The Money Man Read online

  ALSO BY NANCY HERKNESS

  Second Glances series

  Second to None: A Novella

  Second Time Around

  Second Act

  Wager of Hearts series

  The CEO Buys In

  The All-Star Antes Up

  The VIP Doubles Down

  The Irishman’s Christmas Gamble: A Novella

  Whisper Horse novels

  Take Me Home

  Country Roads

  The Place I Belong

  A Down-Home Country Christmas: A Novella

  Stand-Alone novels

  A Bridge to Love

  Shower of Stars

  Music of the Night

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Nancy Herkness

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542000161

  ISBN-10: 1542000165

  Cover design by Eileen Carey

  Cover photography by Regina Wamba of MaeIDesign.com

  To Maria, Anh, and my whole amazing Montlake team:

  Thank you for making my books soar.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Alice Thurber was losing her mind—or at least the part of her mind that she used to add and subtract. She stared at the computer screen, willing the $3.37 discrepancy to resolve itself into perfect balance. But no matter how often she ran the numbers, her client, the Mane Attraction, still had a shortfall of $3.37 for the month of February.

  She felt a tremor of panic ripple through her, making her suck in a breath to calm herself. Never before in all the years she’d been a bookkeeper had she been unable to find the problem in a client’s books. Yet in the past six months, four of her clients had tiny errors that she could not account for.

  “Gosh darn it!” She shoved her rolling chair back from the desk in her newly redecorated home office. One of her two cats, Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, gave her a regal glare from his bed on the multilevel cat tree that stood beside her desk. As she started to pace between the matching cream-painted desk and credenza, his golden eyes closed again.

  A few months ago, the first discrepancy had shown up in the books of Sparkle, a special-occasion dress boutique. She’d combed through all the debits and credits but found no explanation. However, the owner had dismissed her concerns, assuring Alice that she didn’t care about a few dollars of shortfall. Alice had reluctantly let it go because she simply didn’t have time to go through every piece of paperwork.

  But it nagged at her pride. And at her need for control.

  The second discrepancy appeared the next month at Work It Out, the gym where her friend Dawn was a personal trainer. The gym owner dismissed the problem as someone forgetting to fill out the proper paperwork when they took money out of petty cash, but Alice couldn’t let it go so easily. Because now it wasn’t just her pride taking a hit. Her worldview was beginning to tilt.

  She’d chosen her career in bookkeeping for a reason: numbers were objective and reliable, unlike her parents. She could count on two and two always adding up to four. Until now . . . with her own clients.

  However, it wasn’t until Nowak Plumbing Supply showed a $4.12 shortfall that Alice began to freak out. Especially because the owner complained loudly. Of course, that was because Alice had talked his son into switching from paper ledgers to a computerized system and the older man didn’t trust computers.

  The panic swelled into her throat as she wondered if he was right.

  She tugged at the collar of her white cotton blouse as she felt the unpleasant sensation of being dragged back into the crazy unpredictability of her childhood, a life she had hated and that she had carefully constructed her adult career to avoid. Her stepfather’s fortunes had fluctuated so wildly that Alice never knew when she’d get pulled out of summer camp or ballet class for nonpayment of the bill. Her mother’s moods changed right along with their monetary status, so Alice also never knew what kind of parent she’d be dealing with at school pickup time. Alice had sought and found comfort in the predictable outcomes of algebra and geometry as a barrier to the constant zigzagging of her life.

  And now her beloved reliable numbers were becoming as untrustworthy as her parents.

  She bent over the long work surface and scanned through the pages of debits and credits, unable to believe her own calculations. Which made the panic rise up again, this time twisting her stomach into a knot.

  “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” she muttered, flipping back the long brown ponytail that had fallen over her shoulder.

  Of course, she’d double-checked with the banks to see if their records agreed with the monthly balances. They did. The same with the credit card companies. No obvious issues.

  She paced back to the computer and stared at it. Was it possible that the software was the problem? It was a relatively new package that several businesses had bought in the last six months or so. The program’s creator, Myron Barsky, had held a sales seminar at the local hotel, which Alice had attended as a service to her clients. She had been impressed with the software so when seven of her clients decided to purchase BalanceTrakR, she had no problem with that. In fact, she’d gone through the training webinars and set up the system for those clients.

  But the numbers were telling their own story once again. Seven clients were using the software. Only four had an accounting issue.

  That meant Alice was the problem.

  Now the panic began to close up her throat as she felt the foundation of her world crack under her feet. If she could no longer count on her skill with numbers, what could she count on?

  She pushed past the knot in her throat and tried to consider the situation with some calm. If there was a software problem, it should have a thread on the help forum for BalanceTrakR. Yesterday she had searched through all the questions and answers posted online. None touched on her problem.

