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First, would it be helpful to have other members of The Wyatt Foundation/The Collective attend the meeting with me in case they are able to remember details I cannot?
Second, were the documents I sent last week regarding our organization’s charitable activities in France during the first world war helpful?
Third (and I suspect you will say no to this, but it can’t hurt to ask again), are you quite certain we cannot hold this meeting at night?
All best,
John Richardson
Reginald
I felt a bit atloose ends in Amelia’s apartment as she finished preparing for the next day’s meeting with John Richardson. She’d asked me to come over to keep her company as she worked, and so that she could bounce ideas off me as we put our plan in place. And who was I to say no?
Shewassaving my ass here.
I also strongly suspected I was falling in love with her.
Scratch that.
I strongly suspected I hadalreadyfallen in love with her.
For centuries, I’d made fun of men who found it impossible to deny their significant others anything they asked of them. More the fool, me.
“Thank godThe Wyatt Foundationis a more distinctive name thanThe Collective,” Amelia mused out loud from her makeshift office at her kitchen table. She’d been working for the past three hours while I puttered around her apartment and made her pancakes. It was such a domestic scene, with her working and my caring for her, it made my chest ache. “If I hadn’t had a better name to search for in GuideStar, this work would have taken me days. Maybe weeks.”
Her fingers flew over her keyboard, her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun to keep it out of her face as she worked. I had no idea how she typed so fast. I also didn’t know what GuideStar was, or why exactlyThe Wyatt Foundationwas a better name for our purposes thanThe Collective. But Amelia was clearly happy about it, her eyes dancing as she jotted things down on a yellow notepad beside her keyboard.
I briefly considered asking more detailed questions about what she’d said but held my tongue. I probably wouldn’t have understood the answers anyway. Right now, she needed the pancakes I was attempting to make her more than she needed me slowing her down with my cluelessness about taxes. Fortunately, now that I knew it mattered how much baking soda went into the batter, this batch was going much better than the Wisconsin attempt had.
Nothing in her kitchen smelled like the Great Salt Lake had been set on fire, anyway.
“Wow,” Amelia said, then let out a low whistle. “Listen to this. Unless there’s some GuideStar glitch that prevented their tax returns from being uploaded, whichneverhappens on this scale, it looks like neither the Wyatt Foundation nor The Collective has filed any federal tax returns in over fifty years.”
ThatI understood. Sort of. “That sounds really bad.”
Amelia nodded, her eyes bright. “It is. If the IRS finds out, these bozos will definitely lose their tax-exempt status. They will absolutely owe a Herculean amount of back taxes. And like I said the other day, some may even go to prison.”
I moved to where she was sitting and wrapped my arms around her from behind. I rested my cheek against the top of her head, peeking idly at her laptop monitor in the process. The numbers on the screen were gibberish to me. The fact thatsomething so complicated, so utterly beyond me, made intuitive sense to Amelia was possibly the hottest thing I’d ever experienced.
Mine, I thought fiercely. I tightened my hold on her, closing my eyes as I savored the sweet, tender warmth of the woman in my arms.This brilliant woman ismine.
For as long as she’ll have me.
I shook myself a little, trying to snap out of it and focus on what she was saying. “Do you think they did it on purpose?” I managed. Her hair was so soft against my cheek, her scent driving me nearly to distraction. But now was not the moment to think about how much I wanted to take her hair out of its bun and run my fingers through it. “They’ll probably tell you they didn’t know what they were doing. Vampires don’t keep up with the modern world too well.”
“It doesn’t matter if it was unintentional or not,” she said, sternly.
“No?”
She turned in my arms, craning her neck a little so she could look up at me. “Failure to understand the law is not a defense to breaking it.”
Well, that seemed unfair. “What if you’re just a clueless vampire?”
She smiled. “I haven’t specifically checked, but I’m pretty sure being a vampire isn’t a defense, either.Especiallyif you’re a vampire availing yourself of the same federal tax breaks us mortals get.”
“Damn.” I shook my head. “Are you telling me that after centuries of being complete assholes, The Collective’s downfall might actually come from something as dumb as messing up on their taxes?” Thinking about it that way, the whole situation was almost funny.
“Taxes was how they got Al Capone,” she said. “There’s precedent.”
