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KATIE
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I TOOK MY PHONE AWAY from my ear and stared at it in complete and utter shock—which was something I thought they only did in the movies. I mean honestly, is staring at your phone going to do one damn thing to fix any situation? Is it really going to help you understand more of why your best friend would say something so stupid in response to you asking her for advice?
I put the phone back to my ear, still frowning. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that if I’m so concerned about what I’m doing with Adam—and if I think I might be making the wrong choice, because you know, professionalism and all that—then your solution would be to... take time away from the case to spend more time with him?”
Lindsey answered in her extremely serious voice, which meant that she absolutely did think this was the best possible route. She wasn’t joking. She wasn’t being sarcastic to try to make me see a point.
She actually thought she was giving me good advice.
“I absolutely think so,” she said primly. “You’re obviously head over heels for the guy, and I’d say that given the way he’s acting, he’s head over heels for you, too. You guys are hot for each other. You can’t stay away from each other, even when you both know that you probably should. Why not just lock yourself in one of the rooms for the weekend and bang it out? Get it out of your system?”
And now my mouth actually fell open. Because I’d known my best friend was a little bit rough around the edges in her off time—when she wasn’t playing teacher—but this was so far beyond anything I’d ever experienced from her that for a long moment, I couldn’t really even figure out what to say about it.
“Bang it out?” I finally asked. “Linds, have you somehow forgotten who you’re talking to? Or... you know, the fact that I’m here working?”
“You’re there falling in love with your boss,” she argued, her voice overly logical. “And if you can’t see that, it’s my job to force it on you. Have you solved the case yet?”
“No.”
“And are you making much progress?”
I bit my lip. “Well... sort of. We do have new suspects, and we have plans for how to get more information about them.”
“But you’re on your second week already. Honestly, Kate, has it ever taken you this long to solve a case before?”
I started to answer, but she cut me off before I could do it.
“One that didn’t involve murder, but was probably just something where there was a paper trail right in front of your face, just waiting for you to discover it?”
I closed my mouth firmly and tried to remember how long a case usually took me. I tried to find one that had taken me this long before, just so I could throw it in her face. I went through every case in my mental files, picking them apart quickly and looking for how long they’d taken and what they’d entailed.
I looked through everything.
And I didn’t find one damn case that fit the bill. Nothing ever took me this long. The truth was, I generally got into a case already having some idea about who I might be looking for, or how I was going to find them. And I almost always got them within a couple days. It was partially because I was that good, and partially because I knew how to organize myself for the best possible efficiency.
“I’ll take your silence to mean that you know I’m right,” she muttered. “You know you’re screwing around, you know this is taking too long, and you know exactly why that is.”
“I’m in a city I don’t know and having to work a day job while doing my investigation,” I protested. “And this is a big case! There are a lot of people to look at!”
She scoffed. “Do you even hear yourself right now? You’re making excuses for why you shouldn’t be judged on doing a shit job at your job! Katie, are you serious right now? You’re the biggest perfectionist I’ve ever met in my life. You’ve never been satisfied with anything other than the best when it comes to the work you do. It’s one of the reasons you’re at the top of the industry, and why people actually pay that insane fee you pretend is fair. You’re the best of the best, and you worked hard to get there. And yet now you’re actually making excuses for why things are taking so long. Are you fucking kidding me?”
I didn’t answer her right away. Because I did know she was right. Hell, I’d been thinking the same thing for the last week. I was too distracted by Adam to do my job well, and I was too attached to the idea of staying with him longer to want to get the case finished quickly.
Sure, I’d been paying lip service to wanting to stay professional and get this thing wrapped up. But it had only been lip service. The honest truth was that I hadn’t been putting my heart into getting it finished. I was having too much fun with Adam.
“More silence,” Lindsey observed quietly. “So you do know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I do,” I admitted.
“In that case, I’m guessing you can probably see the logic in getting into a room with him and getting him out of your system. Get over him so you can go back to work. That’s my best advice, Kate. You can’t keep him. Once this case is over, he’s going to go back to being a billionaire who dates a different woman ever week and you’re going to go back to a workaholic who can’t go one day without solving a case and doesn’t have time for a boyfriend. Enjoy him while you’ve got him. But get that case sorted out and come home. Period.”
I didn’t like what she was saying.
That didn’t mean I thought she was wrong.
It also didn’t mean I actually wanted to talk about it right now.
“I have to go to work,” I murmured. “Thanks, Linds.”
“Don’t say thank you when I know you don’t mean it,” she quipped. “You know you’ve never been able to lie to me, and I hate it when you try. And also, I don’t want to hear one more thing about this Rachel chick. I’m starting to think you think she’s cooler than me, and it’s making me insanely jealous.”
