Rory cut him off. “I’m directly responsible for us losing money, and I want to make it up.”
“Rory, it’s not necessary,” Cal said, catching Sherin’s oh fuck expression. As their CFO, his sister knew how very unnecessary it was.
Rory hit him with a blaze of eye contact, the kind that left a scorch mark. “I let my personal feelings interfere with the job. I let the whole family down. It was unprofessional.”
“Listen to Cal, doll,” said Mom. “Sit down now and let him run the meeting.”
“Please let me do this,” Rory said.
Sherin exploded. “You can’t, because Cal has already made up the difference out of his own stash.”
Cal put his face in his hands as that little revelation reverberated around the table.
Amid the cacophony of protest, Zeke’s voice was loudest. “That was millions. It would’ve cleaned you out personally.”
For a world-class con who’d been in the game since he was fifteen, and should have disappear-safely-forever money, Cal was skint. He had his salary and credit cards, his Sherwood expense account, and a few fake assets he could liquidate, but his own private fortune and security was gone.
“Caleb Sherwood. What did you do?” Mom knocked an empty cup off a saucer with an agitated sweep of her arm.
What he’d had to do. “We’d promised that money to the Pacific Vortex cleanup to help save the albatrosses.” It wasn’t like they could go to a bank and get a loan like regular people. “I paid the family back the money we lost. I lost. It was my con. I was responsible.”
“Cal, your own security,” said Mom. “We could have found another way.”
He’d tried and failed, and that was all there was to it.
“It’s fine. I’ll earn it back.” He heard the weariness in his tone.
They all pretended things were okay for about a minute.
“You lied, Cal,” said Halsey. His youngest brother didn’t try to keep the hurt off his face.
“I didn’t lie.” He scanned the table. It was an unforgivable offense to lie to a family member unless you were Mom, who had an inexplicable free pass. It was inexcusable for the head of the family business. “How many times have I told you to read your board reports? It’s been there in the accounts for months. I did not lie.”
“It’s still a dirty sleight of hand,” Halsey said.
Cal’s head throbbed, a blinder of a headache on its way. “I didn’t make an announcement because right around that time, none of you wanted to know me.”
“It’s diabolical, Cal,” said Mom.
“We were conned. Classic misdirection,” said Zeke.
“It’s not right,” said Halsey. He had a grip on the table edge that showed his distress. He operated his long running con out in the murky world of Ponzi schemes that looked legitimate until you realized they were based on robbing Peter to pay Paul. Halsey relied on Sherwood to be his safe place.
Cal had screwed up personally with Rory, by losing the money from the con and by making people at this table feel snowed.
He put his hand over his forehead, his brain felt like it was broiling. “I made the decision I thought best at the time.” He had to make the offer. He stood. “If you’d like to take a vote on replacing me, I’ll step outside.”
There was an achingly long silence before Zeke said, “Sit your ass down, Cal, you’re blocking the light. Everyone, stop acting like idiot marks who never check anything, and read the goddamn board reports from now on.”
Another family crisis in the life of Sherwood Venture Capital defused. After that, it was updates on projected income from the wine con, the fencing of fake antique gems, the flying car investment scheme, and the dinosaur bone scam. In other words, business as usual.
Chapter Five
There was a two-thousand-dollar deposit in D4D’s bank account. That was two thousand dollars more than Fin expected to see for her Marilyn gig. She’d figured she’d been had from the moment she stepped off the bar top and accepted a drink from Liam and no one—not a single person—approached her.
She’d thought the prankster would’ve revealed himself, if not before the prank then certainly after it. Isn’t that what pranking was about—being the victor and making sure other people knew how clever you were?
Fin had let Liam feed her bar food and colored cocktails until her eyes drooped, and then she’d gone home and checked the account to find it empty, confirming her suspicions. But now, next morning, it was miraculously richer than the best-case scenario.