  So, swallowing her shame, she had posted her problem on the support forum. No one had responded yet.

  Dropping down into her ergonomic desk chair, she typed in a more general search query, looking for bookkeeping advice. Maybe someone with a fresh perspective might find her problem.

  She clicked through several sponsored ads that offered nothing useful. The next entry was affiliated with the KRG Consulting Group, a powerhouse firm based in New York City but with a worldwide reputation. She couldn’t imagine what sort of help such an elite group had to offer a local bookkeeper. But her sanity was on the line.

  She slipped off her wire-rim glasses to rub her tired eyes before seating them back on her nose and clicking on the link. The tagline read: Are you a small business owner with a problem? We want to help—free of charge. The introduction went on to say
that KRG Consulting Group had started small too so they remembered the struggle. They had met with success and now offered to lend their fellow entrepreneurs a hand through their Small Business Initiative. All she had to do was fill out the online form and KRG would be in touch.

  “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” Alice said to Sylvester, who had leaped off the cat tree to walk across her keyboard. She stroked his sleek black head as she stared at the website.

  It wasn’t a marketing ploy to draw in new customers, since no small business owner would be able to afford KRG’s services. So either it was genuine—in which case she might end up looking like an incompetent idiot when one of their genius consultants took three minutes to figure out what she was doing wrong—or they would just ignore her request because it was so far beneath their high-level abilities.

  She weighed the two possibilities for a moment before gently setting Sylvester on the floor and starting to type.

  Derek Killion sat down at the conference table and braced himself as his partner Tully Gibson strolled over, his big, athletic frame encased in a charcoal suit.

  “Good job on bringing in the Argon International assignment, partner,” Tully said, giving Derek a hard congratulatory thump on the shoulder before heading for his usual chair at the end of the table.

  Derek rolled his abused shoulder under his suit jacket, while Tully sat down and pulled off his handstitched Lucchese boots before propping his sock-covered feet on the table. He’d once put his boots on the expensive zebrawood surface, but Derek had put a stop to that by threatening to deface them with a permanent black marker.

  Tully tilted the chrome-and-leather chair back, making it creak under his solid muscles. “That’s quite a coup for KRG, beating out two of the biggest accounting firms in the world, but you have your work cut out for you.”

  “It’s going to entail a lot of travel too. I’m heading for Asia in two weeks to hit their Tokyo and Singapore offices,” Derek said. Not because the project required his physical presence in those places but because top Argon management wanted to see the face of the founding partner who’d promised them his special attention in order to win their business.

  He’d gone after the Argon International project with every resource at his command because it was a huge feather in the cap of KRG Consulting. A lot of major corporate players had set their sights on the Argon business so it was a triumph when he’d won it, capturing a revenue stream that would make this a banner year for the firm. However, the sense of accomplishment was fading under the weight of the short deadlines and the complexity of the task.

  The third KRG partner, Leland Rockwell, strolled in, wearing his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, and slid his laptop onto the table. “I hear we are taking on the foreign-currency hedging issues of Argon International, thanks to Derek’s brilliant financial plotting. Nice work. We should have a celebratory dinner since that’s going to bring in a ton of money.”

  “I wish I had the time,” Derek said. “I’ll take a rain check for when we complete the project.” The truth was that he didn’t feel like celebrating. Neither the money nor the prestige seemed all that meaningful in the face of the tedious work and travel that came with it. What the hell was wrong with him? He’d never shied away from a big job before.

  “Too bad,” Leland said, flipping open his laptop and adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses. “I guess that means you won’t be able to enjoy the first hit on another project of yours.”

  Leland swiped across his screen a couple of times and the wall display lit up. Derek recognized the KRG Small Business Initiative header and all the gratification he should have felt about Argon surged through him.

  The SBI had been his idea, born of his dissatisfaction with the constant emphasis on bringing in the big corporate accounts like Argon International. Of course, KRG Consulting needed those—he couldn’t ignore that because a lot of people’s livelihoods depended on their profitability—but Derek remembered the company’s roots, the years of struggling to get traction in a highly competitive market. Without the kindness of a few mentors who had believed in three young MBAs with degrees on which the ink had barely dried, KRG would have failed. Derek wanted to pay it forward.

  “It only took four days for someone to find us,” he said, leaning toward the screen as anticipation focused his interest. “Who is it?”

  “It’s from a bookkeeper in New Jersey,” Leland said, scrolling down the screen with his long, nimble fingers. “She handles seven clients on the same accounting software. She recently noticed that four of them have small shortfalls that she can’t account for. Seems pretty straightforward, so I’ll handle it while you focus on Argon.”

  Frustration made Derek drum his fingers on the tabletop. “How long could it take me? Fifteen minutes?”

