“I’m not getting you drunk at three in the afternoon.” Dylan shook his head in disgust as he took a quick left. The Porsche gripped the pavement, and they barely beat an oncoming taxi.
“Are you my nursemaid?” asked Zach.
“You need a plan, not a drink.”
In Zach’s opinion, that was definitely debatable.
They slowed to a stop for a red light at another intersection. Two taxi drivers honked and exchanged hand gestures, while a throng of people swelled out from the sidewalk in the light drizzle and made their way between the stopped cars.
“She thinks I got her fired,” Zach admitted.
“Did you?”
“No.”
Dylan sent him a skeptical look. “Is she delusional? Or did you do something that resembled getting her fired?”
“Fine.” Zach shifted his feet on the floor of the Porsche. “I canceled the Hutton Quinn contract to renovate the office building. The plans weren’t even close to what I wanted.”
“And they fired her,” Dylan confirmed with a nod of comprehension.
Zach held up his palms in defense. “Their staffing choices are none of my business.”
Kaitlin’s renovation plans had been flamboyant and exotic in a zany, postmodern way. They weren’t at all in keeping with the Harper corporate image.
Harper Transportation had been a fixture in New York City for a hundred years. People depended on them for solid reliability and consistency. Their clients were serious, hardworking people who got the job done through boom times and down times.
“Then why do you feel guilty?” asked Dylan as they swung into an underground parking lot off Saint Street.
“I don’t feel guilty.” It was business. Nothing more and nothing less. Zach knew guilt had no part in the equation.
It was not as if he should have accepted inferior work because he’d once danced with Kaitlin, held her in his arms, kissed her mouth and wondered for a split second if he’d actually gone to heaven. Decisions that were based on a man’s sex drive were the quickest road to financial ruin.
Dylan scoffed an exclamation of disbelief as he came parallel with the valet’s kiosk. He shut off the car and set the parking break.
“What?” Zach demanded.
Dylan pointed at Zach. “I know that expression. I stole wine with you from my dad’s cellar when we were fifteen, and I remember the day you felt up Rosalyn Myers.”
The attendant opened the driver’s door, and Dylan dropped the keys into the man’s waiting palm.
Zach exited the car, as well. “I didn’t steal anything from Kaitlin Saville, and I certainly never—” He clamped his jaw shut as he rounded the polished, low-slung hood of the Porsche. The very last element he needed to introduce into this conversation was Kaitlin Saville’s breasts.
“Maybe that’s your problem,” said Dylan.
Zach coughed out an inarticulate exclamation.
“You married her,” Dylan said, taking obvious satisfaction in pointing that fact out as they crossed the crowded parking lot. “You must have liked her. You said yourself you haven’t slept with her. Maybe you’re not so much angry as horny.”
“I’m angry. Trust me. I can tell the difference.” Zach’s interest in Kaitlin was in getting rid of her. Anything else was completely out of the question.
“Angry at her or at yourself?”
“At her,” said Zach. “I’m just the guy trying to fix the problem here. If she’d sign the damn papers, or if my grandmother hadn’t—”
“It’s not nice to be mad at your grandmother,” Dylan admonished.
Zach wasn’t exactly angry with Grandma Sadie. But he was definitely puzzled by her behavior. Why on earth would she put the family fortune at risk? “What was she thinking?”
Dylan stepped up onto the painted yellow curb. “That she wanted your poor wife to have some kind of power balance.”
An unsettling thought entered Zach’s brain. “Did my grandmother talk to you about her will?”
“No. But she was logical and intelligent.”
Zach didn’t disagree with that statement. Sadie Harper had been a very intelligent, organized and capable woman. Which only made her decision more puzzling.
After Zach’s parents were killed in a boating accident when he was twenty, she’d been his only living relative. They’d grown very close the past fourteen years. She was ninety-one when she died, and had grown increasingly frail over the past year. She’d passed away only a month ago.
Zach thought he was ready.
He definitely wasn’t.
He and Dylan headed into the elevator, and Dylan inserted his key card for the helipad on top of the forty-story building.