“Yeah, cookie. Just okay. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, but otherwise…I’ve spent a while trying to figure this shit out on my own. If someone as smart as you wants to take a crack at it, I’m down.”
Her mouth opens.
Closes.
Then opens again.
But before she can reply to me, the door to the kitchen swings open and Dean is reappearing, a waiter on his heels.
They sweep away the dredges of our entrees, deposit coffees and decadent desserts in front of us.
And then Marie is smiling up at me, scooping her spoon into the chocolate mousse, and she asks, “What kind of books do you read?”
We spend the rest of our time at Dean’s discussing books that we’ve read and places we’ve traveled to and the locations that are still on our bucket lists.
There isn’t any tension.
But there is plenty of laughter and teasing, and when I leave her just inside her front door, after having kissed her long enough for my control to begin to unravel, she doesn’t press me for one more night—andonlyone night.
Instead, she smiles as I step back out into the hall, and says…
“Don’t think I forgot about the deepest, darkest secret part.”
Twenty-Nine
Marie
I’mbleary-eyed and knee deep—or maybe elbow deep—in papers when I find it…with more than a little help from an employee named Suzanne.
She was caught in Angela’s web of deceit a few weeks back, reached out to Jean-Michel.
And…another thread.
Another person not willing to let all these strange coincidences go.
Today, it’s her email that sets me down a path I hadn’t thoroughly inspected before.
And it gives me a connection between Titan Capital and Genen-core…and it’s not solely that tiny microchip distributer.
It’s…more.
Immediately, I reach for my phone, wanting to call Jace.
But I freeze a heartbeat after I unlock the screen.
Because I don’t have the man’s number.
God, why am I such a stubborn pain in the ass?
Scowling, I toss my phone on my desk and pack up the files, shoving them into my bag, emailing myself copies of documents from my work computer I won’t have access to at home, grabbing anything that I might need to finish puzzling this shit out.
Then I slip out of the empty office, everyone having gone home hours ago.
Down the elevator, to my car, out of the lot.
I stop in the driveway, waiting for the signal, but as I turn in the direction of my building, there’s a flash of light out of the corner of my eye.
Bright enough that the turn in the evening’s dusk becomes difficult and I have to swerve around a female pedestrian crossing outside the crosswalk.
