Page 84 of Secret Husband
Thad was already one scotch and soda in. “A glass of Malbec, please.”
He scurried off before I could pose more weird questions about dumpsters and alleys.
“I’m thinking the steak and?—”
“I need to ask you something.”
Thad looked up, perhaps sensing something in my tone. “Shoot.”
I reached for the breadbasket and a rosemary-studded roll of fortification.
“Have you been asking clients of mine to invest in some crypto fund? Or guys in the Rebels org who are not clients?”
His eyelids fell to half-mast. “Has someone said something?”
“Can you answer the question?”
He held up his hands. “Whoa, no need to turn into a hard-nosed prosecutor. Though y’know I love when you get bossy.”
I was ready to explode. “Thad, tell me.”
“Sure, just a few people. If I run into them at the coffee shop or a cookout, they’re always asking me for investment advice. Am I supposed to not give it?”
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I feared. “Galen Frisk said he invested his signing bonus into a hockey-themed crypto fund, and he seemed to think I had signed off on it. Which I know I didn’t because it was the first I’d heard of it.”
“Babe, it’s complicated.” He spoke for a couple of minutes using the finance bro-speak that went over my head while I eagerly waited for the sex scenes in Industry. During his spiel, the server dropped off my wine, and I helped myself to a gulp.
Thad ended his lecture with, “I don’t expect you to understand, but you have to go deep to reap the rewards.”
I stared at him. Why hadn’t I seen it before? I had been so blinded by his boring—safe—persona that I had missed all these warning signs.
I was dating my father.
“Who else have you hit up?”
He bristled. “Hit up? You make it sound like I’m begging. These are legitimate investments.”
“Who else?”
He shrugged, oblivious to the distress he was causing me. “A couple of guys on the Rebels. Grant. MacFarlane.” Those guys had multi-million-dollar contracts. How much had they plowed into this scheme? “A few people I’ve run into at parties.”
Parties I brought him to. “Hockey players?”
“Mostly. They’re all looking for ways to turn their high disposable income into life-changing money.”
I hissed at him. “They already have life-changing money. And this crypto shit is a way to lose that life-changing money. What happened to Galen Frisk’s signing bonus?”
“It’s invested.”
“So you can liquidate it and give it back?”
“Well, not exactly. Like I said, it’s currently invested, and while the returns are in the negative right now?—”
“How much in the negative?”
He took a sip of his scotch. “The fund’s been hit with regulatory oversight, which often spooks the market. This government has decided it’s suddenly interested in monitoring the crypto finance space in a way they weren’t before and?—”
“How. Much?”
