Anyone But Nick (Anyone But... #3) - Penelope Bloom Page 0,5
that kind of precision. We found businesses that were on their way to financial collapse and turned them into virtual money-printing machines. When we showed up with checkbooks and wrote down enough zeroes, they were always willing to sell off their burden to us. After that, my job was to trim the fat. When necessary, I’d step in as a temporary CEO until I could find the key to getting the company back on track. Nothing ever quite matched the feeling of finding the one loose thread—that sometimes-minute adjustment to let every other piece fall back into place.
Today, Bark Bites was going to become Sion’s newest acquisition. It was a restaurant franchise where the menu also included a selection of items for your dog. The dogs were given a little doghouse beneath the table and a tether to be leashed. Based on the information I’d seen, Bark Bites was about six months away from declaring bankruptcy, whether the management knew it or not. They weren’t a publicly shared company, so the hostile takeover route was off the table. Instead, I was going to go the simple route. I had a meeting scheduled in half an hour, and I was going to show up with a fat check in my hand.
My brother Cade sat beside me in the lobby. It was rare for him to join me on business outings. For that matter, it was rare for Cade to do much work in general. My brother had an unfortunate tendency to attract disaster and avoid responsibility. Unfortunately, the work he did do was borderline genius, and we always knew we could bring him in when negotiations reached a standstill with important clients. Cade could convince just about anyone to do just about anything. If he wasn’t so annoyingly useful, we could’ve just told him to stay home and skipped the hassle. But becoming a father seemed to have pushed him to be a little more proactive in being a regular part of the business. He’d never admit as much, but I wondered if he was trying to be a better example for Bear.
I always felt slightly obligated to spend time around Cade, if for no other reason than to keep him from accidentally offing himself. I imagined it wasn’t much different from being in charge of a two-year-old, at least if that two-year-old was hypercapable and clever in the dumbest ways imaginable. I’d saved him from countless near-death experiences. There was the time he’d called to complain that the constant beeping of his carbon monoxide detectors was giving him a headache and making him nauseated. There was also the time he plugged in a drenched extension cord outside to prove it was safe—it wasn’t—and if I hadn’t kicked him away from the cord, I’m not sure he would’ve been able to let go.
Cade leaned his head back against the wall while he played a game on his phone that looked like it was designed for children.
“Can you at least turn the volume down?” I asked.
Cade shot me a withering look. He and my brother Rich were twins. Cade’s life of mischievous living and trouble had somehow managed to make the two of them pretty easy to tell apart. Cade was the one who looked like he’d throw a party at a moment’s notice, and Rich was the one who looked like he’d shut it down and tell everybody to get back to work. They were as close to polar opposites as you could get, but I supposed that wasn’t a shocker from identical twins. Everyone wanted an identity, but twins had to work harder to carve out their own since they were always being compared.
Cade tapped the buttons on the side of his phone, and I was fairly sure the game got louder. “How’s that?” he asked.
“Remind me again why you decided to tag along for this?”
“Because of your little speech?” He tried to change his voice to imitate mine. “Rich and I are so busy pairing off and getting in relationships that we’re going to neglect the business.” He paused, mimicking pushing a pair of glasses up his nose. “Blah, blah. You’re worried that it’s going to all fall on your shoulders. Blah, blah. You have a fetish for women dressed as pirates, and you fantasize about what they’d do with their peg legs. What was it you said, again? ‘I want ’em hilt deep in me dark star’? Or was it ‘elbow deep and harrrrd.’ Emphasis on the ‘arrr.’”