Cuckoo (Kindred Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

in her importance, in her value to the corporation through the CEO. Without this job and with the man gone, the last part of Zara Bandini, corporate lackey, had died too. She’d been struggling with the loss of that part of her identity.
    “Zara!”
    Whirling around, she cast off her thoughts of Grant and the uncertainty of her future to smile at Julian who was striding toward her. “Hello,” she said when he came to a stop in front of her and laid a hand on her shoulder.
    “I’m so glad to have you back,” he said, giving her a pat then turning her body toward her office and walking at her side to accompany her inside. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that things are piling up.”
    He didn’t. She knew how the backlog mounted if she chose to go home early one night of the week. That she hadn’t been here for a month left her with no illusions. “I’ll delegate as much as I can. The team works efficiently so long as there’s someone driving them.”
    “And there’s no one better at that than you,” he said. “If you need anything signed at an executive level, bring it to me. I’ll act as liaison with the board. It’s not that they don’t trust you—”
    “Just that I’m beneath them,” Zara said, nodding and turning to her desk, which was just as she’d left it. With events at Sutcliffe’s compound and Grant’s vicious duplicity, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat at that workstation with nothing but CI business on her mind.
    “They want to check everything out before we make any executive decisions. We don’t want anything too drastic to change before the new owner comes in.”
    That piqued a different kind of interest, but she tried to subdue her vehemence in the face of Julian’s ignorance. “Have you found him? The new… owner?”
    “No,” he said. “Mr. McCormack had a brother, but pinning down his location is proving impossible. He had cousins too. I hadn’t realized he had so many living family members, he never talked about any of them.”
    Julian was obviously parroting what someone else had said because he had no close relationship with Grant that would afford him the chance to make such an observation. But Grant was known as a private man who kept his personal life away from work. That there were lawyers probing into his history and his family tree would mortify him, as it would Brodie. Picking up on the similarity between the brothers when she so often noticed their differences didn’t help to assuage her turmoil over Grant’s death.
    “You never know, it could be that he finds you,” she said and noted that she should talk to Brodie about asserting his authority over CI before any of the lawyers or board members delved too deep into what he and his family had been doing for the last twenty years.
    He smiled. “That would certainly save a lot of time and money,” Julian said, squeezing her shoulder. “Do you need anything? If it’s too difficult being here, we can find you somewhere else to work.”
    Again, she felt categorized as the grieving widow when that couldn’t be further from the truth. When she’d heard Grant’s body hit the floor, she’d feared it was Brodie and when she turned to see that it wasn’t, her prevailing emotion was relief. Horrified by such a hideous response to the death of a man she’d been close to for half a decade, she struggled with the nature of her own character and how it had developed since the night she met Timothy Sutcliffe. That was the night her life changed.
    “This place is home to me,” she said, glancing toward Grant’s office. “There’s work that has to be done and there’s nowhere else I’d rather do it.”
    Getting stuck in a broom closet with a laptop wouldn’t ease her confusion about where she fit in without her corporate identity. She had to sit down and wade into the mounds of work that would have been growing since she and Grant last walked out of here.
    If she kept her focus, the