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Struggling to navigate without interrupting their exchange, Darius didn’t allow himself to lose control. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. The reminder repeated in his mind. Thankfully, everyone got out of his way, and the distance was short to the hallway running along the exterior walls of the nightclub. Exiting the public nightclub area, he navigated to a quieter spot where he could be alone with his mate. He crooked one elbow to trail against the cool paint, guiding him to the first open doorway in the corridor. As he turned inside, Darius shouldered the door closed before pressing his mate against the barrier. He couldn’t get enough of her flavor.
Her fingers tangled in his hair and tugged. Since she was kissing him back eagerly, Darius didn’t pause. When the gentle pulls increased in force, he yielded and raised his head. “Mate?”
“Mate? What is happening here?” she asked, visibly clinging to her self-control as she stiffened her arms to hold them apart. “You’re Darius? Darius Spanos, the accountant who hasn’t mastered returning a phone call? Put me down!”
Darius had survived for centuries by maintaining his composure and cool. His adorable mate’s anger made her even cuter, but he wasn’t foolish enough to share that observation. He set Mara on her feet and steadied her with gentle hands on her waist. As long as he could touch her, he should be able to give her some space. Maybe.
“Had I only known, Mara….”
She interrupted him before he could finish that thought. “Known? How about answering your phone like a normal human being? I’ve tried to get a hold of you for days! Risking my job! And you make me chase you to Nightfall? And I practically get kidnapped or murdered or….” She visibly struggled to find another word to throw at him.
“I owe you a lifetime of apologies, Mara. I’ll start with this. I should have responded to you. This is not an excuse but an explanation. In the last forty-eight hours, I have received approximately seven hundred and fifty email messages, fifty phone calls, and a hundred texts. Of those who reached out, your attempts to contact me are probably the only ones that aren’t scams.”
She stared daggers at him, but her expression lessened in severity as the seconds passed. “You need an assistant.”
“That is definitely possible. You met someone who helps me this evening. However, I would not subject Carina to the pressure of making those kinds of judgement calls in a multimillion-dollar business.”
“Carina works for you? She was lovely,” Mara said, visibly releasing more of the anger and tension from her body. She glanced around the private room they now stood in as if surprised to find herself there.
Darius cupped her cheek and leaned in to kiss her softly. “We are in a quiet space away from the bustle of Nightfall. You are safe here.”
She studied his face before nodding. “Thank you.”
“I am sorry, Mara. I have been waiting to find you for a very long time. Believe me, I’m kicking myself much harder than you slap.”
“I… I shouldn’t have hit you,” she mumbled, turning a captivating shade of pink. Then, as if trying to pull herself together, she waved a hand between their bodies. “I don’t understand what is happening here.”
“Would you rather start with the personal or the professional business we have together?”
She inhaled deeply and answered quickly. “Professional. I can’t switch to anything else until I’ve delivered the message I came to discuss with you.”
“Let’s start there. You work at the bank. Are you assigned to Nightfall’s account?” He watched her straighten and gather herself into professional mode. She intrigued him more than the attraction that connected them. Darius wanted to discover everything about his mate.
“Yes. I’m relatively new at the bank, and I’ve stayed on top of the accounts that I manage. Nightfall is a big client, as you know. I try to check in on the status each week to check for any reported difficulties and to scan the activity to make sure everything is updated correctly. I have an accounting degree and love numbers. For some reason, problems pop out at me. Almost like a person with editing training might pick up on typos.”
“That makes sense and is an excellent skill for an accountant to have. What did you spot?” Darius asked, intrigued.
“The discrepancies don’t happen often, but for both deposits and debits, the entries don’t match. Say the evening drop is $5.12, on the deposit recorded in the account only five dollars appears.”
“So, twelve cents disappeared somewhere?” he asked, immediately alert. That small amount of money might not seem like much, but anyone who has ever collected coins in a jar understands that over months, that change adds up.
“Twelve cents here, ninety there. The most I’ve seen is $3.49.”
“Did you ask someone about the changes?” Darius asked.
“I did. I didn’t receive an answer for several days. The email chain was long. I was immediately on guard when I saw my message to the tech department had bounced from one supervisor to the next.”
“Covering their asses, huh?”
“That was my impression. The response I did get from a bank vice president was a huge amount of hocus-pocus with words. I read the email a million times and couldn’t figure the message out. Well, I couldn’t follow the explanation until I got to the last line that informed me I was in jeopardy of losing my job for inappropriate usage of work schedule and resources.”
“Whoa. That went from zero to a massive threat.” Darius glowered at the thought of someone treating his mate so poorly. And the bank? Darius was too old to have complete confidence in any financial institution. He’d seen many fail over his two hundred years.
“I attempted to leave the problem alone and ignore what I’d found, but this is wrong. I couldn’t reach out anymore through anything traceable by the bank. I’d made a note of your name and number in my notes.”
“And you contacted me when you could without alerting the bank,” he guessed.
“Yes. I decided to try one last time to talk to you here.”
