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I jumped in. “So you pinned it on Lara?”
His brow furrowed for a moment. Seemed he hadn’t expected me to know that. “Stop right there, young lady. You should listen to the whole story before passing judgment.”
I clenched my teeth, holding back telling him what I thought of him for even considering it.
“The bank demanded we identify the culprit.”
“So you picked Lara?”
“Stephanie thought it was her, and besides, we can always amend it if she was wrong and we find out it was somebody else.”
I seethed at the suggestion that erasing an arrest like this from Lara’s record would be no big deal—never mind the whole jail part.
“The bank had frozen our credit line, but then when corporate got involved, they canceled,canceled, goddammit, and called all our loans.”
All my strength drained at those words. That was a death sentence for the business. “I told you we should have diversified our banking beyond Coastal.”
“Let’s not reargue that now. Jerry has been good to us.”
Jerry was his banker buddy from school, and the reason he’d ignored my suggestion more than once to broaden our banking relationships.
“Your fucked-up idea that we could rely on your asshole friend Jerry is why we’re in this mess,” I scolded.
Ernst’s face screwed up in anger. “Bull-fucking-shit,” he half yelled.
I’d made the mistake of swearing, and that always loosened his tongue in response.
“Jerry is the one who helped out.” He pointed an accusing finger at me like I’d been the cause of all this, even though I’d been more than three thousand miles away at the time. “Jerry was the only one who could locate a buyer for me over the weekend.”
With him yelling at me, I wasn’t about to go back to polite. “Buyer? What the hell does that mean?”
“It means we’d be giving everybody pink slips today if not for my friend Jerry. And that includes you.”
I thought quickly about what we could have sold to get us enough cash to pay back our credit line, and the Redondo Beach store where we owned the land was all I could come up with.
“Are you ready to listen to the solution, or do you want to berate me for being here to solve our problems while you were off sunning yourself in the tropics?”
“What?” I hissed.
I’d scheduled the trip months ago and not gotten any complaints. And I hadn’t gotten any fucking communication from him while I was down there.
“I called you late Saturday, but you didn’t deign to answer my call, and again yesterday before I signed the papers. But oh no, your week of me-time was too important to bother worrying about saving everybody’s job. I don’t know how you live with yourself.”
That was it. I was done listening to his ranting. “I’ve given more of myself to this company than you ever have. Who’s the one out on the golf course three afternoons a week?”
He winced, as I’d finally scored a direct hit to his ego.
“And for your information,” I yelled as I dug through my purse. “I never got any messages or calls from you.” I held up the cracked carcass of my old phone. “Some asshole broke my phone while I was down there.”
He put up his hand. “Be that as it may, I did what I had to. So, do you want to hear about it or just keep yelling like a hysterical teenager?”
Hysterical teenagerhad become his go-to insult whenever I got annoyed with him about anything. What he really meant washysterical woman, but he didn’t have the balls to use that again after I’d almost flattened him the first time he tried it.
“I’m listening.” I tossed the phone on his desk. “Since I couldn’t get any calls, you could have left a message for me at the front desk, or had them bring a note to my room,” I added. The last word on this particular argument belonged to me. “What property did you sell?”
“We sold the company.”
“You what?” I yelled. “You can’t do that.”
