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KATIE
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I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING when I say that I was actually cursing at the piece of paper in front of me.
And yeah, I know how weird that sounds. I mean, it was a piece of paper. How much could it really have done to deserve to be cursed at? It was an inanimate object, for goodness’ sake—I mean, unless you bought into that whole plants-are-actually-alive-and-have-brains thing. And they liked to be sung to. And they needed the right amount of affectionate.
But even if that was true, and they were that way when they were alive, I didn’t think that whole sentience thing would survive the paper-making process.
But I digress.
The paper. I was staring at the paper in front of me and flat-out cursing.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” I breathed.
I threw the paper down on the desk and starting pacing, going to my favorite activity for when my brain wasn’t working as smoothly as it should have been. Luckily, whoever had designed this particular hotel suite had evidently assumed that whoever lived here was going to be into pacing. The living room was really big, and there wasn’t that much furniture in here. A couch. A coffee table. A faux kitchen table, which I deeply suspected no one had ever actually used, given how shiny and brand new it still looked. One isolated chair, which was absolutely wonderful for curling up in and reading. The desk.
Where the offending piece of paper was now sitting.
I growled at it as I stalked by, sending every bad thought in my entire body right toward that piece of pressed wood fiber, and then turned my mind resolutely to more useful things.
Like figuring out what I was going to do about said piece of paper.
“List it out,” I told myself firmly. I needed to start with a list. It was where I’d always started, ever since I first started my PI firm—and before that, even—and it was what I always came back to. No, it wasn’t sexy. It couldn’t even really be called sophisticated. Definitely not fancy.
But it gave me a structure for my thoughts, and that had always been the most important thing. Even if I couldn’t do it on paper, with a pencil—my favorite method—just speaking things out loud often helped me get my thoughts under control and all moving in the same direction. And right now, that was incredibly important.
Because right now, I was failing at my most recent contract. And in my world, failure was not an option.
The quick and dirty: Adam Miller, of Miller and Co, the biggest marketing tech firm in the entire country, had hired me to solve a mystery for them. In short, Adam and his finance department in the New York office had come across some missing money—or rather they’d not come across it. Instead, they’d found money missing where it should have existed. And all signs had pointed down here, to the Houston office. Adam had hired me to figure out where that money was going, and who was guiding it.
We’d come down to Houston together, both of us taking on other personas to go undercover with the Houston office, him into sales and me into finance. It had been a pretty natural fit, there, as he’d started as the company’s one and only salesperson and I was a whiz with numbers.
From there, it had all gone sort of sideways. We’d thought we had a lead, and it had seemed like a sure bet, until we found out that the guy wasn’t actually hiding theft, but rather some faked college transcripts. It had taken us a week to get that far, and in that time, we’d not only managed to fail at finding the real thief but also sort of slept together.
Several times.
Now I was looking at a list of suspects from the higher-ups at the Houston office, based on things they’d seen around the office.
The first problem was that it meant they were pinpointing suspects that I hadn’t even considered. And when I was the PI here, that meant a big old failure on my part.
The second problem was that the longer this whole thing went on, the more that thief—or those thieves, I guessed—were stealing from the company.
Which led to the third problem: The longer the case took to solve, the worse it was for my reputation and my contract with Adam Miller.
The fourth problem: Adam Miller.
The man was so handsome that he somehow exuded smolder, with his dark hair and eyes and that scruff he’d grown out as part of his disguise. And don’t even get me started on the sexy Call Me Professor glasses he’d been wearing half the time we were down here.
He was also insanely charming, and impossible to say no to. I mean, I guessed it could have been possible to say no to him.
If I’d wanted to.
Three days on a case with him had pretty much proven that although my brain definitely did want to say no—and knew for a fact that doing anything less was going to put my entire career at risk—my body had different ideas. And those ideas involved a whole lot of getting naked with my boss and doing very wild, very dirty things.
In cars.
In public.
I growled and whirled around when I got to the wall, yanking my brain away from the memory of straddling Adam in the backseat of an SUV and sinking down on his cock, taking it as deep as I could while throwing my head back to give him better access to my neck.
This was not the time to relive that little episode. Or the way his eyes sparkled when he laughed. Or the feel of him on top of me in bed, holding my wrists out to the sides as he—
“No,” I muttered.
