Kristin Hardy - Under The Mistletoe

Indeed. Everyone at Stone Enterprises was dying to know just what Robert Stone planned to do with the company of Whit Stone, his bitterest rival—and the father he’d been estranged from since childhood. Robert had labored all his professional life to outdo Whit and to destroy him financially. In the end, he’d been unequal to the task. Whit had died with his holdings stronger than ever. To have the point rammed home by Whit leaving him the entire conglomerate had to be burning her father up.

Not that Hadley was about to ask.

The graying, hawk-faced legal counsel of Stone Enterprises handed a bound report to Robert and took a seat in one of the plush leather client chairs. “WSI, in a nutshell. You’ve got the preliminary assessment of holdings, value, et cetera. It’s all in agreement with the estate declaration, though slightly over-valued by my estimate.” He smiled faintly.

“Any surprises?”

“Not really. Most of it is a matter of public record.”

“The list of underperformers is longer than I’d expected.” An expression of satisfaction spread across Robert’s face. “Do you think they were cooking the books?”

“Unlikely. If you flip to the page of overall holdings, you’ll see that those are a minority.”

Robert nodded. “I don’t care. We need rid of them.”

“I’ll notify mergers and acquisitions to get on it.”

“You misunderstand me. I don’t want them sold off whole. Take them apart and sell them off piecemeal.”

Palmer stared at him. “Robert, about seventy percent of the companies on that list are running in the black and another twenty are looking at profitability within a five-year time horizon. You run them all through a chop shop, you’re going to lose value and revenue.”

“It’ll lower the hit from the estate taxes.” Stone flipped closed the briefing book. “Get our salvage specialists to work on it. I want those companies to be history within the month.”

“I don’t think we can entirely execute on that.”

Robert’s brows lowered. The only occasions Hadley had ever seen him lose an iota of his iron control involved his father. “I don’t want to hear arguments, Justin. I want to hear ’yes.’”

“How about ’the terms of the will won’t allow it’?”

“Explain.”

“Your father’s will identifies one holding that cannot be sold or dismantled. It has to be held by the Stone family and run in good faith or else the entire estate reverts to charity.”

Hadley watched, fascinated. After years of being the puppet master, Robert was now a puppet himself. And not even he could walk away from thirty billion dollars for the sake of principle.

“What is the business?”

“An old hotel up in New Hampshire.”

“What the hell would he want with a hotel?” Robert demanded. “He specialized in high tech and industrial manufacturing, not hospitality.”

“I get the impression he dealt in whatever he wanted to.”

“And Stone Enterprises deals in what I want to,” Stone said icily. “Find a way to break the terms.”

Palmer shook his head. “We’ve been over and over it. It’s ironclad. You can do what you want with the rest, Robert, but this one has to stay in the family.”

Robert’s jaw tightened visibly. Long seconds passed while Hadley waited for the explosion. Finally, he relaxed a fraction, the struggle for control won yet again. “All right. If we can’t unload it, then we need to turn around the earnings. I won’t have this kind of an operation showing up on our financials.”

“We’ll need to put someone else on it in a hurry.”

“I know.” Robert turned to Hadley. “Well, it looks like that new opportunity I was telling you about has cropped up sooner than I expected. Get the Becheron transfer rolling. You’re going to New Hampshire.”

New Hampshire, December 2005

Opportunity, her father had said. More like banishment, Hadley thought, as she swung into a curve on the narrow road that threaded through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. From vice president of one of the most high profile divisions at Stone to triage specialist for an antiquated hotel out in the sticks with the squirrels and chipmunks. Forget the flights to Zurich, Cape Town and BuenosAires. Now it was Montpelier, Vermont, which was still nearly an hour and a half from the hotel. No direct flights there, of course, which had meant cooling her heels in Boston while she’d waited for a connection on some crop duster.

After all, demoted V.P.s didn’t rate the corporate jet.

Her cell phone rang and she answered it absently. “Hello?”

“Good morning, sweetheart,” said a voice filled with perfume and gardenias and air kisses.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Can you stop by the house before you leave so we can talk about the holidays?”

Hadley resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Too late. I’m already here.”

“The wilds of Maine?”

“New Hampshire.”

“Ah. And how is New Hampshire?”

“Cold,” she answered. “Lots of trees and snow.”

“Sounds wonderfully rustic. Your father seems to think you’ll be gone for a while. At least through the holidays.”

Nice that he had such faith in her. “We’ll see how it goes. I should be able to take a day or two over Christmas, anyway.”

“Actually, that was why I called.” Irene hesitated. “You see, we’re going to Gstaad over the holidays. The twins are mad for the idea.”

Eight hours of flying each way, not counting time spent on the ground. “Sounds great,” Hadley said slowly, “but I don’t think I can take that much time off right now. Any chance of going after Christmas?”

“Well, the twins really want to be there for the holiday. A bunch of their friends are planning a big party and they don’t want to miss it.” Hadley could imagine the spark in her mother’s eyes on the other end of the phone. “And next year the girls will be in their debutante season, so we can’t possibly go then. This is really our only chance.”

Debutante season? “Sure, the debutante season,” Hadley said, biting back a sigh. “No problem.”

“Oh, and if you’re trying to think of something to get them, they’ve been absolutely crazed for those new Louis Vuitton bags, the ones with the cherries.”

Hadley looked at the pine covered mountains around her. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“Wonderful. Anyway, I should let you go—I know you’re busy. I’ll call you before we leave.”

“All right. Love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too, dear.”

And the line went silent, leaving Hadley with another unsettling reminder that when it came to the Stone girls, there were her mother’s twins and her father’s daughter. They shared the same wheat-colored hair and gray eyes, the same delicate features that Hadley often thought put her at a disadvantage in business. They’d grown up in the same household.

And yet not. Robert had taken command of Hadley’s life early. Perhaps it was only human nature that when Irene Stone finally gave birth to the twins, she’d made them hers. It became more apparent each time Hadley saw them that her mother and the twins inhabited an entirely different world than the one she lived in. Theirs revolved around shopping and hairstyles and parties, all the things Hadley had never had time for. All the things her mother loved.

And every time she talked with her mother, that world seemed farther and farther away.

Enough! It wasn’t a crisis. They had plans for Christmas and she was a grown woman with a job to get done.

Checking her directions, she turned onto the highway that led to the hotel—if you could call the pockmarked asphalt that threaded through even denser forest a highway.