Wrapped Up: A Triple Threat Sports Romance (13 page)

Brooke

“Can you believe him?” I shouted into my empty car. “Can you fucking believe him?”

I couldn’t believe Jake would just all of a sudden be so interested in ownership of my father’s company. After everything! The original agreement had been that we would get married so that the company would be given to me and he would have a steady girlfriend on his arm to impress the paparazzi. He had even been reluctant to agree to that at first because he just wanted a steady girlfriend. He didn’t want to agree to be my husband.

Hell, I didn’t want to get married either, but I needed to so that my father would give me the company. Then,
that
asshole decided to give the company to my husband after my marriage. What the hell was happening to my life? I was slowly losing everything because of this deal.

I drove around the block a couple of times, letting everything roll around in my head a little more. If I got married, I would have to split my ownership unevenly with my husband. I would have to get him to sign over ownership upon divorce, which didn’t seem too unreasonable, regardless of how Jake felt about it.

If I didn’t get married, which was what it was starting to look like after walking away from Jake and telling him I was going to call off the wedding, I stood to lose everything. I was even in a position to lose my job if the board decided to let me go for not getting married to take over and take my rightful place as the new CEO.

“What the hell are you going to do, Brooke?” I asked myself. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I didn’t want to give my company over to my new husband, but losing it altogether because I wasn’t getting married was worse.

I wished there was a way to just take the company away from my father. There probably was, and there was one person who could probably help me. That was Hollie.

I called her.

“Brooke, are you okay?” she said as she answered.

“No, I’m not, Hollie. I need your help.” I realized I was crying while I was talking to her.

“Okay, come on by my office. I’ve got the prenup ready, and we can look everything over again to make sure it’s all legal. If there’s even the slightest possibility we can get you out of this without losing the company, we’re going to go after it,” she assured me.

“Thank you so much, Hollie. That’s exactly what I needed to hear. I’ll be there in a minute.” I hung up the phone and started driving to her office.

I parked and went in, greeting the girl at her front desk. I didn’t want to be buzzed into her office or for her receptionist to ask me to have a seat in the front. I walked right past the front desk and knocked gently at her door as I opened it.

“Excellent. Come in, Brooke. Have a seat and look over the prenup to make sure it’s what you want,” she said.

I sat down and picked up the paperwork in front of me. Everything was exactly how I wanted it, but I didn’t want it that way if it didn’t have to be. I set it back down on the desk and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, as if she thought I was disheartened with something she put in the paperwork.

“Do we have to stage a divorce to make this transfer happen?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. You mean the transfer of ownership, right?”

“Right. That’s it exactly.”

“We can set something up along the lines of having his shares transfer over to you after six months, a year, something like that, whatever he’ll agree to. Are you thinking about not divorcing him now?” She cocked an eyebrow.

“I don’t know. I told him I was going to call the wedding off, but I want to wait until I figure out exactly what it is I’m going to do about all of this. I don’t want to
not
marry him, but I don’t want to give him my part of the company,” I told her.

“That’s not exactly what I was asking. We can do damn near anything we want with this prenuptial agreement, so I’m not worried about that. In fact, I can sit down with both of you and go over options if you think that will help. No, no, what I was asking was if you were thinking about making the marriage more permanent by not divorcing him. Are things getting more serious, Brooke? I’m asking as your old friend, not as your lawyer. Girl, you look like a wreck.”

“I don’t know, Hollie. I just don’t know what’s happening,” I admitted.

“Have you been sleeping together?” she asked in her lawyer voice.

I started bawling. “Yes, we’ve slept together. Twice. He even made it sound like we made love last time.”

“You still have feelings for him, don’t you?” she asked in her normal tone, dropping the cold, formal tone she normally used as my lawyer.

All I could do was nod at that point. Words were beyond me. She passed a box of tissues to me from the corner of her desk. I dried up the best I could while I sat there.

“I’m sorry,” I said once my voice returned.

“It’s okay. You guys had a pretty intense history, if I remember correctly.”

“Yeah, we did,” I told her. Even back in school, I had felt that Jake really was the one. I was using the marriage condition from my father as an excuse to marry him really. There wasn’t anyone else I would have even considered asking to marry me.

Still, it didn’t matter how I had felt about him at any point in our history; I wasn’t about to turn over my ownership in the company to him just because my father thought I needed to. I had to find a way to fight it without calling off the wedding and without agreeing to divorce him just because the wedding was supposed to be staged anyway. We were beyond just staging everything.

“Well, look, like I said, we can sit down, the three of us, and go over all of your options on this prenup. There are a lot of things we can do, and honestly, whatever he agrees to, once it’s signed, it’s as good as gold. He’ll have to work pretty hard to challenge anything he agrees to and signs,” Hollie started.

