Wild Zone (Rough Riders Hockey 4)

Quinn pulled back, cupped her hands in her lap and stared at the table. And Olivia felt like shit. She stared at Quinn for a moment with a sense of utter and complete loss. Olivia had always believed she and Quinn would eventually find their way back to each other. She’d always hoped she and her mom would find a bridge back from the betrayal they both felt. But looking at her sister now, after seeing what her mother and Quinn had been doing all these years without even telling Olivia about it, she’d never felt more alienated. Or more unwanted.

Unless she could fix the problem.

She lowered her gaze to the computer screen, eyes blurring with tears. Her chest ached. Her stomach hurt. And a huge, huge part of her, like ninety-nine percent of her wanted to shove the computer back at Quinn and tell her to clean up her own mess.

But they’d dragged Tate into it. And she wouldn’t let him down.

So, she scrolled through the numbers, looking at where the money was coming in and where it was going. Within five minutes, Olivia saw the pattern, and her stomach dropped. “You’ve been spiraling for months,” she told Quinn without looking up. “Jesus Quinn, you’ve been living by the seat of your pants for almost a fucking year.” She looked up at her sister. “You’re smarter than this. You aced accounting in high school. You did an internship with Boeings finance for fuck’s sake. You know better than to pay deposits for future jobs with final payments from past jobs.”

She shook her head and offered a quiet, “I wasn’t managing the money.” Her watery blue eyes lifted to Olivia’s. “I didn’t know.”

“Shit.” Olivia planted her elbow on the table and propped her forehead in her hand, searching deeper, trying to find some money. Somewhere. There was two hundred dollars in the checking. One hundred in savings. For a business this size, that was terrifying. “Are there other accounts?”

“No.”

Olivia’s stomach squeezed tighter and she exhaled on a groan. “What about personal accounts?”

Quinn scrapped her upper lip between her teeth and stared at her hands. Then just shook her head. And the fear dug deeper into Olivia’s gut. This was bad. Really bad. Like bankruptcy-bad.

The overwhelming financial disaster unfolding in front of her eyes, pushed panic into her throat. She moved her hand there, swallowing back the burn. “Oh my God.”

Quinn broke down, covering her face and sobbing quietly across from Olivia. Olivia’s heart shattered, and the pieces plummeted to the pit of her stomach.

Consoling Quinn wouldn’t do any of them any good. Olivia’s anger wouldn’t do anyone any good. So she did what she did best. She dug into the vendors and venues that had been paid in search of money they could get back, orders they could cancel.

“How much do we need for the liquor?” she asked, clicking on the number of the last check written to open an image of the check itself.

“Tw—“ Quinn’s voice broke. She cleared her throat, sniffled. “Twelve thousand.”

Olivia exhaled hard. She’d known it would be high for the number of people attending and the caliber of the crowd, but that number still took her breath. Not because it was unreasonable, but because she couldn’t imagine finding that kind of money in an account this bone dry. She knew she could cut three grand off the top by substituting well liquor for quality name brands. Normally something she’d never consider doing, but right now, she was in survival mode. Right now, she wanted to pull this out of the fire for Tate.

She focused on the last check written for two thousand dollars to O’Conner’s Tavern. The memo line read “Burnett/Thompson dinner” with a date for the following week.

She clicked on the next for the same amount to a different restaurant in downtown DC. The memo line read “Burnett/Washington dinner” and another date for the following week.

“What are these Burnett dinners?” she asked, continuing to click through the checks.

Quinn didn’t answer, and Olivia forgot her question as she counted eighteen thousand dollars paid out to various high-class restaurants in DC over the last three days. A week earlier, she found an eighteen thousand dollar deposit into the account.

The deposit was electronic, but when she clicked on the details, the notes read “Final payment Afterschool Advantage.”

“Fuck.” She’d used Tate’s final payment for the venue to fund the deposits for this Burnett deal, but hadn’t gotten a deposit check from Burnett yet. A spark of hope brought her gaze to Quinn. “Is she holding a check? This Burnett guy’s deposit check?”

Quinn sniffled and wiped her face on her sleeve. “N-no,” she said, her voice stuttering from her choppy breaths. “He’s in Greece. Was supposed to be back yesterday or today, but something happened with his flights and won’t be in until Monday.”

Olivia’s eyes welled with tears of fear. Her options for pulling this from the fire for Tate were narrowing. And she felt physically sick at the prospect of telling him that his family had fucked up. In essence, fucked him over, and if he wanted alcohol at his celebrity hockey-studded event, he was going to have to dole out another ten grand.

Shame and anger and hurt coiled tight at the center of her body. She covered her mouth and absently let her eyes roll over the debits and credits as she searched her brain for some other solution.

At the bottom of the page she found a five hundred thousand dollar line of credit. The available credit on that line was zero.

“What’s this?” she asked. “Where did this line of credit come from? Is this right?” She cut a look at Quinn who was leaning on the table, her head in her hand. She was pale, her eyes pink and puffy, a zombie-like emptiness on her face. “Is this half a million dollar line of credit maxed out?”

Quinn’s lashes fluttered, then closed. She nodded.

“Quinn.” Olivia had always been good at scraping money together. But this… “How did you guys qualify for a line of credit that big when the business wasn’t even in the black?”

Quinn licked her lips, and kept her gaze down. “The house.”