Kenzie had been married before and she had been outspoken in her desire for him. Yet there was a sweetness, a naivety he hadn’t expected. He’d decided to take things slowly, let her get used to him. He didn’t want to frighten her away.
For months, he’d spent at least five days a week with her, had grown to admire her business savvy and work ethic, to say nothing of the physical beauty that appealed to him on every level.
In the beginning, he’d been able to ignore her feminine attributes and focus on her job skills, her value to the company and to him personally as CEO. But little by little, the way she always seemed to be there when he needed her, her insight into helping him solve the problems he occasionally ran past her, combined with the love and devotion she felt for her family, forced him to see her as a woman and not just an employee.
Never once had he considered the attraction might be mutual. Apparently, Kenzie was as good at hiding her emotions as he was.
As he crossed the sidewalk toward the double front doors of the nine-story redbrick building on San Jacinto, his smile slowly faded. All hell was going to break loose when his relationship with Kenzie came to light. It wasn’t PC to date your executive assistant, to say the least.
Hypothetically, it could lead to all sorts of accusations and legal hassles that could cost him, personally, or Garrett Resources a whole lot of money. Not to mention the bad publicity.
Reese was willing to take the chance. He hadn’t felt such a strong attraction to a woman in years, maybe ever. His bitter divorce had made him even more wary. If things didn’t work out, he would face the problem then.
In the meantime, he wasn’t going to deny he was seeing her. And he wasn’t giving her up.
As he pushed through the front door, Reese forced his mind back to the puzzle he was trying to solve. Following the instructions he had been given, he checked in with a prison guard in black uniform pants and a short-sleeved white shirt with an embroidered patch on the sleeve. The guard led him down a hall and passed him to another guard, a Black woman with cornrows and a smile that put him a little more at ease.
“Rico’s waiting for you,” she said. “If you’ll just follow me.” She led him down another long hall and opened a door into a room with a series of partitioned glass windows. Stools sat on both sides of the window. Rico Alvarez sat on one of them, the only person in the room.
“You’ve got twenty minutes,” the female guard said. Still smiling, she closed the door.
Reese sat down across from Alvarez, who was short, his muscular arms covered with prison tats where they showed below the half sleeve of his orange jumpsuit. The lower portion of his head was shaved, the top longer, a bowl cut that reminded Reese of Moe in the old Three Stooges reruns he’d watched as a kid on TV.
Alvarez’s black eyes followed his movements and he straightened on the stool. “I figured I must know you but I don’t. Who the fuck are you, and what do you want?”
“I’m Reese Garrett. I was a passenger on the helicopter that crashed and killed your brother.”
Alvarez glanced away, but not before Reese caught a flash of grief in his eyes.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Reese said.
Alvarez’s attention swung back to him. “So what do you want?”
“I came to tell you the crash wasn’t an accident. I figured you’d want to know. Someone sabotaged the helo.”
Alvarez’s black eyes narrowed. “You’re shittin’ me.”
“I’m telling you the truth. The thing is, you’re locked up in here. It goes without saying, you’ve got enemies. The question is, did you piss someone off bad enough to get your brother killed?”
Alvarez shot up from his stool. “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
“Word on the street is you pissed off some of the big boys. Some kind of drug deal that went sideways. Maybe they took the chopper down and killed your brother to get even.”
Alvarez sank down heavily on the stool. He dropped his head into his hands and shook his head. “No way. They didn’t want Manny dead. They wanted both of us to keep on producing. We worked things out. Paying back the money they got coming wasn’t a problem. We just needed a little more time.”
“And you got them to agree?”
“Yeah.”
“Before or after the crash?”
“Before.” He looked up at Reese, his jaw tight. “You lookin’ to find out who did it?”
“I am.”
“You let me know who it is, eh, homie? I take care of them for you. No one kills Rico Alvarez’s brother and gets away with it.”
Satisfied Rico was telling the truth, Reese rose from the stool, fairly certain now that Manny Alvarez hadn’t been the target. The question remained, who was?
