White Knight Husband: Chapter 2

Ishrugged out of my overcoat and handed it to a member of staff before I made my way to the drawing room of my father’s cavernous mansion. The scent of leather, firewood, and the faint metallic tang of generational expectations wafted through the air of my family home, almost overpowering the memories of the strikingly beautiful woman I’d just met.

It wasn’t often someone really grabbed my attention just because of their appearance, but she really had been something else entirely.

“Shocking,” Nate said when I walked into the drawing room, cutting off my thoughts of her. “You’re early.”

I blinked the world back into focus, seeing Nate already nursing a scotch while Will, one of the twins, was sprawled across a sofa, flipping through something on his phone.

“It was a slow day,” I replied, loosening my tie. “Try not to sound too surprised. It has been known to happen on occasion.”

Fridays were light by design. Technically, it was only a half-day for me, though it was really only a retreat from the office to deal with the endless responsibilities of being human more than actual time off.

Tonight, that meant an impromptu dinner with my brothers and my father, who had been shockingly cool for the last few months. Nate, however, snorted through a laugh and then rose to pour me a drink.

“On occasion? Like what? Give me one example of a time when, in the last year, you were early to anything.”

“Fuck,” I muttered when absolutely nothing came to mind. “You might have me there.”

He smirked. “Exactly.”

As he strode over to the bar in the corner, I dropped down on the couch opposite Will, who looked up and sent me a bored grin. “Any idea if today is the day things go back to normal?”

I laughed. “You mean Dad threatening us or picking a fight? I don’t know, but I kind of wish it would just happen already.”

These last holidays had even come and gone without anyone getting disowned, stabbed, or thrown off the roof. Metaphorically speaking, of course. But the point was that Dad hadn’t once tried to strongarm us into anything by using our inheritances against us.

Theo, our youngest brother, had brought Zach’s secretary—who was also his very obvious crush—to our Christmas Eve dinner just to get under Zach’s skin, but that had been about the worst of it. A real fucking feat, if you know this family.

Even Charlotte and Trent had breezed through before jetting back to Texas, where snow was apparently rare. January, as always, had meant a return to business as usual, and while I’d actually looked forward to it, for the first time in my tenure as CEO, things felt strangely settled. Calm. Too calm.

God help me, but I think I’m actually bored. That always gets me into trouble.

And my father had noticed, but he still hadn’t brought up marriage again despite obviously knowing I finally had a minute for something other than work every now and then. To my mind, that could only mean one of two things—either he’d finally dropped the subject or he was planning something.

If there was anything more dangerous than my father talking about arranged marriages, it was my father not talking about arranged marriages. Frankly, I didn’t love the odds.

Zach arrived a few minutes later, his hair mussed from the wind and his coat dusted with snow. He kicked off his boots with all the grace of a toddler and headed straight torward the bar. “Does anyone know if Aunt CC body-snatched Dad with this ‘family dinners on a Friday night’ bullshit?”

“Bad day?” I asked when he blew past me. “It’s not bullshit, per se. It’s just weird.”

“Exactly,” he said flatly. “My day was fine, but my evening is going to involve buying a snowmobile just to get home.”

“That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable idea today,” I said.

Zach reached the bar, grabbed a glass, and held it out for Nate to pour him a generous drink. “Yeah, but once I’ve got it, I can use it in the Loop.”

“Jesus,” Nate muttered, passing me my drink on his way to the door. “Dad said seven p.m. sharp. We’d better go sit down, but you are not using a snowmobile in the Loop, Zachary Edward Westwood.”

Zach scrunched his nose up, reminding me exactly of what he used to look like twenty-five years ago when he’d been only three. “Says who?”

“Says me,” I said. We strode down the hall and took our seats around the long table in the dining room. “Trust me, I understand the urge. I had to take a cab out here tonight, but I’m not going to be able to find a lawyer willing to represent you for mowing down pedestrians on a snowmobile in a commercial district.”

Zach sighed, but then Dad walked in and he dropped it. Our father, Douglas Westwood, did not take kindly to antics of any kind. Even joking about them was apparently unbecoming of a family like ours.

“Boys,” Dad said as he took his seat, still as unnervingly smiley as he had been these last couple months. “Thank you all for being here. How are you? Everybody have a good day?”

Normally, dinner was a no-business zone, but Zach wasted no time violating the rule as soon as Dad asked the question. “Actually, I didn’t have a particularly good day, but it’s because of an interesting acquisition I wanted to talk to you guys about.”

