Page 16 of Working for the Heiress

"Okay."

"If anybody from corporate asks why you've been pulling archives, you say you're orienting yourself. You're new. You wanted to understand the operation's history. That's all. You stop the conversation there."

"Okay."

He looked at me. He had run out of practical things to say. There was something else he had come up here to do that he had not yet done, and I could see him deciding whether to do it.

I stood up from the desk.

I had no plan for what I was going to do once I was standing, but my body was drawn to his. I stepped around the desk toward him, felt the heat of his body, and closed the door, leaving a foot and a half of space to be swallowed by the energy of this man and his magnetism.

"Conrad."

"Yeah?”

"How long have you known?"

Conrad

"How long have you known?"

I could have said something evasive, blew off her question and went on with my hollow life. But I felt different since she rolled into town. Changed. I felt myself deciding to be honest with her, damn the cost.

"Two years," I said.

She didn't move, and I could see her doing the math.

"Since you got here…You took the job knowing —"

"I took the job suspecting. Knowing came later."

I had not said any of this out loud to anyone. I had not said it to Diaz, who had eyes. I had not said it to the bartender at The Foundry, who had ears. I had not said it to my own mother on the phone the four times a year she remembered to call me. I was saying it now, in a small office to the daughter of the man whose company I had been suspecting of it, and my mouth was working without my permission, and I could not have stopped it if I'd wanted to.

"I worked another garage before this one," I said. "Different state. Different fleet. Different reasons. I saw things there I didn't have words for at the time. By the time I had the words I — " I stopped. The shape of it came up the back of my throat, and I waited for it to settle. "By the time I had the words, anyone who cared to hear them was gone."

"Gone."

"There was an accident. A bad one. Most of the men I worked with left the industry. I came out here because your father's people offered me a job and I needed one and I was — I was tired. Of looking. Of fighting. Of feeling it all.”

"And then?”

"And then you got here. And I started seeing it again. In a different shape."

She was quiet. I thought of the people who died in that mudslide, the way good men just stopped practicing medicine after the disaster. All the deaths. All of it potentially preventable … but certainly not properly examined.

And I thought of this seemingly vapid heiress with the body of a pinup model, who could have sat here playing computer games but decided to go digging and figured out in an evening what had taken me years to understand.

I watched her hand come up between us, seeking my body, and I should have stepped back. But then her palm met the side of my face and those fingers fit along my jaw like a custom part fabricated just for me.

Her hand was cool. The calluses on the pad of her thumb caught on the stubble I had not shaved off this morning because I was in that much of a rush to get here and see her again.

I closed my eyes.

I knew if I kept looking at her I was going to do something I could not undo, and the work of two years of not letting myself want anything was going to come apart in a heartbeat, and there was going to be no version of either of us that came out of that room the same.

She let her thumb move along my jaw. Soft.

I opened my eyes.