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She threw her hands up. “And with the distance my section is from home, I can’t drop in to supervise the A-holes.”
I didn’t respond to her obvious plea to switch territories with me. After the way my morning had gone, I knew a request to switch would be all Powell needed to declare me unfit for the job and hand it to Remy. No, I had to stick it out with my current area.
“Maybe we could go out after work,” she suggested. “Talk a little bit.”
“I can’t. I have a…” I was not missing the meeting with Duke and the whole Hawk Security crew this evening.
“A date?” she guessed.
“A meeting.”
She narrowed her eyes. “With a guy?”
My cheeks flamed, thinking of Duke.
“By the way…” She wiped away her tears and scooted her chair around to face me across the aisle. “If the car got totaled, how’d you get here?”
I stumbled over my answer. “A friend dropped me off.”
“Your face is turning mighty red, girlfriend, so I take it this friend is of the male persuasion, and you’re meeting him tonight?”
I nodded, trying to keep from showing any more embarrassment. Duke was definitely all male, and hot as fuck. I couldn’t allow my thoughts to go there.
She laughed and waved me off. “Go on your date, girl. We can go out another day.”
I was relieved when she returned to her work. I swiveled away as well. What would it be like if tonight actually was a date with Duke? Would he be a quick and rough lover, patient and thorough, clumsy and clueless? No, that last one definitely didn’t fit Duke Hawk. But the dampness in my panties every time I thought about him was a dead giveaway that I wanted to find out.
Duke
Serena’s suggestionthat I go to this Benson family event as her fake boyfriend had thrown me. If I went as her fake boyfriend, it would probably get me killed, considering how her father felt about me.
I could fight my way out of almost any situation, but Lloyd Benson was not a forgiving man, and he had the resourcesto hire a big enough army to take me down. He also had the resources to make a body disappear.
In this day and age, weighting down a body and dumping it in a lake or river had too many modes of failure, which then gave the authorities forensic evidence to work with. But someone rich enough to have a body dumped out of a plane a hundred miles offshore stood an excellent chance of getting away with it.
I’d completely forgotten to get Serena’s phone from her before she went into the building. Checking her message history would have to wait.
So, I met with the real estate lady and signed the lease for the office Jordy had located nearby.
My first item of business should have been a threat assessment of Serena’s message and email history, but without her phone, I was stuck with the mundane task of ordering the basics for my office. Constance had agreed to hang out there tomorrow so at least one of us would be there to receive deliveries in case I needed to leave. Next, I arranged for Jordy to set us up with computers. After that, I was stuck watching the clock and waiting for Serena’s call. Twice, I got on Amazon to order the book she was reading to find out what was on page 208. Twice I chickened out.
Serena
I’d just settledinto a groove at my computer when an interoffice message from Powell appeared on my screen.
Meeting in my office - five minutes
I pulled my mouse over and opened up the files on Knife Creek Chemical, the likely topic of this meeting since I’d failed to get the requested data. Work would cleanse my brain of naughty Duke thoughts.
Sophia Rossi had been the last one on the account, but I didn’t find anything from her. Katelyn’s fiancé, Leo, had been the auditor before her, and I reviewed his notes on the visits to their facility.
The Knife Creek guys—in particular the COO, Aiden Pons—had been real jerks to me. It was discouraging not to find any mention of assholery in Leo’s notes. It could only mean I was the issue. Either Pons disliked having to deal with a woman in authority, or it was my other cross to bear.
I got asked pretty often if I was one ofthoseBensons. When the question came up, it could either work in my favor, or against me. They’d asked during my visit at Knife Creek, and the way things had gone, I’d put them in the not-helpful category.
Going over the prior data, I didn’t find anything concerning about the contamination levels of the original spill, or the trends from the monitoring wells. At least getting rolled by them on the latest data wasn’t putting anyone in jeopardy, and I could endure Powell’s inevitable criticism for coming back empty-handed. All Leo’s reports, co-signed by Powell, showed a groundwater contamination site that had been almost completely cleaned up and didn’t even extend to the edge of their property.
Delays were the hardest part of this job, as the system we had was slow as molasses and risked endangering children with fouled drinking water or contaminated soil while we gave polluters the time the regulations allowed. But in this case, having delayed data would not endanger anyone other than me.
