Perfect Fit - Brenda Jackson [21]
She stood on shaky legs. “May I keep these papers?”
“Certainly, and if there’s anything further we can do, please call and let me know.”
Sage nodded and turned and walked out of the man’s office, literally fuming. When the elevator door opened she rushed inside, quickly pushing the button on the console that would take her to the parking garage. She had to see Erol. He had a lot of explaining to do.
By the time Sage walked into Erol’s office less than fifteen minutes later, she was boiling mad. After leaving the bank, the more she had thought about what Erol had done, the angrier she had gotten. Since it was past closing time, she had met his secretary on her way out.
Without wasting any time, she walked down the hallway to his office and immediately opened the door. He glanced up, both startled and surprised to see her. He stood and came around his desk. “Sage? What are you doing here? When did you get back in town?”
She inhaled deeply, again trying to find a logical explanation for what he had done. “I returned earlier than planned,” she said as calmly as she could. “Didn’t your secretary tell you that I had called?”
“Yes, but I assumed you had called from Alaska.”
She clutched the straps of her purse that hung on her shoulder as she struggled for control. Before her stood the man she loved, the man she was planning to marry. Suddenly she was seeing him as a man who had taken over fifty thousand dollars out of her bank accounts without telling her.
“No, Erol, in fact I was calling from the bank. I went there when my bankcard was declined for a purchase and I couldn’t understand why.” Her heart broke with the expression that suddenly appeared on his face—one of guilt.
“Sage, I can explain,” he said, taking a step toward her.
She automatically took a step back. “Can you? How can you explain taking fifty-two thousand dollars from my account without mentioning a word of it to me, Erol?”
He breathed in and said, “I was trying to find the perfect time to tell you. In fact, I had planned on telling you everything when you got back.”
Sage became livid. “When I got back! What was wrong with telling me before you did it!”
“I knew you wouldn’t go along with the reason I needed the money.”
“Which was?”
For a long moment he didn’t say anything; then he said, “An investment deal. Edwardo told me about this hot investment tip on this invention that could be worth billions of dollars, but you had to have at least sixty thousand dollars to get in.”
Sage inhaled deeply, trying to keep her anger in check, but was failing miserably. Edwardo Anders was one of Erol’s frat brothers who was an investment broker. “So you took every penny we had and invested it without talking to me about it first?” she asked incredulously. She couldn’t believe this. She didn’t want to believe this.
“Like I said, Sage, I knew you would be against it, and all I could think about was getting in on such a great technological opportunity and being like one of those individuals who had the foresight to invest in Microsoft on the ground floor. I figured that in the long run, I would make back at least a hundred times the amount of my initial investment.”
“So you took it upon yourself to make a decision such as that for the both of us, Erol?” she asked angrily. “You had no right to do that. At least you should have given me the opportunity of saying no, and you didn’t do that. For all you knew I may have gone along with it, although I doubt it. I trusted you, Erol. How could you have taken advantage of me that way?”
“But don’t you see, Sage? I thought I was doing something that would ultimately benefit the both of us. Even Edwardo didn’t know the investment wasn’t on the up-and-up and—”
“Whoa, back up,” Sage said, suddenly becoming angrier. “What do you mean the investment wasn’t on the up-and-up? Are you standing there telling me that you lost every single penny you invested?” Sage tightened her hand on her purse straps as she felt the floor