You’ll let me know.” Lance loomed over her desk.
Ari looked up from her office computer. “For the last time, yes. I will tell you if there’s anything that needs to be said.” Jeez Louise. It had been two days since they’d had sex sans protection and Lance was still freaking out. Instead of testing out the dating waters, as they’d both hoped for, his calls to check in had turned into Pregnancy Watch. She was freaking out too, but for entirely different reasons. After they’d made love, and he’d held her tightly, it had been all she could do not to profess her love for him.
She’d been on the brink of blurting out her nascent feelings when he’d cursed and started whining about condoms. The postcoital glow disappeared as fast as the sun hiding behind a summer storm cloud. There was no getting the moment back. Thank goodness. That was all she needed: to have confessed love for a man who couldn’t wait to leave and was horrified by the thought of fathering a child with her.
A baby, wow. She surreptitiously rubbed her lower abdomen as she’d seen Valerie do. It was ridiculous. She was on the pill to minimize her periods and surely she’d know if there was a baby growing inside her. It seemed too monumental a thing to simply happen without her knowledge.
Normally the thought of raising a child made her want to vomit, and not from morning sickness. She simply had no experience with normal, stable families. How in the world would she know what to do with a kid? She’d be the best aunt in the world to Valerie and Jason’s kid, but she’d leave the parenting to them.
She spared a glance for Lance, her glowering, pacing bodyguard-slash-boyfriend. Him? He’d make a great dad. She could see him strolling the sidewalks of Georgetown with a kid perched on his shoulders. His protective instincts would make him slightly problematic during the rebellious teen years, but surely a cool mom like her could temper—wait, stop. What the heck was she doing? Fantasizing about marriage and babies with Lance Brown was a one-way ticket to La-La Land.
She crushed all the emotional hoohah out of her and refocused on the spreadsheet detailing the costs and projected sales for the upcoming show. She hated the math part of her job; of course it made sense she was easily distracted. Anything was better than her current task, but she’d made an internal promise that she couldn’t go on today’s date with Lance until she finished her work. However, given his current attitude, she might take the time to complete her quarterly taxes. For the next three years.
She refocused on the glaring white-and-gray boxes on the screen until her hired security guard, Tony, knocked on her office door. Lance stepped to open it and greeted two men and one woman. All wore dark suits and sunglasses. Ari recognized them immediately. Feds.
She rose off her chair and raised her eyebrows and nodded to them, but she wasn’t going any further than that. Months ago, when the whole brouhaha over her father’s crime began, she’d spent hours answering questions until she’d convinced the FBI that she was totally innocent and ignorant of anything to do with the Rose Investment Fund.
Why were they back now? She thought they were doing basic surveillance. Had they found anything? Did it have anything to do with her father’s disappearance? She turned to Lance, wanting him to make some sort of gesture of comfort, but he’d been acting remote and silent since he’d arrived; obviously, his brain was overly focused on their pregnancy scare.
“Ms. Rose, do you have a minute to chat?”
“Just a minute?” She sighed, knowing there was no fighting the suits. They’d get what they needed, no matter how long it took. “Sit down.” She gestured to the chairs until she noticed Lance was leaving. “Where are you going?”
Lance frowned. “You want me to stay?”
“Yeah, I’d appreciate having someone on my team. The teams aren’t evenly matched right now.”
Lance nodded and stepped farther into the room. He turned to the FBI agents. “Does she need her attorney?”
Thank goodness one of them was thinking rationally. Ari spoke up. “Yes, I do.”
“No, you probably don’t, but you’re welcome to get him on the phone,” one of the agents said.
“All right.” Her morning coffee was burning a hole in her stomach lining. She dreaded finding out why the FBI was here again, but at the same time, she wanted to get it over with.
Ari dragged an extra chair into the office, then walked around the desk to her own chair and called up her attorney on speed dial. Once he was on the line, she spoke to the suits. “Spill it. What’s going on?”
“Arianna, let me do the talking,” her lawyer reminded her on the speaker phone. Months ago, the last time she’d spoken with her father, he’d offered up his personal counsel, but she turned him down and instead retained the services of Valerie’s friend, Sean O’Toole. “Can everyone in the room please identify yourselves,” Sean said.
“Well, me, and my friend, Lance.” She turned to face the older agent on her right.
“Agent James Smithing,” he spoke into the phone.
“Beth Forrester,” the woman piped up. She looked exactly like the women Lance had mentioned were his usual type, coiffed brunette and painfully thin. She was eyeing Lance way too closely for Arianna’s comfort. She was tempted to go sit on Lance’s lap and claim ownership, but that would be a lie, and Lance didn’t seem to want her that way today.