“An interesting acquisition.” Jesse, the other twin, smirked as he looked around the table. “Now there’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one.”

“What makes it so interesting?” I asked Zach, not about to get into the inevitable argument with Jesse about why we had a passion for what we did right now.

Zach shrugged. “Okay, maybe interesting was the wrong word, but it’s kind of painful for me and it’s probably going to be a major conflict of interest, so if we do try to acquire the company, someone else may have to take the lead. I doubt I’ll be able to.”

“Well, that narrows it down to everything you’ve ever said,” Nate replied. “Is it another bar you want to buy because the owner gave you a free drink?”

I chuckled at Nate but didn’t look away from Zach. He didn’t seem to be joking this time. “How can an acquisition possibly be painful? That’s what you do for a living, little brother.”

Zach rolled his eyes at Nate. “This is serious.”

“So was that bar,” he said, deadpan.

Will snorted into his glass, but Zach kept going, glancing mostly between Dad and me. “Colin Thayer called me today.”

As soon as Zach said the name, Nate frowned, all traces of humor vanishing from his features. “Colin Thayer, as in Thayer Steelworks?”

“Yep,” Zach sighed.

I leaned back, my interest definitely piqued. Thayer Steelworks was a generational Chicago empire. One that had nearly imploded five years ago during a scandal so nuclear, it had made Enron look polite. Their entire executive team had been fired and the board ran the company while the CEO, Colin’s father, had gone to trial.

He’d been convicted too. As far as I knew, he was still in prison.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So what did Colin say? And what’s his role in the company? If you’re bringing him up in the context of acquisitions, I’m assuming he’s got some sort of say around there?”

“Yeah, he’s their CFO,” Zach said.

I tried not to visibly recoil. “He’s twenty-six.”

“Exactly,” Nate said. “That’s insane.”

“You’re thirty-two,” Zach reminded him. “And our CFO.”

“Yes,” Nate said coolly. “The difference is that I know what I’m doing.”

“Hear, hear.” Jesse lifted his glass. “To self-awareness. And modesty.”

“I’ll bite, though.” Nate kept his attention on Zach. “What’s going on over there?”

Zach let out a harsh exhale, grimacing. He took a long sip of his scotch before he finally gave us a breakdown of their conversation. “According to Colin, their COO and CEO hate each other. There’s a lot of infighting. The CEO is, and I quote, ‘a moron.’ The board is panicking. Their fourth quarter was fiscally catastrophic and Q1 will be worse. Investors are pulling out left and right.”

“So it’s dying,” I summed up.

“It’s bleeding out,” Zach corrected. “Colin wants to sell before it flatlines and takes them all with it.”

“Why is it a conflict of interest for you?” Nate asked as I started letting the information settle.

Zach winced. “Colin and I are friends. We play pickup beer league hockey together a couple times a month.”

Nate rubbed his jaw, nodding but not saying anything else. As our food was served, Jesse and Will finally turned the conversation to something other than work, but as we ate, the gears in my head were turning. Puzzles like this were my version of comfort food—messy, fraught, high-stakes comfort food, but still.

From across the table, Nate’s eyes met mine and I knew we were thinking the same thing. This was a huge opportunity, but it was definitely a gamble.

Jesse and Will finally stopped bantering back and forth about the pros and cons of Zach’s snowmobile plan, but Zach himself was watching Nate and me, looking at us like he’d just dropped a grenade in the middle of the table and was now politely hoping someone else would pick it up before it exploded.

His eyes flicked between me, Nate, and our father. After thinking it over for another beat, I finally nodded. “Okay, so we offer to acquire.”

Zach exhaled, clearly relieved, but Nate did the opposite, inhaling sharply and rubbing one of his temples. “Whoa there, cowboy. We need to run the numbers before we offer anything. Thayer operates a four-billion-dollar enterprise. Even with that slip on their Q4 report.”

“Maybe five years ago,” I argued. “Before the public meltdown, the trial, the executive purge, and the fact that investors have been stampeding for the exits like the place is on fire.”

He didn’t disagree. Which meant I was right, but the truth was that even with Westwood and Sons’ money, buying out a billion-dollar company wasn’t something we could just do whenever we got bored on a Friday night.

Investing heavily, however, enough to wedge one of us onto their board and to stabilize them, redirect them, and quietly acquire the whole damn thing over time?

That was doable.

“Call Colin,” I told Zach, rising from the table once I was done with my steak. “Get a dinner together.”

