Page 103 of Tangled

The promise to stay, to be waiting for him, was the clasp of a hand whilst drowning.

Tristan sat in the chair, bent over and bracing his hands on his knees as he gasped the air.

Now, with Colleen’s promise, he couldn’t let her down.

Failure would become treason, but the chance to stay with Colleen was worth everything he had.

Tristan picked up his cell phone.

Maybe he should have told them to stay, but he might be able to speak more freely without them in the room. He needed to offer Bell something else and make a different deal, and he suspected Colleen would try to stop him.

It was best that she’d left.

Because he knew he’d have to offer Bell something substantial in return.

He could think of only two things he could offer that might tempt Mary Varvara Bell to forego a thirty-five-cent penny stock that was actually worth two grand per share.

In the end, she took both.

55

The Deal

Colleen

Colleen and Anjali huddled on the uppermost deck under the stars in the cool sea breeze, watching the Sherwood Forest forum silently freak out across the world as to why TwistyTrader seemed to have disappeared and left them with accounts full of a worthless penny stock, when Tristan plodded up the stairs.

“Well?” Anjali asked.

Colleen tried to swallow, but her throat choked her.

Tristan stood in front of them with his hands shoved into his pockets. “We have a deal.”

Colleen hopped to her feet and ran to him, grabbing him around the waist.“You did it?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice monotone.

“So you’re okay? She’s not going to send anyone after you or your friends? Um, Micah, and—”

“And Blaze and Logan. She’ll consider the matter closed, and we’ll all be okay.”

“Then what’s wrong?” she asked him.

“There are contingencies,” Tristan told her, his face shadowed from the harbor lights behind him in the night. “And they need to be finished within four hours. The first thing is that more than fifty percent of the voting rights of the investors’ total stock needs to be signed over to a designated negotiator by proxy waivers, and it can’t be me. If it were me, the lack of propriety would attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. We’ve flouted the law and skirted what they actually allow this whole time, andthatwould be too much.” He sighed. “And if I go to prison, this will all fall apart.”

“So, should we find a lawyer to be the designated negotiator? Or maybe a hedge fund?” she asked him.

He said, “Colleen, it has to be you.”

“Me?Nah.I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

“You have a basic knowledge of business and finance. That half of a finance degree of yours is going to come in handy. More importantly, the minnows and sea bass trust you. They’re going to need to trust the person who’s holding their right to vote on what happens to GameShack.”

She gestured back to where Anjali was sitting. “I don’t know how to do whatever it is, Tristan. If anything, Anjali is a forum moderator, too, and she has three more semesters of finance than I do.”

Anjali shook her head. “They trust you more than anyone else. This whole plan only worked becauseyouwere heading it. If any one of the rest of us had tried to convince the minnows to put their life savings into a trash penny stock, the result would have been uproar and resounding laughter. We would not have gotten ten percent of the response you did. People called your absence ‘an extinction level event’ for the forum when you were missing for a few days.Youhave to do it.”

The responsibility deluged her.