“I am.”
“So . . . we’re together again. Just like that.”
Ivy reaches out and touches his shoulder with her finger. She traces his little scar, the one he got when he fell out of a tree as a kid and there was a sharp rock on the ground and . . . She could tell the story verbatim, as if it were her own.
“It can’t be any worse than having the police visit you at work,” she says.
He props himself up on his elbow. “Are you screwing around right now?”
“No.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this.”
“Why?” she asks.
“You said never. ‘Never, never, never again.’？”
Yes, she had. The last breakup had been particularly nasty, even for them.
“Before that, I said forever.” She pauses, bites her lip. “So did you.”
A dozen times, at least. Maybe a hundred. Usually right before they broke up. Almost like they were trying to reassure each other that it wasn’t going to happen. Again.
“We need rules,” he said. “No games, no messing around.”
“Agreed. And no drama.”
“None. Zero. Zip.”
“I can do that,” she says.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He lies back down and closes his eyes. She loves that he has to think about it. Or pretends to.
But the fact that he makes her wait, not so much.
“No lying,” he finally says. “Not even once.”
“Deal.”
“Done.”
6
Wes Harmon is late for work.
It’s weird.
Bianca has worked at Siphon for almost fourteen months. After starting as an assistant in human resources, she was moved over to the sales department to be the admin for the whole team. Wes Harmon is part of it.
She keeps a close eye on him.
He slides right by her desk, coffee in one hand, computer bag in the other, and sunglasses covering his eyes. Wes smiles and holds up the cup, nodding to Bianca as he disappears into his office.
Hungover, perhaps, though she’s never known Wes to be a big drinker. Then again, it’s not every day the police visit him at work. Maybe he needed to drink more last night.
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.