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KATIE
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“WHAT DO YOU mean you’re going to back off of seeing him?” Lindsey asked seriously, all the joking gone from her tone of voice.
“I mean,” I told my best friend, “that I didn’t come down here to get laid. I didn’t come down here to date. And I definitely didn’t come down here to try to get into my boss’s pants. It’s a bad idea. All of it is a bad idea. It’s bad for the company and my reputation, and it sure as fuck isn’t helping me solve the damn case.”
“But I bet it was helping your mental state,” she quipped, and just like that, my best friend was back. “And isn’t your mental well-being just as important as your reputation?”
I sighed, put my phone on speaker, and set it on the table so I could finish folding the laundry I’d just had washed.
The great thing about living in a hotel was that I could use the laundry service whenever I wanted—especially since Miller and Co was paying for it. The bad thing was that they didn’t come in and actually hang up the clothes they’d washed for me.
“My mental well-being isn’t going to do me one bit of good if I don’t have my reputation or my company,” I said, raising my voice so she could still hear me even as I walked over to the closet and started hanging up the fifteen pencil skirts I’d brought with me. “And next time I go on a trip, remind me to take something other than pencil skirts. I’m getting tired of these.”
“But they make your ass look terrific,” she replied.
“And that’s not helping me solve the case either,” I told her firmly. “I don’t need my ass to be terrific. I need my brain to be terrific.”
She snorted. “I don’t see why you can’t have both.”
“One thing at a time.”
A knock on the door interrupted me just as I was about to ask how her life was going, and I walked to the door and glanced through the peephole.
Adam was standing outside, looking like he’d just showered and combed his hair, his eyes turned to the side and his hands clasped behind his back. He was also rocking up and down on his toes.
He was nervous, I realized, confused. What the hell did that man have to be nervous about? The world was essentially his apple. Or his oyster. Depending on whether you preferred fruit or shellfish.
“Linds, I’ve got to go,” I said, swinging the door open and motioning for Adam to come in.
No, he wasn’t supposed to be at my room. We’d discussed this numerous times. But he had definitely heard me on the phone, which meant he definitely knew I was in my room, so I couldn’t exactly just refuse to answer the door.
“Why?” she asked, immediately sounding suspicious.
“Adam Miller just got here and we’re going to go over some of the details of the case,” I said firmly. “Unless you suddenly have something useful to add in terms of the case I’m working on down here.”
I knew she didn’t. I’d asked her advice not ten minutes ago, and she’d immediately turned the conversation toward Adam.
“Oooooh, Adam’s there?” she squealed—as if she didn’t know the phone was on speaker, which she totally did. “Case my ass! Call and fill me all the dirty deets when you’re done!”
I dove for the phone, horrified, but it was too late. Lindsey had already said what she’d said, and Adam had definitely heard her. When I hit the ‘end’ button and turned embarrassed eyes to him, I could see him fizzing with laughter.
Dammit. I was going to kill that girl.
“What sort of dirty details do you think she has in mind?” he asked, finally controlling his laughter.
“The kind that are absolutely none of her business,” I assured him. “Sorry about that. Lindsey doesn’t have a filter.”
“To be fair, she probably didn’t know the phone was on speaker. I’m sure she thought she was only talking to you.”
“Oh, she knew,” I told him, figuring I didn’t need to protect Lindsey’s reputation with Adam. It wasn’t like it mattered. They were never going to meet. “She knew exactly what she was doing, which is why she did it. Welcome to my best friend, Lindsey Davis. First grade teacher and party girl.”
“Lindsey Davis, first grade teacher and party girl,” he mused. “That sounds like a conflict of interest.”
I pointed one finger at him, making a face. “You have nailed it right on the head with that one. ‘Conflict of interest’ is basically her middle name.”
It was the truth. She somehow made it work, but it was definitely weird. She was one person by day and a totally different person by night, and unless you’d known her before she became a teacher, it was better if you just knew one or the other rather than both personas.
Trying to know both was confusing. Disorienting.
“‘Conflict of interest’ seems sort of unwieldy for a middle name,” Adam joked.
“Which is exactly why I’ve shortened it to COI. Lindsey COI Davis. Now, what’s up? I assume there’s a reason for this visit to my room, even after we discussed how we shouldn’t be visiting each other’s rooms anymore.”
He looked shocked and offended. “Hey, you visited my room last night!”
“Only because I needed to get you out of it so we could meet about the case,” I retorted. “Do you have something to talk about in regard to the case?”
He flopped into the isolation chair and sat back, spreading out in the way that only men really can. “Sure do. But I also wanted to talk to you about something personal.”
Oh, boy.
“Okay, what’s up?” I asked hesitantly, already knowing that this was going to be a conversation I didn’t want anything to do with.
His face, much to my alarm, shifted over to being crafty. Or charming. Some combination of the two.
“The truth is,” he said. “I haven’t seen you much lately, and I’m starting to miss you. You’re just so busy with the case—”
“Which is the reason I’m down here in the first place,” I interrupted.
