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“She doesn’t want to say it in front of me,” came Nikole’s muffled response from under the sheets. “Can you leave now, Sarah? It’s getting hard to breathe under here.”
“Sure thing, darling,” she said, then turned on her heels and left. Or was it a skip?
I blew out a breath and wondered what Sarah could possibly want to talk to me about that she couldn’t say in front of Nikole. “I’m going to take that shower now. Care to join me?”
“No!” she shouted and pulled the sheets back. “Just hurry.”
“I’ll shower in my room and I’ll leave you this one.”
Twenty minutes later, after I showered, shaved, and dressed for the day, I approached the kitchen in search of my unwanted guest. I heard their voices before I turned the corner.
“We haven’t been hiding a relationship from you, Sarah. This is brand new, like a few hours old, new.”
“Really? You went from hating him to sleeping with him in a matter of hours?”
“I never hated him. All right, all right, don’t give me that look. I was pissed when he stood me up and I gave him a hard time about it. But once I stopped being angry with him, these feelings just started to sneak up on me, and then last night, he… he—”
“Stop, I don’t want to hear this part.”
“I was going to say he was so vulnerable.”
I closed my eyes. Is that what she saw in me? Weakness and vulnerability. Was I a pity project? I’d heard enough.
“Are you ready to go?” I asked, stepping into the kitchen.
She jumped, spilling her coffee onto the white kitchen counter. “Shit, sorry.”
“Just leave it. Alma will clean it up later,” I said sharply. “We better go.”
She grabbed a paper towel and wiped it clean, anyway. Then, putting her cup in the dishwasher, she waved to Sarah. “I’ll see you later.”
Sarah wiggled her fingers back. “Later, Nic.”
When we entered the elevator, Nikole looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back, but my head warned me not to get close.
The elevator doors opened, and I unlocked my car. Once inside, I got straight to business. “Jager compiled a list of who checked out books or surfed the net on privacy laws in the New York Library. It’s pretty extensive, but he cross-referenced names of students currently enrolled in law school and scratched them from the list.”
“That’s good. How many people are we talking about now?”
“A couple of hundred, I think.”
“Wow, that’s still a lot of people to research, but we won’t give up.”
I wasn’t worried about us giving up. I was worried about the guy planning something and getting to Nikole or her mother before we got him. I was worried we were racing against time. But I wasn’t going to worry her about that.
When we arrived at her office building, a half dozen reporters waited for her outside.
I nearly ran one over when he blocked my entrance into the parking lot. Then another put a camera right in Nikole’s face, so I had to elbow him in the stomach.
But we weren’t the only ones bothered.
When Nikole left her boss’s office an hour later, her face was red and blotchy. She walked briskly down the hallway to her office and closed the door, but I opened it and walked right in.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Marty just told me I have to work from home until this stuff with my mother cools down,” she said as she slammed her pen on her desk and grabbed her laptop.
“Well, that’s not such a bad idea.” I was glad I could protect Nikole from the safety of my home rather than deal with these annoying journalists. “A stalker could pretend to be one of those reporters.”
