Just let me enjoy this one moment, okay?

Kate flung herself into the chair opposite and tapped a bad-tempered foot. He drank, drank again, and felt the caffeine flood into his bloodstream with a revivifying buzz. Dealing with drunks could sap your very will to live. He opened his eyes and sat back. Okay. Talk to me.

I want to walk through it out loud and you pick holes, okay?

He saluted her with the mug and leaned back to prop his feet up. One of the things I‘m best at.

First of all, let me just say this is the weirdest damn case you‘ve ever had me work on.

Thank you. We aim to please.

Yeah, you can yuck it up all you want, Chopin, but just wait till all this lands back in your lap. She raised herself up by the arms of the chair, crossed her legs beneath her, and shook her bangs out of her eyes. She was so damn cute, and how much he would rather be throwing her down on the nearest horizontal surface and having his way with her. He was sure it would beat the hell out of whatever was coming next. It would beat the hell out of pretty much anything, come to that.

Okay. I‘ll try to tell this linearly. She frowned. I‘ll try. She took a deep breath and began to speak in headings and subheadings.

True North Investments is an international venture capital firm that backs natural resource exploration, discovery, and extraction.

Jim opened his mouth, caught her eye, and closed it again.

John King, president and CEO of RPetCo Alaska, the majority producer in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields of Alaska, sits on the True North board of directors. Global Harvest Resources Inc. discovers the second-largest deposit of gold in the world in our backyard. It may in fact turn out to be the largest gold mine in the world if they ever manage to define its limits.

Global Harvest is an international corporation but they‘re more oriented toward exploration and discovery than they are toward production. This time, the projected deposit being so large, they have decided it will be more profitable to run it themselves.

True North looks at the Suulutaq Mine and looks at Global Harvest and scents the possibility of a buyout or a takeover. They start making investments in Global Harvest stock, but they need more information for a more informed decision. They look around and find a Minnesota con man named Richard Henry Allen and recruit him to go to work for Global Harvest at the Suulutaq Mine, with instructions to weasel his way into the good graces of the mine geologists so he can get the copies of the data that the core samples are producing.

Meanwhile, sitting on True North‘s board, John King gets wind of this. He‘s been RPetCo‘s CEO for over six years and the price of North Slope crude is dropping and so are RPetCo dividends and the shareholders are getting restless, thinking they might like a change of corporate leadership. King thinks that to save his job, maybe RPetCo might need to branch out, expand its resource base. The acquisition of Global Harvest by RPetCo Alaska might be just the jewel to cement the CEO crown on his head in perpetuity.