I nodded. “I understand.”

“But there’s something else we can do that won’t affect your relationship with Jake in any way.”

I looked up at her then. “I’m listening,” I said in a stuffy voice.

“We can attack your father’s credibility,” she said bluntly, with the straightest face I had ever seen on Hollie in all the years I had known her.

“We have actual grounds to do that?” I asked, amazed to hear that what I really wanted to do was even a possibility.

“Oh yeah, I’d say so.” She pulled out a file folder and slapped it down on the desk.

“What’s this?” I asked, turning the cover and looking at the paperwork filling the folder.

“This is everything my staff was able to come up with to help us go after your father and show that he is unfit to continue his involvement in the company. We will also be able to show that he is in no shape to make demands like he is doing.”

“And this will hold up in court?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Hollie said slowly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we present this to the board to convince them to vote him down and allow you to take over without having to go through all his little stipulations and conditions. I also have a full copy of the company’s charter. If your father is proven unfit, they are required by their charter to disregard things like this condition stating that you have to get married to inherit the company. They can basically rule it invalid.”

“Hollie, you’re my hero,” I gushed. I wanted to come across the desk and hug her neck.

“We haven’t done anything yet,” she said cautiously.

“Okay, where do we start, then?”

“Why did your father go ahead and retire? He didn’t do it because of his age. He could have continued working for a few more years until he was old enough to be forced into retirement,” she said.

“Health reasons is all he told me,” I said.

“He didn’t specify what health reasons?” she asked.

“No, he didn’t. He keeps stuff like that from me, you know, the really personal stuff,” I told her.

“Well, we need to figure out what it was about. Certain health problems will completely invalidate stuff like these damn stipulations. I mean, this is unreal. He shouldn’t be making requirements like this, and you’re right. He should pay for asking you to give up your ownership of the company, either to a man or completely by forfeiting it and not getting married at all.”

I felt vindicated already just by having Hollie so gung-ho on my side the way she was in this situation. We hadn’t even started on anything yet, but knowing that we had an outside chance to just strip him of his authority was great.

“Where do we start?” I asked her.

“I will start by getting my staff to dig into his medical records and any official health statements he has made since then. If he made any statements to the board regarding his health when he retired, we can use that against him as well. Then, all I have to do is put together enough evidence from other cases to convince the board to disregard him entirely.”

“Wait, he’s already retired. What will this do?” I asked.

“That’s actually not a bad question,” Hollie said. “Basically, what I plan on doing is showing that he was already unfit to continue serving as the CEO of the company prior to his retirement. Once I convince them of that, anything he did before that can be thrown out. Next, of course, I’ll need to convince them that for the last ten years, you were the one running the company, even when he was still the active CEO. Once I do that, they’ll be left with no other real option other than to just file the transfer and hand you the position,” she said.

“You make it sound like a piece of cake,” I said.

“It is. But like with any cake, baking it is a bitch,” she added with a laugh. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Brooke. Let me handle it all from here. You go home, maybe crack open a bottle of wine to relax your nerves. Let Jake know the good news, that you guys can probably make all of this work without the prenup, without a divorce, all of that. Let him know that you guys don’t even have to fake it anymore. That’s good news, right?”

“That’s damn good news, Hollie. Thank you so much.”

I stood up from the chair in front of her desk and leaned across to give my old friend a hug.

“Now go,” she insisted. “I’ve got work to do, and you’ve got celebrating to do.”

“Thank you, Hollie,” I said with a smile as fresh tears started to run down my face. I hurried out of her office and back to the car. I couldn’t contain myself. I was laughing and crying at the same time because I was so relieved that everything was probably going to work out for me.

I pulled out my phone and called Jake. I listened as it rang and rang.

“Jake, baby, it’s Brooke. Give me a call. It’s very important. It’s good news. Damn good news,” I said on his voicemail.

I put the phone in the cup holder in front of my center console in case he called back while I was on my way to his house.

I made it to the house and wandered around inside trying to find him. He wasn’t there. The mansion was huge and so lonely without him there. There were rooms I hadn’t explored, and whole sections I was pretty sure I hadn’t been in. I plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV to try to distract myself, but there was nothing that would take my mind off of him.

I checked the time. As it got later, I got worried. I tried calling again.

“Jake, it’s me again. I’m at the house. I’m really sorry about this afternoon. I overreacted, but I think I have it all figured out now. Please give me a call or come home, baby.” I felt like there was more to say, but I didn’t want to run him off even more than I had tried to do earlier. I figured there would be plenty of time to say those other things once we talked later. It would be some time before it would be appropriate to say some of those extra things anyway.