Which he did.Giving up the ghost, Harris curled in his shoulders and slumped forward, deflating.“I don’t know anything, okay?The day Duncan forced me on your father, Curtis boxed up all the financial documents, took them home, and put a lock on his office door.”
“So what are you still doing here?”
He waved a hand at his inbox on the corner of the desk.“Answering calls, going through the mail, signing whatever corporate documents Curtis’s attorney puts in front of me.Collecting a paycheck on the off chance your father decides to pay me, and when he does, it just goes to pay Duncan.”Harris ran a shaky hand through his dark hair.“I did not kill myself in business school to be an executive assistant for a shell of a company.”
“Duncan’s forcing you to stay here?”
“I know what he is.”Harris dropped his arm, the thump of it on the desk a resigned exclamation mark.“You saw the deeds of trust.We got upside down on that house, and Duncan had to bail us out, just like your father.Now we can’t get out from under him.”
Excitement trilled up Nic’s spine.Finally, a break.He leaned forward, offering the life preserver Harris so obviously needed.“What if I could help you?”
Six
Scott and Mike’s arraignment was scheduled to start in ten minutes, and Cam had no idea where it was actually going down.Ear pressed to the stairwell door on the sixteenth floor, he could hear the muffled chaos on the other side, a crowd of people as equally confused as him.He checked his phone again—still no reply from Nic.The court calendar listed the arraignment on the seventeenth floor, but that federal courtroom was empty.Probably why all the squawking press had trampled down to the clerk’s office on sixteen.
Cam had known this was the plan for Abby’s safety, but this morning’s radio silence from Nic was complicating matters, for him at least.
Taking a fortifying breath, he swiped his all-access card over the security lock and pushed out of the stairwell.He flashed his FBI badge at the guard posted on the door, nodded at the cute law clerk he passed in the melee, then smiled and cajoled his way through the crowd of reporters to the court clerk’s front desk.
“Agent Byrne,” the desk attendant greeted him.“Please tell me you’re here to rescue me.”Mandi usually delivered that line with a wink and toss of her long blond hair, but today she looked like she actually meant it.Expression pinched, hair yanked back in a severe bun, she’d put the kitten away and unleashed the tiger.And it was a very tired and grumpy cat.Not that the press weren’t still trying to shove proverbial chairs at her.
Cam had come prepared with a different, hopefully more effective strategy.He reached into his inner coat pocket and withdrew a bar of dark chocolate from one of those ridiculously overpriced San Francisco factories.Aidan would probably never notice it had disappeared from his desk drawer.
Flirt turned up, Cam held out the bar to Mandi, tempting.“How about I rescue you and you return the favor?”
She snatched the chocolate out of his hand and sniffed it, eyelashes fluttering in ecstasy.“Well, it’s not an airlift but it’ll work.”She unlocked the service counter swing door and held it open for him to pass through.“Karen, cover me for a minute,” she said to one of the other attendants before leading Cam around the corner.
Out of view and out of earshot, Mandi ditched her heels with a relieved sigh and propped a bare foot against the cinder block wall, giving Cam a view of her toned thigh under a hitched-up pencil skirt.Not the only show she was putting on either.Pretty brown eyes with lips that were just this side of decent, she slowly peeled back the foil candy wrapper, eyeing him through long lashes.“You looking for Attorney Price?”she said.He’d unwrapped the bombshell a time or two, back when he’d only just swung through town for a case or to visit Jamie.Before he’d moved here, before...Mandi spoke again, saving him from jumping through avoidance hoops.“He’s down on fifteen, Courtroom C.”
“Magistrate’s chambers?”
“You saw that out there.”She waved the chocolate bar toward the lobby.“It’s worse on seventeen.”Where the main federal district courtrooms were.“Vultures won’t look for them on fifteen.”
Grinning, he leaned in close, a forearm against the wall by her head.“I always did say you were the smartest person here.”
“Don’t you forget it.”Her cherry-red lips closed around the chocolate bar, over the line of decent, but his mind was already a floor away.
She read him like a book, dropping the seduction and chuckling.“Use the internal staircase,” she said, tilting her head back and right.“Thanks for the chocolate.”
“Thank you for the assist,” he said with a wink before he took off for the stairs.
He exited onto the fifteenth floor, in the staff hallway behind the courtrooms.Halfway down the corridor, Tony stood outside one of the holding rooms.“Agent Byrne,” the guard said.
He blew out a dramatic huff.“Had to run the gauntlet to get here.”
The door opened, and Nic stood there in all his full-suited glory.Light gray three-piece, crisp white dress shirt, and monochrome blue tie that matched his eyes.Sharp.Add to that the barely contained excitement vibrating through him, the hype of the coming courtroom, even for a perfunctory arraignment, and Cam forgot how to make words.
Nic filled the silence, albeit with a knowing smirk.“Sorry, the gauntlet was my fault.”He opened the door wider for Cam to step through.“Just give us a minute.”
Closing the door behind them, Nic turned back to Abby, who sat at a small table reading through a stack of documents.She wound her earbud cord through her fingers, the motion gaining speed when she looked up and caught sight of Cam.He’d backed off the bad cop routine but she was still skittish toward him.He leaned back against the wall, as nonthreatening as possible, while Nic claimed the chair across from her.“Do you have any questions on the affidavit?On your testimony?”
Cam had thought that was what the papers might be.Nic had spent the rest of Sunday in Holding Room Two with Abby, taking her official statement and preparing her for questioning.Yesterday, he’d been a ghost, locked in his own war room preparing court documents, save for a brief meeting with Scott’s and Mike’s attorneys, then an early departure to take care of something at the brewery, he’d said.
“I didn’t misrepresent anything you said, did I?”Nic asked gently.
She abandoned the tablet and cord for the pen next to the papers, mashing the clicker end against the table.“No, everything’s right.”
“Clearly something isn’t.What’s got you nervous?”
