“A year ago, we had an employee embezzle money from our company. Accounting fraud.”
My arms fell to my sides, and I mentally cursed.Damn. I couldn’t have another one of our businesses be caught in a scandal.
“What happened?”
She told me all she could. About an employee named Kyle Whitby. About most employees secretly believing that she might have had something to do with it too. And worst of all, they hadn’t pressed charges.
I groaned at the last one.
“I’m sorry for not telling you this earlier,” Ava said. “I was afraid that you’d refuse to hire any of my previous staff. Or prevent them from working there again.”
I threw my shoulders back and turned to face the windows. “Ray Murphy should have come clean, Ava. Not you. So, I won’t hold anything against you.”
She looked back at me, a picture of vulnerability. “But what about my staff?” she asked, her voice hollow.
I let go of a painful breath. “It’s not for me to decide, Ava. That’s a decision Thomas and his team will make.”
She sat down on the chair.
“How bad is it?” she asked, sounding worried.
“For Luxe Hotels?” I asked. “Not too bad since it happened a year ago. But we can’t cover it up anymore.”
Her lips parted in shock. “You mean?—”
I nodded. “We need to conduct an internal investigation to confirm. Then, you need to press charges against whoever did it.”
She seemed to turn the matter over in her mind before she spoke again. “I have some evidence,” she began slowly. “Video recordings from our cameras and some screenshots of transactions out of our restaurant’s business account.”
I met her eyes. “That will help. Though, if you’ll humor me, why didn’t you press charges when you seem to have so much evidence against the man?”
Ava bit her lip, her expression one of sadness. “Because Kyle and I were dating back then. And I couldn’t believe he could embezzle from my mom’s restaurant in the week after she passed. In the week when I was too distraught to care about anything else really. Even about Mom’s restaurant, which she always said was like her second child.”
The hurt in her eyes went straight to my heart. As for the surge of anger I felt about her dating a man like that, well, that was a surprise to me too.
She deserves better.
“I’m really sorry to hear about your mom’s passing,” I said heavily. “I’ve experie—” I hesitated, and our gazes met.
She knew what I was going to say. That I was going to mention my mother’s death in the last year of high school,but it was unnecessary. She was intimately familiar with the details of that incident. We’d been dating back then after all.
I shook my head, trying to come out of the daze that Ava always had on me. I could breathe in her scent, and I could sense a hint of wood smoke in it.
“Our legal division has an office in Lower Manhattan. I’m driving over to that part of the town tomorrow afternoon, and I wonder if you’d like to join me.”
She bit her lower lip while she considered that. The contemplative look left her face, and she gave me a decisive nod. “Let’s do this.”
I didn’t stop to consider what it might look like. The CEO of Luxe Hotels picking up his employee in his car. I didn’t care. I wanted to make sure Ava got some sort of closure for her mom’s restaurant.
Because this much was as clear to me as the freckles on Ava’s nose: I couldn’t bear to see her hurting alone.
11
AVA
“Now, Ava, I know you’ve given the building code to your friends so they can visit you,” Mrs. Wilson said as I shut the large brown doors behind me, a bunch of flowers in my hand while she hobbled out of her apartment. “But please let them know not to share that code with anyone else. It’s a headache to change it often, but we can’t have our security compromised—oh my. Those are beautiful lilies.”
I smiled and handed them to her. “I saw them at the market on my way back and remembered you loved red lilies.”
