Quinlan: Foster’s Pride – Lion Shapeshifter Romance (Foster's Pride Book 3) Kathi Barton (early reader chapter books TXT) 📖

She was laughing as she walked away from him. Pulling out his phone, he called Robby to let him know what was going on. The man thought it was great that the two of them were getting away and offered them his home in Florida. Taking him up on the house, Quin made arrangements to fly there and have some fun. Robby was going to stock the place, whatever that meant to the older man. Not that it mattered. They’d be away, having fun, and no one would know where they were. At least until they came back.

Chapter 5

They flirted from the time they left the house to when they arrived at the airport. It had started out that her dad was going to keep an eye on the house for them, but in the end, they’d gotten Cass to do it. Rogue sort of hated to leave her dad when he’d only just arrived, but he told her that if he was given a house to use on the beach, he’d have left her too. Laughing, he also told her he and Lexi were going to move closer to her and Lily.

“I’ve missed a great deal, and I’d like to make up for lost time.” She told him she thought them moving here would be a good start. “I’ve been talking to your sister a great deal too. She told me you had a long conversation with her.”

“Not so long. But over the course of the years. She just needed to step back and look at the whole picture.” Dad told her he was glad she’d done that. “I didn’t do it for you, Dad, but for her. I was afraid she’d get down the road, and it would be too late for her. She would be the one that carried the guilt. But I’m ever so happy the family is together again.”

The check came just as they were leaving for the airport. Calling her sister and telling her to get her ass over to her house brought her over, but she was spitting mad when she got there, telling Rogue that she was in the middle of making her first batch of jelly when she’d called. All Rogue did was hand her the large envelope the courier had brought. When she glared at her several times as she tore it open, Rogue couldn’t help but laugh at her.

“You’re so going to regret looking at me like this when you see what is in there.” Lily told her she doubted it. “All right. We’ll see.”

It was a good thing Quin had walked behind her when she pulled out the check. While she didn’t know how much it was, Rogue did know it was more than a million dollars. The money hadn’t been cashed in since Mark had died. When Lily was sat down on the chair, she asked her if this was a joke.

“You know me better than that. I’d never do anything so mean like that to you.” Lily handed the check to her. After looking at it, she handed it back. “This should be enough to keep you going until the trial is over, I think.”

“I should hope so. It’s for seven million dollars. Where the hell am I going to cash that size of a check? Do banks even have that much money?” She thought about it. “I wonder if I could have it all in ones. That way, I could have a nice bath in it.”

“You’d have so many papercuts you’d so regret that. But seriously, you need to get with Cass. He’s going to be the one getting this settled up for you and the kids. I’d talk to him about putting the money in a secure bank, one that Missy cannot touch.” Rogue told Lily where the money had come from. “Mark took good care of you. So you could take good care of his children.”

“They had to have my permission to have his body exhumed. I gave it, but then I was told it wasn’t necessary. That someone had confessed to killing Mark. I was supposed to talk to Cass about it yesterday, but I got sidetracked with one of the kids.” She told her what she knew. “Why would anyone kill him? Why would Sampson want to kill one of the nicest people there ever was?”

“Mark was planning to leave the company, as I’m sure you already knew.” Lily told her he was going to be spending more time with her and the kids. They were going to have more. “I thought you would have known. But it was Mark’s right to do so. He owned a part of the company too. Also, since he’d been there for so long, he wasn’t under any kind of non-compete contract to make sure he didn’t work for anyone in the same industry again. Sampson was afraid that once he started working on the same kind of programs his company was involved in, they’d find out that Mark was the only one that had done the work. The rest of them were hanging onto his success.” Lily was crying a little as she explained to her about how he’d been slowly poisoning him. “Then when that didn’t work as quickly as he’d hoped, Sampson hired someone to kill him. It just so happened that it was in a store where others were killed as well. Rather than face the death penalty, once the Feds told him about having the body exhumed, Sampson left a confession, then killed himself. You will be getting insurance money from that, as well as any and all shares that Sampson had.”

“So much death. All Mark and I wanted to do was to have our own family and spend as much time as we could with them. We had made so many plans.” Rogue hugged Lily and told her she’d be able to carry through on those plans for him.