“Cal only hates it because he hates managing people. He likes marketing and design.” Angie strode beside him, not at all picking up his hints that he wasn’t in the mood for company. “He’s not the right person to be CEO, but Mom can’t see it.”
He stopped because this was the most open he’d heard Angie be about everything that was going on at Beaumont Oil. “You think you are?”
“One day I will be. Not now. I don’t have any experience because I didn’t work there the way Cal and Wes did during the summers. My father thought I should be learning more feminine things like how to dance ridiculous old dances that haven’t been popular in years. I can fox-trot with the best of them. No, I’m not the person who can keep things running. My mother is. She should take the CEO position. She’s got the votes for it. Right after my father died, she bought back some of the stock he’d sold off. We have a fifty-two percent stake in the company because Mom said you should never cut it too close.”
He hadn’t known his aunt had made a move like that. “I thought the family always owned the majority share.”
“Dad sold some stock off to cover a couple of bad investments he’d made,” Angie admitted. “It wasn’t much. Four percent, but it took us under the majority vote threshold, and my mother doesn’t like to take chances. That’s one of the reasons I think the company would be safe in her hands. I’m hoping she’ll finally see that I’m the one who should eventually take over. Cal will be far happier if he can have some freedom. He’s actually quite a good artist, but he wasn’t allowed to study it. The only reason Dad let him major in marketing was he’d decided Wes was his real heir.”
“Well, I hope you get what you want.” He stood outside the door of the shop. Now that he was done with the gazebo, he would have absolutely nothing to do if he wasn’t working with Sera. He had to find a way to make her understand it was okay to tell his family about Luc.
Or he had to take the chance that she would never want to tell and live with it.
One way or another, he couldn’t let her go. Not without a fight. He was in love with her.
Angie started to turn but faced him again. “I know that you think you want Sera, but I hope you’ve given some consideration to what we talked about the other day.”
When she’d tried to warn him off. “I assure you, I’ve thought about very little except Sera. I was up most of the night thinking about whether or not we can work it out. We had an argument. You might get your wish.”
“It wasn’t my wish.” Angie’s shoe tapped on the concrete drive. “What did you fight about?”
He couldn’t tell her. He’d promised Sera and he meant to keep that promise. This wasn’t his secret to tell. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got to find a way to make it up to her.”
He didn’t even really understand what he was making up, and that was the problem. He hadn’t listened enough the night before. He should have been patient and listened to her.
“Or you can understand that there are some things that aren’t meant to be. I know it seems like Mom is coming around on Sera, but at some point we’ll all find out this has been a major manipulation,” Angie said with a sigh. “I love her, but she’s never going to accept someone like Sera in our family. She would have done anything for Wes. Anything but accept Sera. He tried to date her for years.”
“She wasn’t interested in him that way.” Now that he was thinking about it from her perspective, of course she’d been scared. He still wasn’t sure it was right never to let Luc know a part of his family, but he could see how she’d been in a corner and hadn’t known how to get out.
“She had to have been at least once,” Angie said under her breath.
He stopped because that had been said with a fine edge of distaste. “What did you say?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I’m sad you got hurt. It’s exactly what I was trying to avoid. It’s why I talked to you about it when I realized you were getting serious.”
But that wasn’t what she’d said. Her arguments against his relationship with Sera hadn’t been about him getting his heart broken. No. They’d been about Luc. And that vaguely disgusted comment about Sera and Wes had been about Luc, too. He felt his eyes narrow. “You know.”
“Know? Know what? I’m afraid I didn’t know you’d broken up. It hasn’t made the rounds yet, but it will. Everything does around here.”