as the Cool Girl of Denver high society, had ensconced himself out on the Beaumont Farm and gotten sober. No more parties with him. And her twin brother, Byron, was starting a new restaurant.
Everyone else was moving forward, pairing off. And Frances was stuck back in her childhood room, alone.
Not that she believed a man would solve any of her problems. She’d grown up watching her father burn through marriage after unhappy marriage. No, she knew love didn’t exist. Or if it did, it wasn’t in the cards for her.
She was on her own here.
She opened up a message from her friend Becky and stared at the picture of a shuttered storefront. She and Becky had worked together at Galerie Solaria. Becky had no famous last name and no social connections, but she knew art and had a snarky sense of humor that cut through the bull. More to the point, Becky treated Frances like she was a real person, not just a special Beaumont snowflake. They had been friends ever since.
Becky had a proposition. She wanted to open a new gallery, one that would merge the new-media art forms with the standard classics that wealthy patrons preferred. It wasn’t as avant-garde as Frances’s digital art business had been, but it was a good bridge between the two worlds.
The only problem was Frances did not have the money to invest. She wished to God she did. She could co-own and comanage the gallery. It wouldn’t bring in big bucks, but it could get her out of the mansion. It could get her back to being a somebody. And not just any somebody. She could go back to being Frances Beaumont—popular, respected, envied.
She dropped her phone onto the bed in defeat. Right. Another fortune was just going to fall into her lap and she’d be in demand. Sure. And she would also sprout wings.
True despair was sinking in when her phone rang. She answered it without even looking at the screen. “Hello?” she said morosely.
“Frances? Frannie,” the woman said. “I know you may not remember me—I’m Delores Hahn. I used to work in accounting at—”
The name rang a bell, an older woman who wore her hair in a tight bun. “Oh! Delores! Yes, you were at the Brewery. How are you?”
The only people besides her siblings who called her Frannie were the longtime employees of the Beaumont Brewery. They were her second family—or at least, they had been.
“We’ve been better,” Delores said. “Listen, I have a proposal for you. I know you’ve got those fancy art degrees.”
In the safety of her room, Frances blushed. After today’s rejections, she didn’t feel particularly fancy. “What kind of proposal?” Maybe her luck was about to change. Maybe this proposal would come with a paycheck.
“Well,” Delores went on in a whisper, “the new CEO that AllBev brought in?”
Frances scowled. “What about him? Failing miserably, I hope.”
“Sadly,” Delores said in a not-sad-at-all voice, “there’s been an epidemic of Brew Flu going around. We had to halt production on two lines today.”
Frances couldn’t hold back the laugh that burst forth from her. “Oh, that’s fabulous.”
“It was,” Delores agreed. “But it made Logan—that’s the new CEO—so mad that he decided to rip out your father’s office.”
Frances would have laughed again, except for one little detail. “He’s going to destroy Daddy’s office? He wouldn’t dare!”
“He told me to sell it off. All of it—the table, the bar, everything. I think he’d even perform an exorcism, if he thought it’d help,” she added.
Her father’s office. Technically, it had most recently been Chadwick’s office. But Frances had never stopped thinking of her father and that office together. “So what’s your proposal?”
“Well,” Delores said, her voice dropping past whisper and straight into conspirator. “I thought you could come do the appraisals. Who knows—you might be able to line up buyers for some of it.”
“And...” Frances swallowed. The following was a crass question, but desperate times and all that. “And would this Logan fellow pay for the appraisal? If I sold the furniture myself—” say, to a certain sentimental older brother who’d been the CEO for almost ten years “—would I get a commission?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Frances tried to see the downside of this situation, but nothing popped up. Delores was right—if anyone had the connections to sell off her family’s furniture, it’d be Frances.
Plus, if she could get a foothold back in the Brewery, she might be able to help all those poor, flu-stricken workers. She wasn’t so naive to think that she could get a conglomerate like AllBev to sell the company back to the family, but...
She might be able to make this Logan’s life a little more difficult. She might be able to exact a little revenge. After all—the sale of the Brewery had been when her luck had turned sour. And if she could get paid to do all of that?
“Let’s say Friday, shall we?” That was only two days away, but that would give her plenty of time to plan and execute her trap. “I’ll bring the donuts.”
Delores actually giggled. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Oh, yes. This was going to be great.
* * *
“Mis-ter Logan, the appraiser is here.”
Ethan set down the head count rolls he’d been studying. Next week, he was reducing the workforce by 15 percent. People with one or more “illness absences” were going to be the first to find themselves out on the sidewalk with nothing more than a box of their possessions.
“Good. Send him in.”
But no nerdy-looking art geek walked into the office. Ethan waited and then switched the intercom back on. Before he could ask Delores the question, though, he heard a lot of people talking—and laughing?
It sounded as though someone was having a party in the reception area.
What the hell?
He strode across the room and threw open his office door. There was, point of fact, a party going on outside. Workers he’d only caught glimpses of before were all crowded around Delores’s desk, donuts in their hands and sappy smiles on their faces.
“What’s going on out here?” he thundered. “This is a business, people, not a—”
Then the crowd parted, and he saw her.
God, how had he missed her? A woman with a stunning mane of flame-red hair sat on the edge of Delores’s desk. Her body was covered by an emerald-green gown that clung to every curve like a lover’s hands. His fingers itched to trace the line of her bare shoulders.
She was not an employee. That much was clear.
She was, however, holding a box of donuts.
The
