Read Leave It to Cleavage for Free Online Page B

Carly could hear the knocking of her knees.
    “This company belongs to the Ballantyne family. And I am a Ballantyne. Tom,” she paused for a moment, surprised by how strange his name was starting to feel on her lips, “is not here.” She swallowed but didn’t look away. “And he may not be here for a while.”
    She saw the bookkeeper blanch and heard Carly gasp again and imagined their reaction if she just went ahead and blurted out the truth.
She’d
undoubtedly feel better for a good five seconds or so, right up until the moment when they realized she was all that was standing between them and joblessness and the panic began to spread.
    “I just had an, um, E-mail from Tom a few minutes ago. He’s leaving for,” she wracked her brain for the name of the town she’d looked up at dawn, the one about five hours farther inland, “Guandong, and he’s asked me to keep an eye on things until he gets back.”
    “But I e-mailed him and heard nothing. I . . .”
    Miranda raised an eyebrow at the bookkeeper just as she had learned to do at committee meetings when someone questioned her opinion. Or with beauty pageant contestants who weren’t paying attention to their coach.
    “Tom has always spoken very highly of you, Helen.” She used the woman’s first name intentionally. “And we would not like to lose you. But I need to see our latest financial statements and a breakdown of the payables and receivables, as well as our cash balances, immediately. If you don’t have them on this desk in the next thirty minutes, I’ll have to hire someone who will.”
    Then she and her laptop swept past the two dumbfounded women, rounded a corner, and marched straight into the ladies’ room. Where they spent the next thirty minutes gathering up the courage to go back to work.

chapter 5
    L eaving the toilet was tough. Facing the files Helen St. James had left on the desk was even tougher. But as she worked through the financial statements, Miranda began to feel a faint glimmer of hope. After years of shrinking profits, these statements showed steady growth over the last six months, most of it due to an unprecedented number of new accounts.
    Here, on paper, things looked very good. When all those new receivables came due over the next weeks, Ballantyne Bras would be in its best cash position in years. They’d be solvent, liquid, fluid, all those wonderful water-based terms that meant they could focus on growing the business instead of struggling to tread water.
    So why, she asked herself, had Tom bailed out? Why, right before Ballantyne was about to reap the rewards of his efforts, had he grabbed a life preserver and jumped ship? If it was only her he’d wanted to leave, he could have asked for a divorce. The key had to be in these receivables.
    Staring out the window, Miranda thought about the shreds of the letter she’d found the night Tom disappeared, and the bank’s concern about the number of new receivables. There
were
a lot of them, and they’d all been opened by Tom. Then she thought about the terms they’d been given.
    Most customers got thirty to sixty days to pay for their goods, but Tom had given the new customers a hundred and twenty days. Four months.
    The hair on the back of Miranda’s neck prickled.
    “Carly,” she said into the intercom, “will you bring me a copy of the orders and contact phone numbers on all the receivables due over the next two weeks, please?”
    Miranda had to remind herself to breathe as she waited for the information she’d requested. With shaking fingers she dialed the phone number of the first company. Her mouth was dry and she wasn’t sure how she was going to talk around the lump of fear in her throat.
    On the fourth ring the phone was answered. Miranda was just letting out a sigh of relief when she heard, “Joey’s Pizza. The special today is . . .”
    Miranda hung up, waited a full sixty seconds, and then hit the redial button.
    “Joey’s Piz—”
    Miranda slammed down