In Her Sights by Keri Ford, Charley Colins Page A

don’t get it. My role in politics isn’t
to be the strong one. I’m the humored one.”
    In all the times he’d been close to her, he’d always felt
suckered in. Drawn in by the same smile and face she used to pull in a crowd and get them to do her bidding. This was different. Standing there in the long and
deserted hallway, there was sadness around her softened eyes. Lips were flat.
It kind of just socked him in the gut a little. More layers. More confusing
things about her. “I don’t understand.”
    She walked ahead, rubbing her arms. “I’m sure you know I
lost my parents when I was nine.”
    Everyone knew about that. He’d seen the police report and
the photos. His stomach churned a little. It wasn’t the dead bodies or the blood that got to him. It was the gruesome way her parents were killed. They weren’t
just quickly murdered. They were butchered. Whoever came after them took their
time. Seeing the scene in pictures as an adult made it hard for him to
comprehend. Seeing it as a nine year old girl like Lexie had? He didn’t even
want to think about what that could do to a kid. Somehow she came out great. “My
condolences.”
    She nodded. “Gabe Maxwell became my legal guardian and
holder of all Olympia accounts until I came of age.”
    Gabe Maxwell was a hell of a man to reckon with. He had
power, and knew it. It’s a wonder Lexie wasn’t a complete stuck-up snob with
that kind of man in charge of her. Clayton nodded so she’d finish.
    “He wanted me to understand politics, understand how to work
the system and how the system worked so it couldn’t work me. He wanted to make
sure people couldn’t take advantage of me. Including him.”
    Interesting to hear this side of Gabe Maxwell. He was such a
cut and dry man, it was hard to picture him raising a kid. Lexie could have
easily been sent off to a girl’s school or anything while Gabe focused on the
company. Instead he’d taken the time to bring her in the company and keep her
focused on it.
    “In the beginning, any business purchase he wanted to make,
I was pulled in. Not even a teenager, and I was making the final decision on
multimillion dollar deals. Pros and cons were explained the best they could be.
I didn’t understand half of it when we started, but before any changes took
place, he made sure I knew the score on it all. It was hard. Sometimes I had to
make choices that put people out of jobs for a while to save part of the
company that was struggling. I wasn’t pulled into a room of VPs to argue my
point. Gabe did that. He just wanted to know I was in agreement before he spent
my money.”
    God. Nine, ten, and eleven years old and he was riding bikes
and playing baseball. She was running a huge company. How could someone put
stress like that on a girl, but at the same time, who would Lexie be if he hadn’t?
“Sounds hard.”
    “Very. But it didn’t stop at business deals.” She took a
breath. She started to talk several times, but stopped. He just kept with her
casual walking pace as her lips parted again and she found what she wanted to
say. “Olympia gets a lot of requests for different charity functions. Those
were harder. We can’t just support everyone and anyone. After a lot of talking with
anyone who listened, I told Gabe I wanted to focus on the functions that had
the least amount of funding. The ones who needed money the most.”
    “Admirable.” Not just because she made a choice, but because
she consulted others. Clayton kept his chuckles to himself. She could be so
unyielding with him, but then she wasn’t at all on other things.
    She nodded. “But not as front-page newspaper worthy, and
that’s where Uncle Gabe wanted me. That way, my positive appearance could
balance with the cutthroat real estate decisions. Anyway, we’d figure out how
to make headlines with it in the long run. One day, some kids came to Olympia
and asked for a playground on an empty lot that was mostly trashed out. Uncle
Gabe knew this was