My hand shot out and I grabbed it, answering without checking who it was. I didn’t need to. A caller this persistent, this early, could only be a Westwood. It didn’t really matter which one. They wouldn’t stop until I picked up.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Nate.” That one word woke me up more than the incessant buzzing because Alex sounded like hell and that didn’t happen often. “I need a meeting with you this afternoon. Bring Kate too.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Okay. We’ll be there. What time?”
“One. Executive boardroom.”
Awake enough now that something in his tone gave me pause, I slowly opened my eyes.
“Who’s coming?” I asked finally, suspicion slipping through my gut like a fox sneaking into the hen house. “Is it just us?”
“Nope. It’ll be you, me, Will, Kate.” All of that was standard enough, but then he added, “Oh, and Colin. Colin Thayer. You remember him, right? Jane’s brother.”
That woke me up the rest of the way. Alex didn’t know that Colin and I hung out on occasion, but I also knew it wouldn’t matter in this context. Colin wouldn’t have been invited to this meeting as anyone’s friend. I sat up and scratched the side of my neck.
“Yeah. I remember him. What’s this about?”
“We’ll talk when we get there.”
The line went dead before I could push further and I slowly lowered the phone, trying to piece together what kind of meeting required both Kate and Colin. Kate was obviously part of the Hinds’ acquisition, but the Thayers weren’t.
Unease swept through me before I swung my legs out of bed and stood. Stretching the stiffness out of my shoulders, I headed for the door. The faint scent of coffee wafted through the apartment, which meant Kate was already downstairs.
I found her in the kitchen, barefoot and half awake, with her hair loose and messy down her back. She moved quietly through the space. The morning light spilling through the windows turned her hair a burnt copper.
Without turning around, she reached for a mug and then spoke, obviously already knowing I was there. “Black?”
“Yeah.”
She slid the mug into the coffee machine, operating it expertly and pushing the coffee across the counter when she was done. As she finally lifted her gaze to mine, she picked up her own mug, a slight, almost shy smile ghosting across her lips. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” I replied, watching her move around my space like she’d been here a hundred times before.
It felt strange, knowing that this was Emma. The same girl I’d spent so many years getting to know was now in my kitchen the morning after, very real and verynotwho I thought she might be.
Kate Vanderhaul. You’ve got to be shitting me.
I’d had almost twenty-four hours to process now and I still wasn’t quite caught up, but at the end of the day, she was still Kate, and she and I had to get to work. “Alex called. He wants to meet with us at one in the executive conference room.”
She glanced up at me. “What about? I don’t recall seeing a Hinds meeting in my calendar today.”
I slowly shook my head. “No idea, but I do know Colin’s going to be there as well, which makes me wonder if it’s got to do with Hinds at all.”
Her eyebrows tugged together. “Colin, as in Colin Thayer?”
I nodded. “The CFO of Thayer Steelworks. A company we’ve already bought out and who has nothing to do with Hinds. Do they?”
“Not as far as I know.” Her head cocked for a moment, like she was mentally running through names she associated with Abram Hinds. Then she shrugged. “I’ve definitely never come across them in my dealings with him, but that’s all I’ve got.”
“Right. Well, I guess we’ll find out later.” That sense of unease didn’t evaporate, though.
It followed me through the day as Kate and I drank the rest of our coffee in relative silence. She popped back across the hall to her own apartment to get ready for the day and we met in the parking garage for her to catch a ride over to the office with me, and it was still there.
The drive itself should’ve been awkward, considering everything we’d been through in the last day, but it wasn’t. Both of us had sort of retreated back into our own heads for now and I was okay with that. We’d cleared the air, but it was still going totake time for us to work up toEmma-and-CBlevel trust as Kate and Nate.
As always, she took a seat at the conference table in my office and opened her laptop, getting to work like nothing had changed. I spent the day alternating between getting lost in work of my own and staring at her, occasionally finding her staring back at me.
