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KATIE
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BY THE TIME MONDAY rolled around, I’d spent so much time lecturing myself about what a bad job I was doing that I wasn’t even sure I could see straight anymore.
I had also gone right back to the idea that I needed to get Adam out of my system if I was going to keep my head in the game. No, I hadn’t been thinking about him when I screwed everything up at Rachel’s. But I’d also never screwed a case up so badly before, and the only real reason for it was that I had a massive distraction on that case.
A distraction with bright blue eyes and a wicked smile and a body so hard that it felt like rocks covered by velvet.
Not that I was thinking about that. Not anymore.
I strolled into the office with only one thing on my mind, and that was finding a way to make up with Rachel. I needed easy access to her if I was going to keep investigating, and for that easy access to happen, I needed her to actually... you know, be on speaking terms with me.
At the very least.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a plan for how I was going to get it done. I’d seen the betrayal on Rachel’s face when she found me in that office, and I knew she had a quick trigger for that sort of thing, if only because of how she’d grown up.
She’d thought she could trust me, and now she wasn’t so sure anymore. And as much as that hurt me—and it definitely did—the bigger problem was the investigation.
I had barely sat down at my desk before I started missing her. I missed her sudden appearances and the way she draped herself over my chair and slid into it, just to drop some insane fact on me or ask me out for the night or tell me about how big her crush on Arthur had gotten.
I missed her shouting across the room at me, and to hell with people who might be on important phone calls or working on something that required focus.
Most of all, I missed knowing that she was right there, and that I had a friend on the floor if I needed one.
I turned around to stare at the chair where she usually sat... and found her in the doorway of my cube, staring at me.
“Rachel,” I said, too surprised to think of anything cleverer than that.
“Kate,” she responded.
Okay. Calling me by the nickname she’d made up for me. That was... something.
“I was just thinking about you,” I said quietly.
“Were you thinking about how shitty it was for you to go snooping through my things when I invited you into my house?” she asked, her voice holding no expression whatsoever.
I gulped. This was why I didn’t become friends with people who might be suspects, I reminded myself. Conversations just like this.
“I was thinking about how much I already missed you shouting across the room at me,” I admitted. “And showing up in my cube without any warning to talk about who knew what. And being able to consult with you about witches and what size of cauldron is best for mixing up hexes.”
Yes, I was playing dirty, calling up some of our best inside jokes. But what was I going to do?
I needed this girl back on my team. And I was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen.
She narrowed her eyes at me, her lips pressed tightly together. “I miss all of that stuff, too. But I guess you should have thought about that before you went pawing through my stuff.”
She turned and was gone before I could think of an answer to that—or offer my excuse again—and I stared at the empty space where she had been, realizing that I was going to have to do a whole lot better than that if I was going to get back into her good graces before she ended up stealing more money from Adam...
Or being accused of it, even when she wasn’t the one doing it.
***
“TELL ME AGAIN WHY WE’VE once more rented a car and gone to watch someone’s house?” Adam asked doubtfully, staring at the building that held Rachel’s apartment.
“We’re not watching her house,” I reminded him. “I’m here to apologize. Again. And bring her flowers. And chocolate. And a cheesecake.”
“All things that I agree with,” he said, glancing at the backseat, where the flowers and chocolate and cheesecake were all sitting on the seat. “But if she blew you off this morning, what makes you think she’s going to be any happier to see you now?”
I chuckled, though there wasn’t any mirth in it. “Have you ever said no to someone who came bearing a cheesecake?”
“No one has ever apologized to me with a cheesecake, honestly,” he answered quickly. “Although now I sort of wish they would. Because it does sound like a pretty good way of telling someone you’re sorry for something you did.”
“Exactly. It’s the perfect way. Non-traditional, but totally effective. Plus flowers. Plus chocolate. Besides, she showed up in my cube this morning. I didn’t go to seek her out. She came to me. And if I’m reading the situation right, then that means she’s willing to at least listen to me. I just have to give her a reason to do it.”
I could feel the doubtful stare coming from his general direction, though I refused to look away from the building in front of us. “You don’t think it’s possible she came to your cube just to rub it in your face that she’s not talking to you anymore?”
At that, I did look at him. With plenty of sarcasm. “Really? You think she’s that petty that she’d come all the way to my cube to talk to me, just to tell me we weren’t going to hang out on the playground anymore?”
His lips twitched. “Well, when you put it that way...”
I turned back to the building, my mind working through the conclusions I’d been coming to all day, around work and the investigation. “No, she came to my cube because she wanted to be the first to make contact again, and I guarantee there’s some sort of ulterior motive. Girls like to play the slow game. If she wasn’t talking to me, she would have stayed away and made it obvious that she wasn’t talking to me. That’s not what she did. And that means that there’s still something there. I just have to poke at it until I figure out what it is.”
“And this is so important because...”
His tone was leading, and I knew the trick question when I saw it. I turned to him with a very serious face. “Because I need to solve this case, and I need her to be speaking to me to do it. Any other questions?”
His eyes shifted toward the building as he thought, and then he tipped his head and frowned. “Yeah, actually, but it might not be something you can answer. What the hell is Arthur doing here, and why does he have a laptop with him?”
I jerked around in my seat, my eyes going straight to the front of the building, and stared, shocked, at Arthur getting out of a car with an enormous laptop already in his hand and starting toward the door of the building. He looked up and down the sidewalk, like he was looking for someone specific—or looking to make sure he wasn’t being watched—and then stepped up on the curb, his phone in his other hand.
“He’s typing something,” I said unnecessarily.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Adam noted. “What’s going on here? He just happens to be at the building we were coming to so you could apologize to Rachel? You don’t suppose he’s following us, do you? Or that he—”
The door of the building opened, then, and Rachel herself came skipping out, her face alight with excitement.
I saw her and immediately dropped down in my seat, knowing that I’d be well within her eye line if she looked this way. I reached out, grabbed Adam’s shirt, and jerked him down after me.
“Get down!” I hissed. “She knows both of us well enough to be suspicious if she sees us.”
“I thought you thought she wanted to be friends with you again!” he hissed back. “If that’s true, wouldn’t she be at least somewhat excited to see you here?”
“I do think that. But I didn’t expect to show up and catch her greeting Arthur like a long-lost...” I peeked up over the dashboard at where they were still standing on the sidewalk, and gasped. “... Lover. And I don’t think she’d thank me for seeing what I’m seeing right now.”
Adam sat up a bit and peeked over, too, and we both stared at the couple, doing our best to hide while also watching as Rachel reached up around his neck and pulled him down for a deep, passionate kiss.
“What in the great bagels is going on there?” Adam whispered.
I had no idea, but I knew what it looked like. It looked like that crush Rachel had been going on and on about had become something a whole lot more serious—despite the fact that Arthur was married and had kids.
It had also just become a whole lot more obvious that there was more going on than we’d known. If Rachel was involved with Arthur, then it meant I had to add her to the list of people who might be taking part in the larger con I’d already imagined for Joseph and Arthur.
Dammit.
“Whatever they’re doing, I’m definitely not going to go apologize to her now,” I murmured, watching as she took his hand and led him into the building. “Let’s go back to the hotel. If she’s in on it with Arthur and Joseph, then it changes everything.”
Adam sat up and put the keys in the ignition, starting the car while his eyes stayed on the sidewalk. “That,” he said, “might be the understatement of the century.”
