The Billionaire and His Driver

CHAPTER ONE

TWO YEARS EARLIER

Coffee .

That was all she wanted in that moment. One sweet and smooth cup of piping-hot coffee in the privacy of her office before the madness of the day began.

She hardly slept a wink last night after that fiasco of a dinner date with Jeremy and how he still refused to go there. Three years of dating and still no ring? It was the story of her thirty years on the face of this earth. That high anticipation for dreams coming true or love affairs staying true that always managed to fizzle out into nothingness. But what was hurting her to her heart was that Jeremy was supposed to be different. What was scaring her to her soul was that she wasn’t getting any younger, and if it didn’t work out this time like all those other times then she would have to start all over once again. From scratch. Which was where she’d come from. Which would put her right back where she started from.

Her cell phone rang. It was sitting on her desk, so she leaned it up and looked at the Caller ID. It was Jeremy again, no doubt wondering why she walked out on his trifling butt last night. But what did he expect her to do? Sit through another I’m not ready to get married speech like he wasn’t almost thirty-five years old but was some teenager trying to decide whether or not to take her to the prom? Three years and he still wasn’t ready to fully commit to her? What were they doing? What was she doing when she knew she absolutely wanted a husband and children and didn’t want to be an old lady when she got started? That was her dream. It had always been her dream after her parents and siblings perished in that fire and she, as the family’s lone survivor, went to live with an aunt that didn’t give a damn about her. Who was always accusing her of eyeballing her various sorry-ass boyfriends. Who forced her to have to beat back those same boyfriends and their constant advances. Who caused her, at the ripe old age of thirteen, to say to hell with it and hit the road. She could do bad all by herself.

But her story didn’t end there. She didn’t do bad at all. She ended up in a shelter for wayward teens where she was thrilled to be away from the stress of living with her aunt, and she excelled there. Graduated high school and then graduated college. Made a name for herself in various non-profits around the county that helped people like she used to be. Now she was office manager of the largest charitable organization in Eugene, Oregon, the city where she attended college, and one of the largest in the pacific northwest. God be praised she made it, she felt, despite every obstacle possible placed in her way.

But, even so, all these years later, she still was the lone survivor.

She still went home all by herself.

Not that she had time to wallow in her past, or even in what happened last night with Jeremy. She didn’t. Didn’t even have time to drink a full cup of coffee. Two sips were all she was able to manage before a knock was heard at her door and then Wally Gilford, one of her most devoted field coordinators, came bouncing into her office with the latest disaster of the day: a major shipment gone missing.

Sabrina “Brina” Hawkins sat her coffee mug on the coaster as she stared her big brownish-green eyes at her coordinator. That was a new one on her. “What do you mean it’s missing?”

“It’s gone missing! A transport trailer that was supposed to be filled with supplies for the victims of those Medford fires never arrived at the destination.”

But Brina frowned. “How would you even know that?” In the not-for-profit charity they both worked for, it was the job of the field coordinator to find out the needs around the state and report those needs to his immediate supervisor. It was then his boss, the field supervisor, who approved the request and then submitted it to Brina who, as office manager, gave the final approval (or disapproval). Then, if approved, the field supervisor ensured that the approval was fulfilled. There was no role in that chain, after submittal of the need request, for a field coordinator.

But Wally, being the conscientious worker that he was, had a ready answer for that too. “I have contacts on this particular case because I used to work for a non-profit in Raleigh and the coordinator up there called and told me that Alan was giving them the runaround. Which made no sense.”

Alan Collier was Wally’s boss. “Why would be giving anybody the runaround?”

“I don’t know,” an exasperated Wally said. “But that’s what’s been happening. So I went to Alan personally and asked him what’s the hold up, and he told me there wasn’t a hold up whatsoever and to worry about my job, not his job. But we’re talking over a hundred thousand dollars in supplies, Brina. That much merchandise doesn’t just disappear. And this isn’t the first time it’s happened either. A few months back I heard from another field coordinator, who prefers to remain nameless, who told me that her request was approved too, but the shipment never arrived at that destination either.”