  “You could probably do it in your sleep, Killion,” Tully said. “But you’re going to need all your shut-eye to stay sharp for Argon. Let Leland handle it.”

  “The SBI was my idea and accounting is my area of expertise,” Derek said. “I want first crack at it.”

  His partners weren’t opposed to the SBI, but they weren’t committed to it in the same way that he was.

  “You just turned down a celebration dinner,” Tully pointed out. “Why do you have time for this?”

  Derek shrugged. “Consider it a burnt offering to the business gods who brought us Argon. We should never forget to be grateful for our good luck.”

  Tully snorted. “You and your team worked your asses off to develop the best possible proposal for Argon. There was no luck involved.”

  Derek shot a wry glance at his partner. “There’s always luck involved. Honestly, though, I look forward to dealing with a problem that I can solve with just my wits and a calculator.”

  At that, Leland looked up from his screen, his thin, intelligent face lit with wry amusement. “Alice Thurber seems pretty sharp from her summary of the problem. The answer might be harder to find than you think.”

  Just as Alice was pouring hot water through the loose-leaf tea in her bone china teapot, her cell phone tinkled its minuet ringtone. She glanced at the caller ID and groaned.

  She was very particular about how long her tea steeped, four and a half minutes being optimum, but this was a call she needed to take. “Thurber Bookkeeping.”

  “I’m calling for Derek Killion of the KRG Consulting Group,” a woman’s smooth voice said. “Is this Ms. Alice Thurber?”

  “Yes, it is.” Alice tried to sound confident and professional.

  “Hold for Mr. Killion, please.”

  A prickle of surprise and anxiety ran through Alice. Derek Killion was the K in KRG. She hadn’t expected the big guns to handle her little problem.

  “Ms. Thurber, this is Derek Killion.” A mellifluous baritone flowed into her ear. “We received your request for assistance through our Small Business Initiative, so I’m getting in touch to see how I may help you.”

  “That’s great . . . I mean, I appreciate it,” she stuttered. His voice was so perfectly modulated that little tingles danced through her ear.

  “I’ve read your description of the problem and believe I can help you. Excellent presentation, by the way. If I sign a confidentiality agreement, would you be willing to share your clients’ books with me via computer?” he said. “I assure you that our cybersecurity is excellent. Also, I will, of course, help you confirm that I am really who I say I am before you send such sensitive information.”

  “I can imagine that your security is top notch,” Alice said. One of the KRG partners, Leland Rockwell, was famous for his expertise in defending against hackers. He was rumored to have helped the US government more than a few times. “I’m glad you understand my need to protect my clients by checking on your identity.” Of course, Derek Killion handled corporate information that was infinitely more valuable than her clients’ so he would expect her to check up on him. However, his offer still impressed her.

  “Once you’ve ver
ified my identity, I’ll email you the instructions on how to give us access.”

  He seemed to be about to end the call, which surprised Alice. She hurried to speak. “I think you should know that every month I do one client’s books by hand and then compare it to the software’s balances. Once I caught the second discrepancy, I began checking all the balances by hand. That’s how I discovered the next two.”

  “I’m impressed by your diligence on your clients’ behalf.” His tone held a touch of impatience.

  “My clients may be small but I owe them perfectly balanced books.” Alice wanted him to know that she took pride in her work, even if she was a small-town bookkeeper. “Anything less is unacceptable to me.”

  “An admirable attitude,” Derek said.

  Alice was incredulous when he didn’t ask any questions. “Would you like to know where I found the discrepancies?”

  “No, I prefer to come at the issue with fresh eyes,” he said, his tone downright brusque now. “I’ll be in touch when I’ve found the problem. Goodbye, Ms. Thurber.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Killion.” But he had already disconnected.

  Irritated by his abrupt behavior, Alice glanced at the time. The conversation had taken under two minutes because he assumed he could find the solution without any input from her. Either he believed she was incompetent or he had a high opinion of his own abilities.

  However, her annoyance abated slightly when she realized that Derek Killion’s dismissive attitude meant that her tea would still be drinkable.

  After she’d poured milk into her mug and added the tea and sugar, she carried it to her desk. Moving her gray tabby cat, Audley, the Earl of Worth, off her keyboard, she ran a search on Derek Killion. When an array of photos—mostly from feature articles in business magazines—came up on her screen, she gasped.

  The consultant looked like one of her fantasy Regency dukes from her favorite romance novels, only in a business suit. It wasn’t just his cleft chin or razor-sharp cheekbones. He projected that bone-deep confidence that only spectacular success—or generations of aristocracy—could imbue a man with. The tilt of his head stated that he had conquered the world, and his blond-streaked brown hair waved away from his forehead with a gloss and thickness that spoke of generations of good DNA.