Zach nodded like he’d been waiting for permission to breathe. “I’ll get it done.”

“Let me know when you have,” I said, then left the dining room and headed down the hallway toward my father’s study, the place where every uncomfortable conversation in my life had taken place.

I didn’t have to wait long for him to arrive. Douglas Westwood had a way of materializing silently, like a ghost who paid taxes and owned seven thousand-dollar pairs of shoes. He closed the door behind him, his head cocked with curiosity.

“Are you in here because you actually wanted to speak to me or did you just need someplace to think about everything Zachary brought to the table tonight?”

“Both,” I said. “While we’re here, we might as well get on with it, though. I know you were going to drag me in here at some point tonight anyway, so let’s just get to it.”

“Get to what?” he asked as he sat down behind his desk, blue eyes much too blank for my liking. It was unnerving. “I did want to pull you aside for a minute, but you beat me to it, so why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

“Who exactly is it you want me to marry? An Astor? A Kennedy cousin? Some obscure European princess looking to upgrade? Just tell me when and where to sign. I’m bored of waiting.”

Douglas blinked rapidly. “I didn’t think you’d bend so easily.”

“I’m not bending. I’m trying to get ahead of the migraine.”

He stood up and started pacing, his hands behind his back, thinking deeply in a way that made me suspicious. When Dad thought like this, it almost always led to more paperwork for me.

“Speaking of the Thayers,” he finally said, still not really looking at me. “I knew Court well. Unfortunately.”

I frowned. “What does Court Thayer have to do with you finding me a wife?”

“He’s got a bunch of kids. I believe he has a daughter, if I’m remembering correctly. But if my memory serves, they’re all young. Teenagers, I think.”

I rubbed a hand over my face. “Great. So this has got absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Who is it actually going to be, Dad?”

My father waved me off like he didn’t have time for this right now, but these last few months, before his sudden silence on the matter, marrying us off had been the only thing on his mind. “Forget about that. Tell Zach to host the dinner with the Thayer boy here. I haven’t seen the family in years. Court was the reason for that.”

He didn’t elaborate, but he also didn’t really have to. There was always history with the old-money set—alliances, betrayals, favors, or debt. Douglas didn’t easily forget about either side of any ledger, but when he didn’t say anything else, I left him to brood and headed back to the foyer to grab my coat.

Nate was already shrugging into his, a scarf wrapped carelessly around his neck. He shot me a worried glance as I strode toward him. “Did he set you up?”

“No.” I pushed open the heavy front doors. “He’s being weird about it, which is new. I expected him to harass me all through the holidays.”

We stepped out into the winter storm, snowflakes swirling under the streetlights down the long drive. A taxi splashed by, and the sight made me think of the woman from earlier. She’d yelled at that driver like she’d been appointed judge, jury, and executioner of Chicago traffic violations.

Weirdly, I found myself smiling without even meaning to. “I met the craziest woman today.”

We started walking toward his place. Nate glanced at me, his chin tucked into his coat. “Craziest, huh? Like she wore her shoes as a hat?”

I chuckled. “She screamed at a cab driver trying to bully his way into traffic and probably made him cry. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

He nodded appreciatively. “You get a name? Or a date?”

“Nope.”

Nate snorted. “You should’ve asked. She probably would’ve made you the perfect wife. Fiery enough that you wouldn’t have gotten bored for at least a month.”

I laughed. “What makes you think I didn’t ask for her name? She just wouldn’t tell me.”

When we reached his building, I hung back at the curb, waving down a cab to take me back to my place. Nate’s eyebrows hiked up before he chuckled. “Well, that’s very on-brand for you. You finally meet a woman who intrigues you and immediately let her slip away.”

The cab slowed to a stop beside me. I flipped Nate off and slid into the backseat. Once I was alone again, I couldn’t stop seeing her, furious and fearless. A human firecracker ready to detonate at anyone dumb enough to test her patience.

She’d made something in my blood spark for the first time in a very long time, and now that dinner was over with, I felt a pinch of disappointment that I’d let her get lost in the sea of people in Chicago, another face I’d forget in a few weeks.

But damn, I’d never forget watching her tear into that driver like he’d killed a kitten in front of her. Honestly, it had kind of turned me on.

The cab pulled away from Nate’s and I dropped my head back against the seat, watching the lights blur past the window and silently cursing myself for letting her slip away—to quote my brother.

She really had intrigued me. It was just too fucking bad that the odds of ever running into her again in a city the size of this one were practically zero.

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