“Good news,” my father announced, striding into my office like he still owned it. The older Alpha had scaled back from his micromanaging tendencies considerably ever since taking a new mate and adding a surprise baby to the family, and those days, he worked more in his home office than the one downtown. Nonetheless, I would find a way to live if I saw a bit less of him at work. Old habits died hard, especially when you were a self-made billionaire who’d created a vast corporate empire out of nothing.

“You remembered the importance of knocking before you enter a room?” I offered, setting aside the compliance reports I had been reading before the interruption.

“No,” he said flatly. He dropped a file on my desk, grinning the same way he always had when his kids were about to open a particularly sought-after Christmas present. “Remember Stover Electronics?”

Now that was a name I hadn’t heard in years. It was hard to forget when I’d known the Stover brothers most of my life. One of those relationships was more tumultuous than the others, and whenever I thought of Ellis, the shy, awkward kid who always ate alone and sat in the back of the class, I felt a pang of guilt. I’d been a different person then, and not a good one.

Before I’d met my late wife, I had been a selfish, arrogant prick who only cared about himself. What she’d seen in me then, I would never know, but she made me want to be a better man and she guided me with patience and grace until I was as close as I could get to the husband Janie deserved and the father I wanted to be to our daughter. She’d been gone for years, but she’d left her mark on me. Some days, knowing that I had to keep being the person she’d molded me into, if only for our daughter’s sake, was all that kept me going.

Some days, a name from the past made me realize just how far I’d come with Janie and just how far I had left to go without her. Ellis Stover’s name was a reminder of the deepest depths I’d sunk to before I hit rock bottom.

“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat when I realized my dad was giving me that look. The one my entire family had been giving me ever since Janie’s death. “They sell electronic parts to manufacturers. They were our tech wing’s biggest competitor on the east coast, outside of Silicon Valley.”

“Not anymore,” he said proudly.

“What happened? They go bankrupt or something?” I asked, opening the rundown in the file. As far as I could tell, the numbers were strong enough. Not great, perhaps, but there was nothing that indicated an immediate downward spiral.

“No, Martin Stover died.”

I stared blankly at him.

“Which is a tragedy, of course,” he added. I loved my father, but sometimes, he fit the soulless corporate stereotype a bit too well. Then, he’d turn into a giant teddy bear around his family and dispel all the notions the tabloids pushed about him. “But in the wake of that tragedy lies an opportunity to continue the proud legacy he built in a way that benefits his employees as well as our corporation.”

“Uh-huh. Nice save,” I snorted. “I thought he was leaving the business to his kids.”

“He did, but they’ve agreed to sell.” He hesitated. “Well, all but one.”

Please don’t say what I think you’re about to say… “Who?” I asked against my better judgment.

“Patrick and Brayden are on board, but Ellis is adamantly opposed. His brothers have agreed to part with their shares, but that would leave Ellis holding the majority shares, which makes the acquisition complicated, at best.”

“What do you expect me to do about it? I know nothing about tech shit.”

“No, but you know Ellis,” he said entreatingly. “You were in the same grade, weren’t you?”

“We didn’t really run with the same crowd,” I muttered. I’d always run with the asshole jocks while Ellis hadn’t really had a crowd at all, but there were some parts of my past that I preferred to keep there, even from my father. I’d never been as obsessed with his favor as my brother Gray was, and we butted heads far more than any of the others, but I still didn’t want him to see me as the person I’d been fourteen years earlier.

“Be that as it may, I’m sure you can convince him to see that the deal we’re offering is more than fair. You’re good with people. Take him to dinner, explain the terms, get him to sign the papers.”

If only it were that easy. I knew the only way I was getting out of it was by admitting that showing up in Ellis’s life after fourteen years was only going to guarantee that he refused to do business with us at all. And maybe that I’d end up with a glass of water in my face when I deserved so much worse.

Before I had the chance, dad’s phone rang. He answered it immediately, since he had an infant daughter and a newly pregnant mate at home. He’d gone from having us hound him constantly about the importance of carrying a cell phone at all to being glued to the thing. “Hello?” He paused and a grin eased across his face. “That’s wonderful news. Thanks.”

Something told me that wasn’t a call from Luis to announce that my baby sister had just taken her first steps. I awaited my fate as he hung up.

“That was Ellis’s secretary. He’s accepted your dinner invitation. You’re meeting at the new Japanese restaurant downtown tonight at seven.”

“Since when did I make a dinner invitation?” I challenged.

He gave me a look. “Just go and work your magic. It can’t do any harm.”

He left before I could tell him how incredibly wrong he was. Some walks down memory lane only ever wound up at a dead end, and this was one of them.