Val nodded. She’d be Dane’s, but more importantly, Dane would be hers after he chose to betray Noelle. And Noelle would be forever out of his reach once he did that.
Dane picked up his sake cup and swirled the liquid around. “Noelle asked me for coffee today.”
Val took pleasure in sharing one piece of good news. “Is that so? I took her out on Saturday and fed her an earful about poor lovesick Dane.”
He chuckled. “After Friday night, I doubt she’s interested in lovesick Dane.”
She figured he’d earned the information. “Well, I played on her obvious interest in you. You know, I think she’s convinced you’ve got a soft center under that bullshit demeanor you keep up.”
“Seriously?” He leaned forward and ran a finger across Val’s hand. “You may have saved me weeks of recovery.”
She hated the way the concerned lines on his face smoothed, hated the dreamy grin that left her worrying her plan might backfire. It wouldn’t do for him to become infatuated again. Maybe he needed a new distraction.
Val retracted her hand. “Yes, I know. And now you owe me.”
Dane sucked on his teeth. “You want me to work on Selena?”
“You have the perfect opportunity to get even with Geraldo. He’s probably working to sabotage your efforts with Noelle.” The same way he'd forced her to sabotage her chance with Dane. “Think about how he drove you away from your company.”And from me.
“I’m listening.”
Val played her trump card. “Think about that pretty girl falling under your spell. You know they all look up to you.”
Dane grabbed his shoes and began to put them back on. “Nice try, Val. But I’m not interested in seducing some insipid fan girl.”
Val grimaced. “That isn’t what I was suggesting.”
He stood and threw two twenties on the table. “But since I have her under my tutelage anyway, I’ll teach her some questionable little loopholes. I can at least lay that groundwork.”
“Good.”
Dane slid open the bamboo door, but before leaving, he said, “If Geraldo wants to keep up his vendetta, he’ll find himself well matched.”
As he took the elevator up, Dane fiddled with the recording app on his phone, messing around until he knew how to hit the On icon with his hand in his pocket. He turned the app off. It went against his instincts to capture himself even in writing. But Val’s familiarity with the location of the app on his phone had left him unsettled. How many conversations had she recorded? Surely she’d only incriminate herself if she attempted to publicize anything said between them. And she had further to fall than him in the public eye. Still, he wondered if he ought to factory reset her device the next time she left it on her desk.
He exited the elevator to find Selena waiting outside his office door. He glanced at his watch to make sure he hadn’t stayed away longer than he meant. But no. It wasn’t even one yet. She bounced on her toes as he held the door open for her.
“Come right on in, Miss Valencia. I see you’re eager to get started.” He followed her in and unfastened the button on his suit coat. “I can’t recall anyone so excited to securitize assets. Well, not since Val.”
Selena beamed at the comparison. “If I can confess something . . . I came here to get a chance to work with you, so this is really a dream come true.”
Jesus.
Dane smiled at her as if she wasn’t being an insufferable suck up. “That’s nice to hear. You might feel differently after today.” He’d fully intended to start her off easy. The basics of structuring a security weren’t complex. The realities were like walking a tight rope ever since the financial crisis with many opportunities to run afoul of ethics and possibly the law—all of which Dane hoped to exploit in the next week. With Selena ready to eat everything he fed her as though he were a god of finance, maybe he could ramp up his lessons.
He pulled a chair around the desk beside him and loaded the loan tracking software. “Can you log in? We should do this through your account.”
Her jaw dropped. “Am I going to start trading?”
“Nope. This is a sandbox. You can do anything you want in here, and it won’t affect the real world. Play around. Make mistakes. Break the law.” He laughed, and she did, too, only a little harder than warranted.
“That’s funny.” She typed in her user name and password, and the page rendered with a menu for various activities.
Dane walked her through starting a new transaction, showing her how to choose the source of the assets, a shelf company for transfers if necessary, and a target buyer. “The system makes it pretty easy to create a sale. You’ll obviously need to learn about all the players here, but the hard part is selecting the assets to include in the sale. We’re just going to make a simple security to start.”
She nodded. “We already did some of this last week, but the whole time I was looking forward to real world opportunities.”
“We’ll get there.” He spent the next hour walking her through the different loan properties and showed her how loan buckets were created. Finally, he walked her up to how to build a tranche for the security. “And if we take loans from each of these buckets—”
