Jameson cocked his head to the side, the first hints of adrenaline making their way into his bloodstream. “I am a betting man.”
Grayson smiled darkly. “I know.”
It had been a long time since all four of them had been presented with a challenge like this one—all five of them, counting Avery.
Jameson leaned back in his seat. “Tell us more.”
Grayson obliged. “Sheffield Grayson came from poverty. He married money, and his wife’s parents funded his business endeavors. He siphoned funds away from those endeavors for his personal use, stockpiling them in foreign accounts. When his wife’s mother died, she left everything to her daughter and granddaughters, tied up in trusts. Acacia is her own trustee, but the trustee for the twins’ trusts is…”
“Kent Trowbridge?” Jameson guessed.
Grayson nodded curtly. “My father kept a journal detailing his own illegal transactions. He supposedly emptied Acacia’s trust, but there was no record of that in the journal. Records of embezzling from his own company? Yes. Records of his plot against Avery? Yes. But there was nothing about emptying Acacia’s trust.”
Now, Jameson’s mind was whirring. “Would Trowbridge have had access to it?”
“He comes from a prominent family of lawyers with close ties to Acacia’s mother’s family,” Grayson replied. “If Trowbridge didn’t set up the trust, someone in his family probably did. Assuming Acacia’s trust used the same financial institutions as the girls’ trusts, I’d say it’s likely Trowbridge could figure out a way to access it. And if it appeared to him that Sheffield Grayson had been engaged in illegal activities and skipped town…”
“Trowbridge could fairly easily assure that Acacia would blame her husband for the empty accounts,” Jameson finished. “Everyone would. How much money are we talking about here?”
Grayson did some mental calculations. “If I were guessing, I’d say between ten and twelve million in Acacia’s trust and an equal amount for each of the girls. It’s possible that Trowbridge was in some kind of financial trouble…”
Jameson knew his brother well enough to read into his tone. “But you don’t think so.”
“No.” Grayson’s eyes hardened. “I think this is about Acacia.”
“He wants to control her?” Nash said. There was nothing that got under Nash’s skin like a man mistreating a woman.
“He’s boxing her in,” Grayson replied, a dark undertone in his voice. “Turning up the heat. I overheard him telling her that he was there for her, she just had to let him be there for her. I heard him reminding her that her parents were gone, that her husband was gone, that she had no one. And wouldn’t you know it, when the FBI came to the house, he was nowhere to be seen, because she couldn’t afford a lawyer, and his only offer was to come as a friend.”
Grayson stopped there, but Jameson knew instinctively that his brother wasn’t done. He was still thinking, still piecing together the big picture.
All they had to do was let him.
“Trowbridge told Savannah about the accusations against her father,” Grayson stated with blade-like precision. “And about her mother’s emptied trust. Plus, right before Gigi and I fought, she said that Savannah and their mother had an argument about the girls’ trusts. They wanted to use them to help pay for a lawyer, but Savannah said the trust terms wouldn’t allow that unless…”
“Unless Trowbridge signed off on it?” Nash drawled.
“Maybe,” Jameson replied. “But Grayson thinks there might be more to it than that. Don’t you, Gray?”
“I think,” Grayson said, his voice low, “that if my private investigator hasn’t managed to get a copy of the trust paperwork by now, he’s fired.”
CHAPTER 93
JAMESON
They went from SUV to private jet and by the time they had, Grayson had gotten ahold of that paperwork. He set his tablet down with an audible click for the rest of them to see. Avery beat Jameson, Xander, and Nash to picking it up.
“The money is under the control of the trustee until the beneficiary is thirty years old…” Avery’s eyes widened, and she looked up from what she’d just read. “Or married.”
Grayson’s expression was grim. “Savannah is seventeen, eighteen in seven months. She has a boyfriend, and that boyfriend is Kent Trowbridge’s son.”
Jameson didn’t know these people as anything other than names in a story, but he thought about what Grayson had already said. The elder Trowbridge was boxing Acacia Grayson in, draining her finances, using the FBI to rattle her, ensuring that her only options were him… or his son.