He lifted one brow and continued. “—and Rachel that I don’t get to see you much anymore. What about dinner tomorrow night? A night without any work. Nothing about the case. Just you and me. I want to...” He paused and looked at me more seriously now. “I want to get to know you better. As cheesy as that sounds. I want to spend time that’s just you and me. No work. No suspects. No stakeouts.”
I had to smile at that one. “You didn’t think the stakeout went well? And here I thought you enjoyed yourself.”
He was up and out of the chair and standing in front of me before I could even compute that he’d moved at all, and when I looked again, he was standing right in front of me, heat radiating off of him and his eyes intense as they stared into mine.
“I can’t get it out of my mind, actually,” he joked—though his tone was anything but joking. “I think about it all the time. And I want more. But you seem to feel differently.”
Okay, so he wasn’t wrong. But he also wasn’t right. And I didn’t think he’d understand any of that if I told him. He wouldn’t know how it felt to be a woman who had fought tooth and nail to get to where she was in the industry, and couldn’t afford to slip up, lest someone send her back down to the bottom. He couldn’t possibly understand how scared I was of losing my reputation of being branded a PI that slept with her clients to get ahead.
He was already the head of his billion-dollar company and got everything handed to him on a silver platter. Okay, I knew he worked hard, but if he got caught sleeping with someone, people would immediately forgive him and think he’d only been sowing his wild oats or whatever.
They’d be a whole lot less likely to forgive me that easily. And that wasn’t something I could afford to forget.
I’d already failed to solve this case as quickly as I should have. I couldn’t afford to keep getting distracted by Adam Miller.
But I also couldn’t afford to upset him or turn him down. He was, after all, my boss.
Which was why I forced my face to soften—not hard when he was standing so close to me—and looked up at him through my lashes. “Well, when you put it that way... Dinner tomorrow night sounds great.” I used my softest, huskiest voice, and I didn’t even have to fake it.
Because no matter how much I told myself that I shouldn’t want him and shouldn’t want to spend time with him, I did. Everything in my body was screaming for him right now, with his well-trimmed scruff and his ocean-blue eyes, his admission that he missed me.
Shit, it was playing havoc with my emotions, and I didn’t even want to get started on what it was doing to the space between my legs. I felt like a lit-up filament just standing this close to him.
It was entirely too easy to agree to go to dinner with him. And it would be even easier to agree to go back to his room with him after that, depending on how much alcohol I’d had.
Conflict of interest, indeed. Lindsey might be the very definition of the concept. But I was walking such a fine line in that regard right now that I wasn’t sure how to put my feet down to keep myself safe anymore.
***
WHEN I WENT TO WORK the next day, I went out of my way not to share a cab with Adam—even though he texted me three times asking me if I wanted to.
Hey, don’t look at me that way. You know what I said about having to maintain my reputation and get this case solved without any further complications. And I’m betting you know I was right about that, too. I needed to spend some time getting his sexy eyes and able-to-cut-glass jaw out of my mind and teaching my body to forget about how his fingers had felt as they danced along my skin and spread me open to push inside, going up until—
Stop. See? I squirmed in the seat of the cab, biting my lip at the sensation the squirming caused.
That was exactly why I had to get away from him. Because thinking about him caused reactions like that, which were not conducive to using my brain and getting this case finished.
By the time I got to the office, I was well into a plan for how to spend my day, and I spent the morning slogging through file after file looking for inconsistencies, and then, when it was getting close to lunch, I texted Rachel.
Katie: Lunch?
Rachel: My name’s not lunch. Who’s this, please?
Katie: Breakfast calling. Wondering if you, not lunch, would be interested in getting a meal.
Rachel: I thought you’d never ask! My favorite deli is on the corner. My treat.
I grinned at my phone and started gathering my things. That girl was more fire than anyone I’d ever met, and that included Lindsey, who was practically made of the stuff. She always seemed to have a smile and a joke ready, and now that I knew what her background was, I wondered if that was a defense measure she’d put in place as a shield against the harsh realities of the world.
I also wondered if she was so cheerful because she was stealing millions of dollars from Miller and Co. and getting away with it.
And the moment I wondered about it, I hated myself for it. She could just be a cheerful, happy girl. That didn’t have to have anything to do with stealing money.
Sheesh, being a PI really made you paranoid and overly judgmental of people. It also made it really, really hard to make friends, because you just never knew who those friends were going to turn out to be. I loved my job, but there were days when I definitely regretted what it had done to my ability to trust the people I had met and decided to befriend.
I liked Rachel. I didn’t want her to be the bad guy. But that wasn’t going to change anything if it turned out that she was, in fact, stealing millions from the guy who had hired me to find the person ripping him off.
And with that thought, I grabbed my purse and my phone, jumped out of my chair, and went off to have lunch with the girl who had no idea I was investigating her for embezzlement.
