FOURTEEN
CLAIRE PULLED HER truck into an empty space beside the diner and turned off the car. She cracked the window and inhaled, trying to clear her head before her meeting. Maybe if she couldn’t smell Luke she’d be able to stop thinking about him, but the clean citrus scent of his aftershave was still with her after their morning together. They’d driven back from the city that morning and after spending a couple hours with him in the car, his scent had permeated everything. Or it could have been the shower. And the sex. Either way she was having a hard time getting him out of her head, and she needed to focus.
She’d had sex with Luke in a public place. She still couldn’t believe it. Even in college she hadn’t been as wild or sexually reckless as she was with him. Except it didn’t feel reckless. A private sex club wasn’t the same thing as a dark movie theater. She was fairly certain far kinkier things were going on in the club that night, including on stage. She’d asked him for a distraction and he’d delivered it in spades. From naked Mandy to the dancers on stage, everything had been over the top. And watching the woman with two men excited the hell out of her.
Seeing the beautiful lines of their acrobatic bodies as they came together was unreal. Having Luke touch her while she watched was mind blowing. By the time the trio reached their climax she’d been desperate for her own. Instead of worrying where she was or whether she ought to, she trusted Luke to look out for them, and she took what she needed. The memory made her face flush hot, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel bad about it. It felt too good to be bad.
But she couldn’t sit in the truck reminiscing. Ditching her responsibilities would be bad. She had a confused crew depending on her for answers, and she had to give them what she could. She climbed down from the truck and went into the diner, a 1980s version of a 1950s diner. It was already a dive years ago, but they had great ruebens and were close enough to the jobsite to be easy for her crew to get there.
She scanned the mostly empty restaurant. It looked like she was the first to arrive so she grabbed the round corner booth. It wouldn’t hold all of them but it was big enough for most of them and there was an empty table next to it for the late comers. She’d just ordered coffee when the first of her guys showed up. Four of them came in together with Mike leading the way. They looked uncertain until they saw her and then they made a beeline to the booth.
“Hey, boss lady,” said Mike, sliding into the booth next to her.
“Hey, yourself,” she said with a smile. “How is the wife and corn niblet?”
The young electrician flashed a quick smile at the mention of his baby-to-be but it was quickly replaced with a more serious expression. “She’s worried. First Pete, now this thing with the ATF. It has her a little freaked, and who knows how long the job will be shut down. We’re running pretty close to the wire…” he said, sounding sheepish, but the men beside him nodded.
And that was the crux. Her crew was made of good men with responsibilities of their own, and she doubted any of them had enough of a buffer in place to weather things if the job stayed closed for long. She hated to see them worried, and she’d hate even more to lose them if they had to go elsewhere for work. She’d have to pray Jackson got to the bottom of the illegal ammo thing fast. Despite having the full force of the government behind it or maybe because of that, Claire trusted Jackson more than the ATF to figure out what was going on.
“I understand, really I do,” she said as more of her men filed in and slid into the booth, eventually moving to the table when they ran out of room. The waitress moved discreetly between them taking orders and filling drinks. “Luke. Mr. Masters,” she clarified, “has his own private security working to find out what happened. I’m sure the job won’t be closed down for long. I’ll do everything I can to make sure I keep us working. In the meantime I’ll move us over to the property I’m doing on Chestnut Street. It isn’t all electrical work but I’ll pay your regular salary. We can start over there in the morning and it will keep us moving forward.”
It would also eat up the last of her potential profit. By the time she paid back Luke for when he’d been trying to help by hiring outside crews to fix the vandalism and paid her electricians to do finishing work, there wouldn’t be a profit left in the house no matter how good a price she got for it. She watched her visions of moving to another property on the street go up in smoke, but at least she had options. They weren’t good ones, but it was something. She just prayed it wouldn’t affect Masters Enterprises working with Matthews Contracting in the future, or all the pictures Claire had built of growth and financial solvency would vanish, too.
The waitress brought their food, and they ate in relative silence, no one talking much. Claire knew they were still worried. She was too and she couldn’t lie to them and tell them it would all be okay. They wouldn’t believe her if she did.
“Do you have any idea who did it?” Mike asked and the other men shifted their attention to her, waiting for an answer.
“Not a clue,” said Claire. “The only thing I know is that it wasn’t one of us. Sparks didn’t know anything either. I was with him when they found the stuff. He was floored.” She’d never suspected Sparks would be involved, but she felt the need to stand up for the construction manager after he’d been dragged off for questioning.
“Do you think it has anything to do with what happened to Pete?”
The table went silent waiting for her answer. With her men watching her, she said what she been thinking but hadn’t been able to bring herself to say out loud.
“I think it must be related. It’s too strange otherwise. Pete didn’t have any reason to be near those window openings, and he wasn’t a careless man. If he’d gone to the storage container to get fixtures and saw something he wasn’t supposed to…” she let the rest of her sentence trail off because thinking she might be even a little bit responsible for Pete’s death hurt too much to contemplate. She’d been the reason he was on six to begin with.
No one said a word, but she could tell they were thinking. Until they knew who was responsible for the ammo on the job or Pete’s death there was nothing left to say. They finished their lunch and when the check came Claire picked up the tab for the group with her personal credit card. She gave them directions to the flip, told them she’d see them all in the morning and assured them they’d figure a way through it all, praying that was true.
JACKSON SAT ON the couch in Luke’s office wearing his customary black, looking poised and ready to spring into action. Luke just wished he’d brought better news with him.
“So that’s really all you have?” he asked, trying for the moment at least to keep a reign on his temper.
“The ATF has a tight lid on things. The only thing I know for sure is that when they went through the storage containers, the only one containing illegal ammo was the one used primarily by the electricians. They found .223’s and 5.56 NATO with aluminum casings. The cheap stuff,” he said to clarify. “They don’t know for sure yet, but based on a preliminary inspection, they think the ammo found on your site is part of a lot they’ve traced back to Norfolk and from there probably on to Eastern Europe, but there’s nothing definitive yet. It looks like for now at least, the ATF is concentrating their investigation on Ms. English’s firm and the GC, but they aren’t ruling anyone out. They aren’t close to an arrest.”
Luke held on tighter to his temper. The idea of anyone investigating Claire or her company made his blood run cold. He knew without a doubt that she hadn’t been involved in anything illegal but with so much of this business dependent on a firm’s reputation, she couldn’t afford the stain even an investigation would bring.
“It wasn’t Claire,” he said simply.
“I know you’re sure of that,” said Jackson. “But you pay me not to be, and the fact that it was a member of her crew who died under suspicious circumstances makes her that much more interesting to the investigation.”
Luke gritted his teeth hard enough to make his jaw ache, but Jackson was right. He paid him to be suspicious, and if he had to eliminate Claire and her crew as suspects before he could find the real culprit, so be it.
“So what happens next? Any guesses as to how long my site’s going to be closed?”
“It depends on what they find. They’ve interviewed everyone on the job. They’ll probably revisit their interviews with Ms. English and her crew, but honestly there probably isn’t anything else to find on the site. Closing you down is more a way of exercising control. Maybe another couple of days. Let me ask you again,” said Jackson, leaning forward. “Are you sure there isn’t anyone you can think of who might have a grudge against Ms. English? I know you’re sure she’s not involved.”
“She’s not,” said Luke simply.
Jackson held his hand up to stop him. “Regardless. I can keep digging and I will find out what’s going on. But until I have some motive for the attacks, it’s going to be slow going. Anything you can think of, even if it doesn’t make sense, could help.”
