personal assets, and she’s got you by the short hairs there, buddy. But don’t worry. I’ve transferred about half of our investments to Lowell & Robbins, and they assure me they can make up your losses in only a couple of years. So the company is safe, the branches are safe, and you’re fucked. Now sit down, have some of my excellent coffee, and if either of you are interested, I have some fresh-baked cinnamon rolls here that are, quite frankly, divine.” With that, he pulled out the pink pastry box that a solicitous Lachlan had put into his hand as Simon had been walking out the door that morning. Simon had smiled and floundered for thanks, speechless, because it was such a simple, generous act.
Alex Kennedy’s friends were really tremendous, weren’t they?
“Simon, you shit, I thought you’d never ask,” Gabby said, her infinity-pool black eyes going limpid in her stunningly beautiful face. Gabby—who stood nearly six feet tall and had skin of the deepest, darkest brown, with her hair cut short and left natural—had emerged from adolescence with the grace of the proverbial swan.
Both Simon and Gabby had gone through their awkward, ugly phase together, egged on by parents with political aspirations to somehow be less painfully lacking in every direction.
He’d seen that she’d be an absolute beauty, even then, and together they’d practiced scripts and scenarios for how to talk in public, how to interact with people in peer groups, how to look and act as successful as their parents expected them to be. They’d been in the middle of their self-transformation when they’d met Chris in graduate school. He already had the looks, the talk, the schtick down, but his grades hadn’t been fantastic. The three of them had become inseparable, and while Gabby had picked up Chris Lockhart’s propensity for the best clothes, the best makeup, the best cars, she had never forgotten about also being the smartest in their class.
And Simon had never forgotten that anything they’d wanted had come with hard work.
Between the three of them, Reddick, Lockhart, and Baldwin was one of the most successful accounting firms in the Sierra Foothills and, if their proposed branches in Sacramento and San Francisco panned out in the next ten years, in Northern California.
But only if Chris Lockhart could not be stupid.
“You’re eating cinnamon rolls now?” Chris asked, standing in the middle of Simon’s office without a pity-party rage-rant to throw.
“Mmff, ohmigod, yes!” Gabby said on a moan. She swallowed and tried for coherence. “Chris, come here. Have a bite. I swear to you, your day will improve.”
Chris just stared at her in obvious disbelief and then, with a sigh, stalked across the carpet and used a napkin to fish out one of the small, pillowy mounds of sugar and perfection.
“You know I don’t even like—” He took a bite and practically dripped through the carpet, he melted so fast. “This is magic,” he said, and Simon wanted to laugh and tell him how right he was. “I would give up my house for these cinnamon rolls every morning.”
“You’d have to,” Gabby said practically, taking another bite. “You wouldn’t fit through your front door.”
“What about you?” Chris asked, and Gabby rolled her eyes.
“I’m not the one with the metabolism problem,” she said—accurately. Every Achilles had his heel, and Chris’s was that only a meticulous diet and workout regimen kept his figure trim and boyish. Otherwise, he’d admitted to both of them, he’d look like one of those fleshy, prosperous banker stereotypes who died of heart failure at forty.
“They do seem to make your problems melt away,” Simon agreed musingly. “But Chris, you need to talk to Nancy Slater so she can get your signature on the forms that will save our company, okay? I made an appointment for you at two. She’s coming to your office, so you just have to not be an asshole and show up.”
Chris looked wounded. “I wouldn’t miss an appoint—”
“We almost lost two accounts last week because you missed appointments with clients,” Gabby said, her voice softened somewhat by the cinnamon roll. “Look, honey, you’re off your game. We get that. And we are obviously here for you, but you have to let us help.”
Chris let out a sigh and took another bite. “I’d forgotten about that,” he said after he finished his bite. “You guys….” And Chris had always been smooth and a little bit arrogant and a little bit superficial, but the look he gave them both now was