She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife (Natasha and Chase) novel Chapter 134

(Bauer)

My lawyers are almost too good.

I’m watching them on the seventy-inch screen in my office.

Three of them in dark suits at a podium downtown, taking turns explaining to the assembled press why Natasha Warren is, in carefully chosen synonyms, a corrupt and conflicted little woman in over her head.

It’s a beautiful piece of work.

I only gave them forty-eight hours to put this filing together and they did a brilliant job.

They have insinuated, without ever quite saying it, that she’s spent six months running interference for her billionaire husband while pretending to be impartial.

And that after I insisted she remain part of the project because I trust her.

I asked them for ammunition. They’ve given me a missile.

Now it’s up to me to save her.

I did not pay them to win. I paid them to wound.

I’ll be the one to pull her out of the path of enemy fire.

I watch Henderson take another question.

He looks regretful. He looks measured.

He says the word fiduciary eleven times in ninety seconds, which has to be some kind of record.

The damage is already done.

By lunchtime every financial publication on two coasts will have her name in a headline next to the word fraud.

By tomorrow morning the business contacts she's spent her career cultivating will have started, very politely, to back away.

By the end of the week, she’ll be toxic in every conference room in California except, conveniently, mine.

That part is excellent.

What is less excellent is that my lawyers have made themselves the heroes of this story when the hero is supposed to be me.

Henderson is delivering his closing now. It is our duty to protect our client's interests.

I almost admire him for it. Then I pick up the phone.

"Get me Henderson the second he’s done prancing in front of the press. And get my communications team in here. Schedule a press conference in ninety minutes. In front of the building."

"Mr. Bauer, that’s-"

"Ninety minutes, Theresa."

She’s too professional to argue. I do love that about her.

By twelve thirty I’m on the front steps of my own building, in front of a very respectable cluster of cameras.

There’s a single sheet of paper on the lectern that I don’t need, because I know what I’m going to say.

I take a long, regretful breath.

I look like a man who’s just learned something disappointing about his own household.

"Good afternoon. I want to address the filing made by my legal counsel earlier this week regarding Mrs Natasha Warren and the ongoing Bauer-Warren merger negotiations."

Pause. Adjust. Look pained.

"I want to be unambiguously clear. I was not consulted on the personal-liability portion of that motion. I learned of it the same way all of you did.”

I take beat to let that sink in.

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