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Love Decoded

Page 114

by Nikki Castle

Some dads teach their daughters how to drive. Mine taught me how to pick a lock.

After I knock twice to ensure no one’s home, I pull the bobby pin from my hair and start in on the lock. It takes me next to no time to hear the click.

I’m quiet as I push the door open; just because no one answered the door, it doesn’t mean no one’s home. But it quickly becomes obvious that I’m alone in here because all the lights are off and the only sound comes from the hum of the refrigerator.

Still, I don’t flip on any lights. I just turn on my phone’s flashlight and quietly tiptoe down the hallway.

Based on the apartment listing I found while I was sitting in the coffee shop, it’s a decent-sized two-bedroom with a nice view of the city. And if I know men like the VP at all, one of those bedrooms is going to be used as an office.

I peek into the first bedroom and find…a bedroom.

Normally, I would go straight for the office and wouldn’t waste time on the bedroom, but my curiosity is at an all-time high. So I slip into the room and start to snoop.

It becomes clear that this isn’t the VP’s apartment where his assistant is a guest; it’s the mistress’s apartment that the VP pays for. The bedding and décor have the touch of a woman. And when I open the closet, I find it filled to the brim with woman’s clothes. Dresses, casual options, and a lot of business professional attire.

But this still doesn’t explain how this ties into the acquisition. The VP’s infidelities might be affecting his finances and risking his job, but I don’t understand how this affects Randall’s company.

So I keep snooping.

I sneak down the hallway to the next bedroom, fully expecting it to be an office. But to my surprise, it’s another bedroom. But it doesn’t look like it’s the bedroom of the executive.

It looks like a room that started as an office but morphed into the bedroom of a man also in his twenties.

It was definitely an office at one point. A nice one. But now, that nice mahogany desk has been pushed against the wall to make room for an air mattress. The hamper is overflowing, some of the clothes littered across the floor, and there’s a video game console hooked up to the miniature TV set up on the desk. The whole room screams frat boy.

What the fuck is going on in her?

The VP is fucking his assistant and putting her up in an apartment, and the assistant is living with a guy her age? What am I missing?

I dig through the rest of his stuff, but I don’t find anything. I don’t think the guy lives here, just sleeps here. I just can’t figure out why.

In the end, I revert to the place where I can always find answers. My laptop.

I should really go back to the coffee shop to do this, but I’m too curious to wait and too worried I might need to check something else in the apartment. So I open my laptop and set to work digging.

I find the assistant’s resume, her home life, her dating history.

Which is where I find the boyfriend.

I can’t be 100% certain that’s who lives in the other bedroom here, but her phone records and lack of other dating history make me fairly confident I’m right.

She’s fucking the VP, and at the same time, has a boyfriend on the side. A boyfriend who she moved into the VP’s apartment.

Could they be a throuple?

I sneak back into his bedroom, suddenly glad I stayed in the apartment for this. Because it takes me less than two minutes to find a drawer of both straight and gay sex toys. Proof that the men are also involved.

Okay, that’s an extra puzzle piece, I guess. Still doesn’t complete the puzzle, but…

I take a seat on the couch again to keep digging. This time into the boyfriend’s life.

Which is where I find another puzzle piece.

The guy is a shareholder at the company.

He is a frat boy, twenty-five years old and born with a silver spoon in his mouth. When he graduated college with a business degree, his father, one of the executives at the company, gifted him shares.

His father, who recently passed away from a heart attack.