He drew her dress strap down over her shoulder and cupped her breast, running his thumb over her peak through her dress. “I’m staying at the Four Seasons Aviara again,” he murmured against the top swell of her breast. “Spend the weekend with me. We’ll get a bottle of wine, sit on the beach, and talk this weekend.”
“Okay.”
They didn’t talk.
All weekend.
Kingston had to go back to Connecticut on Monday. He said he was needed at a meeting Back East. He couldn’t stay.
The next Monday,Nicole was eating lunch in the downstairs break room with Meghan and Morgan when Afifa from HR walked in, carrying her lunch box, and sat with them.
After the usual chitchat, Morgan yawned and stretched, looking around the break room at everything except Afifa. “I wonder when that supposed second round of layoffs is coming.”
Meghan shot Nicole a look and rolled her eyes.
Pressuring Afifa seemed wrong. If Afifa knew something, she probably wouldn’t have been able to tell them. Even so, the lower-level HR associates probably weren’t in the know.
“So, Morgan, how about this heat wave?” Nicole asked. “Eighty-three, today.”
“Oh, it’s all right.” Afifa waved her fork with a bite of red-flecked chicken in the air. “I don’t know anything. I don’tknow when or if there will be more layoffs. For the first wave, Human Relations received an additional email at the same time everyone else got theirs, detailing the packages we were to offer, and that was all. That is all we have heard.”
“So that’s the only email you’ve ever gotten from our Last Chance overlords?” Nicole asked her.
“Oh, no. We get emails daily, just not about layoffs.”
All three of the other girls leaned toward Afifa.
“Do tell,” Nicole said.
“Just routine business emails or asking for information,” Afifa said. “I just admit, it would be good to put a face to such interrogating emails.”
“Likewhat?”Nicole asked.
Afifa rolled her large, dark eyes. “Benefits and compensation packages. Where our 401K is managed. Passwords for the intranet so they can go hunting for clues, I guess. And then last week, out of the blue in the afternoon, a phone calldemandingthat Kingston Moore—the new sales man, you know?”
Nicole joined Meghan and Morgan in nodding.
“—demandingthat Kingston Moore be issued a badge immediately, thatday,thathour,as if we had been remiss.”
“Were you—remiss?” Meghan asked her.
Afifa shrugged. “Gia paid me twenty dollars to tell him he couldn’t have a badge because he was a remote worker.”
“Oh,” Nicole said. “Was there a bet?”
“Of course, there was a bet, which I got in on. I won an additional ten dollars after he was locked in the copier room last week after over a month but less than three.”
Oh, Kingston probably hadn’t caught the door after?—
She hadn’t even thought about?—
Nicole’s cheeks warmed.
“And it was odd,” Afifa said. “The man on the phone said that Kingston Moore should haveall-access,meaning his badge should open every door in the building. Odd.”
“Every door?” Nicole asked.
“Yes, and his name was odd, Morrissey Sand, like the desert.”
