pointing in anyone else’s, was certainly enough to lead her father to that conclusion.

Over the next week and a half, she worked like a fiend as an efficiency expert, finding several ways her father’s company could save money. She also searched for any discrepancy that could place doubt or lay suspicion on anyone other than Flint. She found a few. She always did. But nothing that wasn’t easily explainable or a product of human error or laziness. Someone cutting corners, but not for nefarious reasons.