“Give me your feet, and I’ll give you my phone.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. What was he planning? “Deal.”
The sofa was a two-seater, just long enough for her to stretch her legs onto Corin’s lap. He ran his fingers along the tops of her feet and around her ankles. She could get used to that, she decided.
She opened the document and scanned through it. A thorough investigation into the security of Blackburn Enterprises’ interests. Commissioned by CEO Corin Blackburn, managed by his grandfather, collated by an anonymized research sub-group.
Hah.
“So, the report—”
Corin dug his thumb into the tight muscles along the bridge of her foot, and she saw stars.
“My main problem,” he said, his tone one of intense concentration, “is that I drove away my most valuable employee six months ago. I didn’t realize until she was gone how great her influence on me and my company was. Without her, I’m lost.”
His thumb did terrible, wonderful things to the one spot on her ankle that was always stiff at the end of the day. “Umph?” she managed to say.
“The months since she left have been remarkably absent of crisis. All the systems and processes she set up continued to work as intended. Her replacement is very capable. But in an emergency…” He sighed. “I can’t get anythingdone.”
Her lips quirked with amusement. He looked sofrustrated. “How so? You’ve been in contact with your clan, right? What’s the holdup?”
“You tell me.”
She read through the report.
“Huh.”
“You see?”
“That’s a lot of pages of nothing. That’s … hrmm.”
He stopped massaging her feet. “What did that ‘hrmm’ mean?”
Did he really not know? Maya’s blush calmed down as her brain moved away fromoh god that feels goodto business-mode.
“Well, all you were asking them to do was check who’d visited the vault, right?”
He nodded.
“And they can’t tell you yes or no or even ‘we don’t know’?” She grimaced. “It’s a simple question. If they can’t answer, then, well…”
“What?”
She tapped the phone. “This is a lot of nothing meant to disguise the fact that there’ssomethingthey don’t want you to know. They’re not lying to you.Nobodylies to you. They’re just … putting off the truth.”
He frowned. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because that was my life for five years, Corin. It was literally the first thing everyone told me when I started the job workingfor your grandfather. Never tell Mr. Blackburn ‘I don’t know’ and never tell him something he doesn’t want to know unless you’ve already fixed the problem. When you took over, it was business as usual.”
“I … always thought you were just extremely competent.” There was a strange undercurrent in his voice.
She huffed. “Iamextremely competent. Though I’m surprised your grandfather put his name on this, given it’s blatantly a whole lot of nothing.”
Corin’s face sobered. “If anyone broke into the vault, no blame would fall on the rest of my clan. All the fault would be mine for not protecting the clan’s treasure.”
“Not your grandfather’s? Didn’t you tell me it was his job? A retirement perk.”
He shook his head. “I was clear when I asked them to investigate. If there was no sign of anyone accessing the vault, they could safely tell me so.”