“You don’t have to give me her name.” Brina Hawkins was nobody’s snitch. “But who’s her field supervisor?”

“The same as mine. Alan Collier!”

Wally watched Brina as she rubbed her forehead. She was a good office manager, he thought, but he also harbored some resentment of her for taking a job he felt should by rights have gone to him. He made himself feel better by claiming she was a DEI hire, although he knew she had nearly six years’ more experience than he had in their field, but that was beside the point to Wally. He had friends who had far less experience than he had, and they had all advanced in their organizations. That was the point to him.

Brina was nobody’s fool. She knew Wally, though a great worker, was also an entitled prick who felt, by virtue of his skin tone, he should be her boss. She’d had to deal with that kind of mentality her whole career. It used to bother her. Used to piss her off. But now it was like water off a duck as far as she was concerned. And right now, she wasn’t thinking about Wally’s resentments or sense of superiority. She was thinking about that missing shipment and one of her field sups not doing his job. “Okay, Wally, thanks for letting me know. I’ll look into it.”

Wally smiled. “Thanks, Breen. That’s why I broke the chain of command and came straight to you. I know you’ll do something about it because Alan doesn’t even seem concerned about it. Like losing a hundred-thousand-dollars’ worth of supplies is no big deal to him.”

Brina nodded. It was odd to say the least. “You get back to work. I’ll look into it.”

Although she was cool about it, inwardly she was getting anxious. And as soon as Wally left her office, she tapped her mouse to wake it up, pulled up her approval logs on her desktop computer, logged in with her password, and searched the shipment Wally spoke of that she knew she personally approved.

But what struck her right away was that not only was there no chain of custody report that was required to be filed by Alan Collier as field supervisor, but her final approval letter wasn’t found either. She searched every possible database in their charity network, but it was nowhere to be found. She even dug deeper and found even more irregularities. She could recall at least four additional approvals she gave to Alan, but none of them were found either. What on earth was going on?

She immediately grabbed her iPad and went upstairs to the Office of the Executive Director: to her boss.

But he was as nonchalant with her as Alan Collier had been with Wally. Even after she told him how much money was involved, he just seemed to shrug his shoulders. Which made her double down with a sky-is-falling sense of concern. “If what I’m seeing is accurate, sir, and there’s no glitch in the system,” she stood in front of her boss’s desk and told him, “then we’re talking over two-and-a-half-million-dollars’ worth of missing money. Over two-and-a-half million dollars, sir.”

Steven McNamara nodded his head as he looked at the information in Accounting that she had pulled up on her iPad to present to him. But that was all that he did. “I’ll look into it,” he said, as he handed her back her iPad. It was the same line she had laid on Wally. But that was because Wally wasn’t in the chain of approval. But unlike Wally, she was the main link in that chain. Her name, her reputation, was on the line in that chain.

And when McNamara smiled and told her to have a nice rest of her day, as if she’d told him nothing unusual at all, something didn’t sit right with her. Did he not see the urgency? Or did he see it, but didn’t care the way Wally said Alan Collier didn’t care? Either way, she knew even then it was going to mean trouble for their charity. Or for her ! “Yes sir,” she said when he dismissed her, and walked out of his office.

But as the day wore on, she couldn’t get past the way he accepted such blatant discrepancies like it was nothing when they both knew it was monumental. And another thought kept coming to her mind: if her own boss didn’t care, what did that mean? That there wasn’t a discrepancy, which she knew it was? Or that the discrepancy was there, as was obvious the case, but that it wasn’t going to blowback on him? The next question, then, was who was it going to blowback on? Her ?

Before lunchtime she was calling Jeremy. He could be an asshole with his commitment phobia, but he was a very good lawyer.

He agreed to meet her at Starbucks.