“I DON’T NEED a damn appointment! I’m his sister, you cretin.” The sharp American accent and strident tone of Gracia’s voice reached Basilio through his partially closed office door.
The heavy door opened forcefully, slamming back against the rich paneling of his wall, but surprisingly, his administrative assistant made it into the office a step ahead of Basilio’s sister. “Sir, I’m sorry.” The distress at not holding her post was clear in his admin’s tone. “She refused to even wait for me to ascertain if you were still on your conference call.”
Gracia came storming around his admin at the same time as his executive assistant came rushing in from her annex office.
“What is going on in here?” Her hair in a severe chignon, her navy business suit immaculate, his fifty-year-old executive assistant could do freezing aristocratic disapproval better than even Basilio’s mother, who was actually the daughter of a count.
His admin immediately began apologizing again as he stood from his desk, giving his sister a look that would have made Basilio’s mother proud. Gracia halted in her approach to his desk, her annoyed expression morphing to one of consternation.
She gave the EA a moderately polite look before looking at Basilio with wariness. “It is a family emergency.”
Basilio merely waited in silence for more information.
His executive assistant wasn’t so patient. “I see, and there was no time for you to call and apprise us of your imminent arrival so we could clear your brother’s schedule on your drive from the airport?” Camila Lopez asked with clear censure.
Gracia looked between Basilio and his EA, her cheeks going pink. “I wasn’t thinking of calling. Only getting here.”
“And if Señor Perez had been away from the office?” Camila pressed with a single raised, perfectly shaped black eyebrow.
“I didn’t think of that.”
As amusing as he found his sister’s interaction with his executive assistant, Basilio did not have time for the entertainment. He did, in fact, have a very busy day.
“Thank you for your assistance and I will need the next thirty minutes for Gracia,” he said to both his admin and Camila. “See that we are not disturbed.”
“Of course, señor,” Camila said to him with just the right amount of deference before offering his sister a look that said clearly, she wasn’t worried about someone else interrupting.
Once the other two women had left his office, both doors through which they’d gone closed firmly behind them, Basilio indicated one of the chairs facing his desk. “Sit down, Gracia, and tell me what has you forcing your way past my admin.”
Gracia sank into the seat with more grace than her behavior had shown so far. “It really is a family emergency, Baz.”
For the family that so rarely remembered he was a member?
“Explain,” he demanded as he settled back into his own chair.
Gracia frowned at his tone. “You remember when that awful teenager hit little Jamie with her car?”
“I am unlikely to forget.” Five years before, his then four-year-old nephew had spent two weeks in a coma after being hit by a car while on an outing with his mother.
“Well, apparently, she changed her name and moved away from Southern California.”
“Unsurprising.” While Basilio had been in Spain at the time, saving his father’s company from bankruptcy, he knew that Miranda Weber had been vilified in the broadcast media and even worse on all the social media outlets.
“Yes, well. Some idiotic reporter found out who she is and is resurrecting the story.”
And this was the family emergency that she needed Basilio’s help with? When usually both Carlos and Gracia were happy to forget they were half siblings most of the time.
Putting aside his own sense of cynicism about their definition of family, Basilio said, “I can see where that would be emotionally difficult for Carlos and Tiffany.”
“Yes. It’s awful! And this time some fly-by-night morning gossip show wants to interview the girl. She’s all set to give them her side of the story.”
“She’s not a girl any longer, surely.” Miranda had been nineteen five years ago.
“Woman, then,” Gracia said dismissively. “She’ll go on television and lie. About our family!”
“Surely Carlos has PR people who can handle this.” Not to mention lawyers. If the woman lied in a public forum, they could bring a civil suit.
“You know he prefers you call him Carl.”
Yes, because it was less Spanish, letting him forget he ever had a father named Armand Perez. “That is what you want to discuss now?” Basilio asked, his voice dry.
“No, of course not.” Gracia wrung her hands. “It’s just you have to do something!”
“What do you imagine I can do that Carl and Tiffany cannot? They are not exactly without resources.” Carlos’s wife came from an old and wealthy East Coast family.
Basilio’s brother ran his stepfather’s business, one of respectable enough size to have public relations people on retainer. While Perez Holdings was much bigger and more successful now, that had not always been the case.
“She had a restraining order taken out against both Carl and Tiffany. It includes any representative working for, or on retainer from, them.”
“How did she manage that?” Basilio wondered aloud.
“It’s insane, I know.”
That was not what Basilio had meant. For Miranda Weber to obtain such a thing, serious threats had to have been made. Cursed with a deep-seated sense of entitlement, his brother could be a hothead, as well. Carlos had never had to save a company, or put the hours into shoring up his family’s name in the international community as Basilio had done. When their father split with Carlos and Gracia’s mother, she’d remarried quickly and both of Basilio’s older siblings had embraced their new American family wholeheartedly, taking their stepfather’s last name and rejecting their Spanish heritage for their American mother’s way of life.
While Basilio was not sure he could blame Carlos, considering the current circumstances, clearly the older man’s temper and certainty he could do as he pleased had cost him access to Miranda.
When Basilio didn’t say anything right away, Gracia added, “I think it might have been her brother-in-law or something.”
“She