many more hoops he’d have to jump through, how many more “jobs,” dirty jobs some of them, he’d have to perform to finally get “in.”
He wondered. Sometimes he thought his superior was stringing him along, that he didn’t have any real faith that Cyrus could get the job done. Didn’t think Cyrus had what it took.
Cyrus was always overlooked and underestimated. He knew what to do and how to make it happen. He had orchestrated the oldest Wilde’s departure from the scene, and had paid the foreign...scabs, he thought, his lip curling, a lot of money to do so.
He sighed. But it was money well spent. Tiber Wilde thought he was brilliant, that he could outthink Cyrus just because he was a lawyer. Cyrus hated lawyers. They all thought they were smarter than everyone else, just like his superior.
But he had easily manipulated the eldest Wilde. All it had taken was a little money...a lot of money, he mentally calculated, and he’d created an incident the smart-ass lawyer Wilde hadn’t been able to get away from dealing with personally.
Which had left Cyrus to deal with the second in command, Canton Wilde.
He could handle
that
Wilde.
A grin stretched his lips wide, revealing perfectly even, symmetrical, capped teeth he’d paid an arm and a leg for...to replace crooked, yellowed ones that had been his legacy from a disenfranchised, poor childhood.
“Now that the smart one is out of the way, it’ll be cake dealing with the ex-jock.” Cyrus White spoke aloud, his tongue swiping over the perfection of his teeth, his face balled into a derisive sneer.
His fingers steepled together as he stared absently out the window.
True, it hadn’t been quite as easy to manipulate the big oaf, as he’d thought it would.
The Cheshire grin slipped.
But he had a plan. All he had to do was convince the Wilde that he could trust him.
Chapter 11
“Y eah, it’s all good, Tiber. No real bumps in the road. Nothing I can’t handle, at any rate,” Canton spoke to his brother via his Bluetooth, while motioning for his assistant to enter into his office. He held out his hand for the small thumb drive Ray, his assistant, held within his hand, one he’d been waiting for him to deliver.
A brisk nod from Canton told Ray that was all that was needed from him, and with a deferential nod, a sarcastic bow and quirk of a brow, all delivered seamlessly and on cue, toward Canton, he spun on a booted heel and left his office.
Subconsciously, Canton registered both the bow and quirk of Ray’s subtle sarcasm.
“Ass...” Canton murmured under his breath, noting his best friend/assistant’s mannerisms.
“Did you just call me an ass?”
Ray had barely closed the large oak double doors behind him before Canton was inserting the thumb drive into the USB port on his desktop. He absently picked up his rimless reading glasses before he plopped his big frame down in his brother’s expensive custom chair. As lavish as the chair was, it creaked as in protest of Canton’s one hundred and seventy pounds of pure muscle sitting on its frame.
“Hell, no. Wasn’t calling you the ass. That was for Ray,” Canton answered, distracted as he waited the less than two seconds it took for the file to open and the info he needed to fill the screen.
“But,”
he clarified his statement for his brother, “I did call you that earlier today when I met with that even bigger ass, Cyrus White, and had to listen to him go on and on about his company’s objection to us buying any more liens. Seemed hell-bent on asking why we felt the need to do that, to continue when the plan was for them to purchase the land that went up for auction. Said a bunch of bullshit about how much better it was for the community, blah blah.”
Canton found what he was looking for in the file, his mind split between answering his brother and his task at hand.
“What the fu—” Tiber bit back completing the curse. “That is none of his or Rolling Hills’ concern. We will
C. J. Cherryh
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