Graham leaned against the beam we’d just defiled and crossed his arms. “Absolutely not. Complete fiction.”
“Good.”
“Though if ithadhappened,” he said, his voice dropping to that low, rough register that had started this whole problem, “it would’ve been the best thing that ever happened in this barn.”
I pointed at him. “Out.”
“Leaving.”
“Outnow.”
He pushed off the beam, caught my hand as he passed, and pressed a kiss to my palm. Quick. Warm. The kind of gesture that shouldn’t have leveled me after what we’d just done, but did.
Then he walked out into the afternoon sun, and I stood alone in my barn with shaking legs and hay in my hair and the absolute certainty that I was in over my head.
I pressed my back against the beam. Still warm where his body had been.
“Well,” I said to Cassie. “That happened.”
She turned her back to me and stuck her face in her hay net.
Fair.
The call came at eleven.
I was in the office reviewing the booking confirmation for the Rousseau group when my phone buzzed.
Sandra Locke, my accountant.
“Rose, I need you to look at something.” No pleasantries. Sandra didn’t do pleasantries, which I liked. “I’ve been reconciling your quarterly statements and there are discrepancies I can’t explain.”
“What kind of discrepancies?”
“Payments that don’t match your invoices. Three vendor charges in the last two months that are significantly higher than the quotes on file. And a deposit from your Rousseau booking that should have cleared ten days ago. It’s gone. Like it never happened.”
My stomach turned. “What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean the money was received and then it disappeared from your operating account. No record of a transfer, no refund issued, no trace. Someone moved it and covered the trail.”Sandra paused. “Rose, this isn’t a bookkeeping error. Someone with access to your accounts is moving money.”
There were only two people with access to those accounts. Me and Denise.
I thought about Denise in the barn feed room, waving her hand.Processing. Their bank is slow. I’ve got a follow-up scheduled.
No. There had to be another explanation.
The happiness from this morning felt like it belonged to a different woman.
“How much are we talking about? Across all of it?”
“The three vendor overcharges total roughly fifteen thousand above what should have been paid. The Rousseau deposit is another eight. But this is only the last two months. If this pattern goes back further, the number could be much higher. I need you to pull six months of bank statements and cross-reference them against every invoice in your system.”
“I’ll do it now.”
I hung up and sat very still, staring at the screen.
Fifteen thousand dollars.
In a business where every dollar had a name and a job, where I budgeted feed costs down to the bag and negotiated vendor contracts line by line, fifteen thousand dollars had gone somewhere it shouldn’t have.