Bad enough that I’d slept with him twice and thought I might actually be falling for the guy. That didn’t mean I was going to let it interfere with me doing my job. I was going to be professional and completely grown-up. I was going to solve this damn case and do it without breaking any more of my personal rules.
I was going to stop thinking of Adam as the tastiest snack I’d ever encountered. I was going to stop flirting with him. Definitely going to stop sleeping with him.
Definitely, definitely, definitely. Because that was what it would take to get this contract finished out and save the company from losing any more money.
And that all brought me back around to the original problem. The contract. The case. Those three names on that sheet of paper.
Two of them were strangers to me, though I assumed that if they were included on the list, they’d done something obvious enough that it made the guys running the Houston office think they were suspicious. That would make them great leads.
The third name, though...
“Rachel, what exactly have you done?” I asked.
I made my way back to the desk and sat down, drawing a pad of paper toward me and grabbing a pencil. It was time for a list.
“Pros and cons,” I said, writing the words as I said them out loud.
And then I started writing everything I knew about Rachel. She was more outgoing than anyone else in the entire company, from what I’d seen, and seemed to know everything about everyone. She definitely knew about every social gathering the office had—and usually who would be there and who they might bring with them. She’d been quick to introduce herself to me when I first started working in the office and had immediately invited me out for a happy hour with some of the other departments.
She worked in finance, which meant she had access to the money and all the spending accounts for every rep. It would be easy for her to reroute money from the banks into a personal account. Theoretically. It would also be easy for her to do that and then make it look like someone else was doing it. Yes, there should be checks and balances there, and if she was just an accountant, she shouldn’t have unfettered access to the company’s bank accounts. But I’d come in and hacked the system within about ten minutes, finding it very easy to get access to each employee’s personal accounts with little more than a few well-placed guesses.
If Rachel was good, she’d have been able to do the same.
Even if she wasn’t, she hadn’t a lot more reach than people in the other departments, just by virtue of working in finance. If she was taking money, she’d be able to hide it just by getting rid of the account before anyone else saw it.
But.
She had not struck me as overly crafty. The truth was, she’d been so outgoing and so friendly that I had immediately written her off as Not Dangerous. She just didn’t come off as that person, and I was really, really good at being able to tell when people were dangerous or crooked. She hadn’t set my alarm off once.
The fact was, she was the one and only friend I’d made so far in the Houston office. The only person who had asked me to do anything outside of work, and definitely the only person I would call more than just a work acquaintance.
And that might mean I had an opportunity to study her more closely than the other suspects, who I didn’t even know.
It was also going to make this really, really complicated.
“An Adam complication and a Rachel complication,” I breathed, looking down at the paper in front of me. “Terrific.”
Then something caught my eye, and I tipped my head a bit, frowning as my brain turned a corner I hadn’t seen coming.
Adam and I had both come into the office unexpectedly, and I knew for a fact that a new position had actually been created in finance just for me. It must have been obvious to anyone who was watching that I was being shoe-horned into the department.
At the same time as someone was stealing money from the company.
I frowned harder, trying to grab a hold of that thread and follow it through to the conclusion I could feel forming right in front of my face.
Rachel had sought me out almost the moment I walked into the office and sat down at my desk. If I’d been shoe-horned into the department, then she’d shoe-horned herself into my life. She’d invaded my cubicle and invited me out with the other departments, and then she’d latched on to me when I went to the happy hour. At the time, she’d only had eyes for Adam and his capable-of-cutting-glass jaw.
At least, that was what she’d said.
But what if there was more to it than that? What if she’d suspected that I was being put into finance to keep an eye on the weird stuff going on in the department and try to figure out who was doing the stealing? If she was the one who’d been stealing, she’d have known that there was something to track, and might have made the jump to believing that eventually, the higher-ups would do something about it.
Something like putting a spy into the department to try to find the thief.
She’d come to my desk almost immediately.
She’d insisted that I come out with them.
She’d been seeking me out to chat every day after that and asking how the job was going and what I was working on.
I sat back in the chair, my lip caught in my teeth and my eyes staring out into the nothingness in front of my face.
“Oh my goodness,” I murmured. Could it actually be that simple? Could it be that it was right there, and I’d been so upset about what was going on with Adam that I hadn’t even seen it?
Because from where I was sitting right now, and all the things I was looking at on my list on the desk, it was looking really, really possible that Rachel had sought me out and become my friend specifically to keep an eye on me, because she thought I might be a spy injected into the department to watch out for her.
