Chapter One
Nolan
“Thirty-six million is not enough?” Eli asks, looking outraged.
I lean back in my chair and try to fight back the grin on my lips as my brothers go at it.
Westin doesn’t say anything, but his jaw is tight. He doesn’t think it’s enough.
“I would have squeezed forty out of him,” Westin says flatly as he rifles through some papers.
Eli is about to explode until we meet eyes and I give him a look that says, ‘who cares what Westin thinks, it’s never enough for him.’
With a sigh, Eli leans back in his chair and loosens his tie. “Where is Brooke with the food? I’m starving.”
My other brother, Luke, checks his phone. “She’ll be here in five minutes.”
It’s nine o’clock on a Thursday night and we’re all still at the office. Our office.
My father left his five children Cline Investments, Real Estate, & Holdings, or Cline Corp for short. It was a failing investment firm that we inherited five years ago and since turned into a powerhouse of making cash. You’d swear we had a money printer in the basement with the way we’re earning.
The four boys—Eli, Luke, Westin, and I—run the company and we’re damn good at it. Our younger sister Brooke was always more of the artsy type—drawing on the wallpaper as a kid and singing in the packed car on family vacations. She wanted to be an actress instead, so she gave up her control in the company, but she still gets a fifth of the profit, which is more than any A-list celebrity would hope to earn.
Luke starts pacing around the conference room as Westin moves onto the next point in our agenda. “Which of us is going to Harold Brown’s charity gala?”
All four of us shout “not it,” at the same time, like we’re kids again trying to decide who gets to tell dad that another basement window got shattered by a hockey puck.
“One of us has to go,” Westin points out. He’s always great at pointing out the obvious, no matter how unpleasant it is.
“Those charity galas are so stuffy,” Eli says, pretending to gag. “Those people are so conservative. I swear it’s all a show they put on for each other before they go home to their sex dungeons. It can’t be real.”
“It’s real,” Luke says as he stops at the window and looks out at the spectacular view of Manhattan at night. “These are old school people with old school values. Big time prudes. At one event I went to, I saw Mr. Brown chew out the band for playing Lady in Red by Chris de Burgh. He said that red was the color of the devil.”
“Well, he’s expecting one of us to be there,” Westin says as he taps his pen on the table. “And he’s our biggest investor.”
Like we need to be reminded of that. The old man gave us nine figures to play around with last year and is planning on adding more to it this year. But Mr. Brown is very traditional and doesn’t approve of bachelors in their thirties, like we all are, except for Eli who’s only twenty-eight. He wants his investors to have family values like him, which translates into being married with five kids by the age of twenty-six.
It’s too late for that, but the least we can do is show up at his charity events in a suit with a pretty smiling girl on our arms. We can call up our tailor and get a suit made easily, but the pretty girl is a bit harder to find. Especially when you hardly ever leave the office.
“I’m not going,” Eli says as he leans back and crosses his arms. He’s the youngest of the four of us and still tries to play the baby card, even though it never works.
Luke is thirty and has always been the largest of us. All of us Cline brothers are big muscular men—the football, hockey, and rugby coaches were always at our house during our high school years trying to recruit us—but Luke is the biggest. He walks behind Eli, grabs his tie, and holds it up like a noose, choking him. “You’ll go, if I say you go.”
I start to laugh and shake my head when Eli grabs a hold of Luke’s leg, lifts him up, and tackles him onto the conference table.
“Oh, very mature,” Westin snaps as he quickly snatches his papers off the table before the two big men roll over them as they start to wrestle. They knock over empty coffee cups and a few files fall to the ground, spilling papers and contracts everywhere as they fight in their two thousand dollar suits.
“Get the fuck off me!” Eli shouts when Luke pins him to the table and presses the side of his head into the hard wood.