“Gordon Marquez.”
“Thank you,” Sean said. “Now, why is my client getting a visit today? She’s already answered your questions.”
“We are here, along with Beth from the Department of Justice, to let Ms. Rose know the investigation is moving into prosecution and remind her three months is nearly up,” Mr. Smithing said.
Arianna’s heartbeat quickened and her skin got cold and clammy, even though she wasn’t one hundred percent sure what they meant. These last months had given her a crash course in the law, but every so often she was a floundering fish. “What three months? What are you talking about?”
“Arianna, let me talk.” Sean sounded annoyed and amused at the same time.
“Your three months to vacate the property before it reverts to government ownership,” said Agent Marquez.
Ari’s mouth fell open and her lunch lurched uncomfortably in her stomach. Vacate? What the hell were they talking about? “Sean?” There was a note of hysteria in her voice.
“We now have rights to seize all assets belonging to Mr. Stanley Rose. Didn’t your father’s attorneys inform you?” Ms. Forrester asked.
Lawyer Beth looked way too happy about this. Arianna put her pen down before she could do something stupid, like launch it at the woman.
“During the course of the investigation, we found paperwork documenting the sale of Ms. Rose’s gallery building, and as the building is in Stanley Rose’s name, we need to ask Ms. Rose to vacate the property, taking only her personal belongings,” Agent Marquez said.
Arianna began to shake. “No, you can’t do that.” Her voice quavered. “Sean, do something. Tell them they can’t make me move.” He would fix this, he had to. She’d held it together for months; she couldn’t fall apart now.
“Notification was sent to the law firm of Arnault and Skaten. Didn’t they inform you?”
“Arianna, relax. The building was a gift from your father, right? They can’t seize gifts,” Sean said.
“Unfortunately for Ms. Rose, it was not a gift. We found an IOU in Rose’s files,” Agent Smithing said.
“Do you have it in writing that it was a loan?” Sean asked sharply.
“It’s in writing. Why, what difference does that make?” Ari asked, bewildered. She didn’t care how Sean solved this, but he needed to fix it, stat, because there was no way she was moving out of her beloved loft apartment. How would she hold her show in three weeks? This was a catastrophe. “Sean, why does the IOU matter?”
Her attorney answered wearily through the phone. “Because now the gallery wasn’t a gift from your dad, but a deal between the two of you, and they have the right to take it.”
“No,” Ari nearly cried. “I didn’t think it mattered that I told my dad I’d buy him out someday. It was just a scrap of paper. Nothing official.”
“Nevertheless,” Ms. Forrester said, “it’s not a gift.”
She was such an idiot. Why in the world had she let Dad buy the building? Because he’d offered, and all that talk of escrow and mortgages had seemed complicated at the time. Well, complicated was nothing compared to this disaster.
She couldn’t breathe and could barely see clearly for a few moments. She focused on blinking back tears. Not once during the previous weeks of questioning had she shown any emotion to the FBI, and she refused to start now. Lance reached a hand out to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. If he showed any sympathy, she would lose it.
“Sean, what are my options? Can’t you reset the clock, since I was never informed?”
“I’m sorry. You have three days to pack up and move out.” The FBI agent looked sympathetic as he broke the bad news.
“Th…three days?” She’d need three years. Where would she go, and how was she going to hold her show? The show that meant everything to her, because it proved to herself that she wasn’t a total screwup, that she could manage something well in her life. Apparently not.
“You should leave now.” Lance stood up and hustled the suits out of her office. No, not her office anymore, their office.
She needed five minutes. Five minutes to rage, scream, cry, and weep. Then she’d stand back on her stilettos and come up with a plan.
Omigod, stilettos… her clothes. Where was she going to keep all her clothes? No hotel closet was big enough. She had barely had enough space when she went on a weeklong vacation let alone moved in.
“Ari?” Lance stood in the doorway looking at her as if he expected the computer to come flying at his head. “You okay?”
“No. I am not okay. Where am I supposed to go?”
“Hotel?”
She slumped back into her chair. “I guess this solves the issue of my stalker vigilante now,” she said. “If he can’t find me, he can’t hurt me, right? We can go tell Tony he’s fired.”
Lance sat in another chair and stretched out his legs on her desk. “I wouldn’t say that. If he’s determined, he’ll find you.”
“Thanks.” Arianna glared at him. “You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know.”
“So they tell me.” He smiled, but concern for her lingered in his eyes. “Come on, let’s figure out where you’re going to move and start calling moving companies.”