Читать книгу The Delacourt Scandal - Sherryl Woods - Страница 8

“Bryce Delacourt is the most powerful, sanctimonious man in all of Texas, so, yes, if you can find a way to bring him down, by all means do it,” Griffin Carpenter said, his wrinkled face an inscrutable mask. Only the tell-tale blaze of excitement in his black eyes indicated to Maddie Kent the intensity of his passion for this particular story.

No one knew why Carpenter had it in for the power brokers of Texas, but he’d made it his life’s work to expose their foibles. In his late fifties now, he’d been described alternately as an ambitious crusader or a vengeful, mean-spirited man. Maddie didn’t care which he was or what his reasons were. Those were the words she had been waiting most of her life to hear, the chance she’d worked her butt off to get.

The Delacourts had ruined her family, and now they were finally going to pay. If there was so much as a hint of a scandal in their past, so much as a whiff of illegalities in their business dealings at Delacourt Oil, she would find it. And she would expose them for the heartless, rotten human beings they were behind their facade of generosity and family loyalty and perfection.

Her own passion for the hunt had been a long time building. She had been ten when her father had come home one day to announce that he’d been fired, cast aside because of a simple mistake that anyone could have made. As he told it, it had been nothing more than an accounting error that should have meant nothing to someone with the Delacourt wealth.

But Bryce Delacourt was a hard man, and so Frank Kent found himself out of work without a reference. He would never work as an accountant again, at least not for a company of any size or respectability. Delacourt had seen to that.

The humiliation of it had broken the man Maddie had adored. For five years, his self-esteem in tatters, he had moved from one dead-end job to another, never earning more than minimum wage. His family had suffered far more due to his increasing depression than because of the lack of income. The warm, generous man who’d been involved in every aspect of his children’s lives was gone, lost in lonely, self-imposed isolation and bitterness.

When Maddie was fifteen, her father committed suicide. He’d almost botched the attempt and had lain in a coma for two horrendous weeks before finally getting his wish and dying.

That final act of a sad and desperate man had all but destroyed the family, financially and emotionally. Maddie’s mother had retreated into her own private hell, aided by alcohol. Her brothers had turned into street thugs to get what they wanted. Only Maddie had used that defining moment to strengthen her resolve to succeed. She had vowed at her father’s grave that one day she would be in a position to make the Delacourts feel that same kind of pain.

Now, thanks to Griffin Carpenter, she had her chance. She didn’t care why Carpenter hated Bryce Delacourt or any of the others who fell victim to his paper’s venom. It was enough that the publisher’s agenda matched her own. Most newspapers in the state were in awe of the Delacourt wealth and power, but Carpenter had his own resources and a pit bull’s tenacity when it came to digging up dirt on the entrenched power brokers of the state.

Carpenter’s Dallas-based tabloid, Hard Truths, was a wealthy Texan’s worst nightmare. His reporters turned over rocks and crept through back alleys in search of scandal. More often than not, they found it, then took delight in sharing it with the public in the most colorful terms possible.

It was not the sort of journalism Maddie had trained for or respected. She’d attended one of the nation’s best journalism schools, taken her fair share of courses in media ethics and responsibility. And she intended to follow all of those rules with absolute diligence—once she had written this one exposé….

For now, though, she was happy to be Carpenter’s newest recruit, and she intended to be his best. In no time at all the Delacourts would be making headlines, and for once it wouldn’t be on the society or business pages. She planned to make them the talk of Texas, until they understood humiliation as intimately as her father had.

She gazed across the wide mahogany expanse of Griffin Carpenter’s desk, straight into eyes glinting with anticipation.

“I won’t let you down,” she vowed to her boss.

Then she mentally whispered the same words to the father she had lost so long ago.