A Twisted Love Story(7)

Bianca gets up from her chair and knocks once on his office door. She opens it to find him getting settled at his desk.

“Your call with the bank is in ten minutes,” she says.

“Got it. Anything else?”

Bianca doesn’t move. She is halfway between the door and his desk, trying to decide if she should sit down and ask him more about what happened yesterday.

But he’s busy. And he is late.

“No,” she says. “Nothing else.”

She returns to her desk, still thinking about it. Not really her place to ask him anything unless it’s work-related. She doesn’t know if this thing with the detective is or not, because that little story he gave her yesterday isn’t adding up.

“How’s my favorite assistant?”

Tanner Duncan. A man so attractive he makes suspenders look good. He’s intelligent with charisma to spare—everything a sales director has to be. Tanner is the one who brings in the money, the investors looking for somewhere to put their millions. No one is better than Tanner at matching up the money and the startups.

He’s also a prick. Bianca has heard that from a few people but never seen it. Tanner has never been anything but polite and professional to her.

“Good morning, Tanner,” she says.

“What’s happening?”

“The team from Porterhouse confirmed for eleven. Your lunch with James is at Trattorio, and your three o’clock pushed to three thirty.”

“And the team?” Tanner asks.

Bianca clicks to the schedule screen, listing off all the reps who are out of the office today on sales calls. “We’re still waiting on two reports for Thursday’s monthly meeting. The rest have been distributed.”

Tanner leans over her shoulder to stare at the screen. “What else?”

“Dana has that meeting today with Infinite Investments, and Marcus is still following up with Bio-Reality.” Bianca looks at him. Tanner is checking his phone and nodding.

His head snaps up. “Good. Anything else?”

Yes, she wants to say. A detective came to see Wes yesterday, late in the afternoon, when everyone else was in meetings. And today Wes was late.

“No,” she says. “That’s it.”

Tanner walks away, toward his corner office.

Bianca checks her email and her phone. Still nothing interesting. But over the past eighteen hours, she has learned a few things about Detective Karen Colglazier. She has worked for the Fair Valley Police Department for over twenty years. Her husband had been a cop, as well, but he died in the line of duty. Bianca found an old picture from the funeral. Back then, it had been front-page news.

One more thing she learned about Karen: The detective is currently assigned to the Sex Crimes Unit.

Sex crimes.

Bianca isn’t a genius. She has known that since grade school. Some kids were just smarter, quicker, they could grasp information and turn it around, flipping it into something innovative, while Bianca was still trying to figure out the basics.

But she isn’t stupid, either. If there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s figuring out people. She does it all day long, on the phone and in person, translating what people say into what they mean. The two are rarely the same. Being able to read people is what makes her such a good assistant. Maybe a great one.

It came in handy when she worked in human resources. She could weed out bad candidates before they went any further up the chain. Though she wasn’t in the preliminary interviews, she had plenty of time to assess the applicants while they waited to be called into the back. She knew if they were early, on time, or if they were late, and she knew how they acted while they waited. Did they fidget, were they obsessed with their phone, or did they stare at themselves on a mirror app? If anyone didn’t seem like a good fit, Bianca deleted them off the final callback list.

She considered it part of her job. If the HR managers didn’t want her doing it, they wouldn’t have given her that kind of access.

Yesterday, after the detective left, Wes came out of his office and volunteered an explanation for the visit. “There’s been a few break-ins on my block,” he said. “She just wanted to know if I’ve seen anything unusual.”

Bianca doesn’t know a lot about police work other than what she has seen on TV, but it seems unlikely that Detective Karen Colglazier would be working on a neighborhood break-in. Sex Crimes focuses on things like harassment, stalking, assault, and rape.

She opens her desk drawer and takes out her Russian nesting dolls. She opens each one, seven in total, and works her way down to the second smallest. The eighth one is long gone, replaced with a key.

It isn’t something she should have. Assistants aren’t allowed to have a master key to all the offices.





7




Wes ends the conference call, tossing his headphones on the desk. He checks his schedule, hoping to see a cancellation, but his whole afternoon is still booked. Bianca always sends the agenda for the meetings, and he pulls up the next one. Hard to concentrate when all he can see is Ivy.

And if, God forbid, he forgets what she looks like, he can look at the picture on his phone. She doesn’t know he took that picture of her lying in bed, asleep, with a tiny smile on her face.

It isn’t recent. The picture is from the last night they spent together, almost a year ago, right before they broke up. When she had said, Never, never, never again. He had kept the picture as the wallpaper on his phone for a week after that, until finally forcing himself to remove it.