I laughed and told her goodbye, thankful for the fact that she’d gone out of her way to make the conversation a joke, in the end, just to take some of the sting out of it.
It didn’t change what she’d said. But it did make it a little bit easier to get off the couch and finish getting ready for work—where I had no doubt I’d see Adam, who Lindsey had just advised that I get over, pronto.
***
I’D ONLY BEEN IN MY cubicle for fifteen minutes or so before Rachel appeared, all bright red, low-cut sweater and black skirt paired with red heels and wild, curly hair.
And yet somehow still looking completely professional.
I needed to learn how to do whatever it was she did to pull that all together. Sex and professionalism at the same time. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but it could be one hell of a disguise.
She did that draping thing she did, this time against the wall, and gave me a pouty face.
“What are you doing this weekend?”
I whirled in my chair to look at the woman who was quickly becoming one of my favorite people—and realized in that moment that Adam might not be the only reason I was dragging my feet on this case.
He was a big part of it. Lindsey was right about that. But if I looked deep into my soul and really thought about it, I was starting to bet that Rachel would be a big part as well. I didn’t want to find out that she’d been stealing from the company. I didn’t want to think of her as a bad guy.
And it wasn’t a big jump to go from that to realizing that I was probably dragging my feet, just so I didn’t have to do either of those things.
Shit, I was pathetic. I was horrible at my job. This was exactly why I usually went out of my way not to get close to anyone during a case. It made things way too complicated.
It divided my allegiance and put me in a position where I was conflicted about the choices I was making.
So basically, I had a choice to make. Either I was good at my job... or I kept being Rachel’s friend.
Dammit.
“This weekend?” I answered. “Oh, you know. Hovering over my cauldron in the basement and thinking up new hexes. Practicing riding my broom. Getting my best robe cleaned. The usual weekend activities.”
She actually draped even more. “That sounds like so much fun. Do you want to come do it at my house?”
I jerked in surprise. Was she... inviting me to come do witchcraft at her house? Like, seriously?
“You want to do a witchcraft sleepover?” I asked doubtfully. “Are you sure you have the right equipment? What size of cauldron do you have? I need a big one, you know.”
She dropped into the chair. “I have the biggest cauldron you’ve ever seen, and I just don’t know how to use it,” she said, completely straight-faced.
“You provide the cauldron,” I said, equally seriously. “I’ll bring the ingredients.”
She gave a little crow of excitement and disappeared as quickly as she’d materialized in my cubicle, leaving a whiff of her perfume behind her.
I turned back to my work, reminding myself sternly that I was only going to her house to snoop. Not to be friends. Because being friends with her was only going to make the case harder on me, and at this point, I really couldn’t afford that.
***
AGAINST ALL ODDS, I actually finished my files early that day, and as I sat back and wondered what the hell I was supposed to do with the next hour, I remembered that I had another suspect that I hadn’t fully investigated yet.
Joe Ferry, in the finance department. Where I happened to work.
I yanked the floor plan down off my wall and scanned the names in all the boxes, looking for where Joe Ferry might sit.
He was right freaking next to me.
I couldn’t believe my good luck.
I got up and ducked around the wall between us, doing my best to look as bashful as possible.
“Excuse me,” I said softly. “Joe Ferry?”
He turned in his chair, an extremely good-looking guy who looked like he could be modeling... and yet was obviously a numbers geek.
There was a time when I would have fallen head over heels for that sort of combination. These days, of course, I found that I was a whole lot more into hot, muscular, slightly scruffy CEOs with shocking blue eyes and—
Stop. Business. Do your job.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Katie Walters. I’m new here?”
His face lit right up. “Oh, right! Katie Walters! I’ve heard you’re pretty amazing.”
I tried hard to blush, wishing I was one of those people who could do it on command. “I really doubt that. Just sparkly and new. Hey, I’m all out of stickies, do you have a pad I could borrow? I hate to introduce myself and then start stealing your stuff, but...”
“But it’s all on the company,” he said with a grin. He pulled out one of his drawers—which, it turned out, was chock full of pads of sticky notes.
And paper. And pencils. And what I thought to be at least five staplers.
“Have at it,” he said. “As you can see, I’ve got plenty.”
I walked in and started picking through the stash, pretending to be looking for a specific color while actually trying to estimate how much stuff he actually had here. This was insane. He was a hoarder of office supplies.
But why?
“How do you have so much stuff here?” I asked, surprised. “Do you buy this and bring it in yourself or something?”
“I tend to place big orders and then go through it over time,” he said quickly. “Nothing evil, I promise. Just don’t like placing orders, so I do it on more of a yearly basis.”
I did a quick mental scan of his files. That wasn’t true. That wasn’t true at all. He was ordering once a week, and they were all big orders.
The question was, why was he doing it?
And was he doing anything else on the side that I should know about?
