Chapter 3
Ziggy squeezed the folder under her arm against her ribs. Damn thing was going to leave a mark if she held it any tighter. But it was better than spilling one of the coffee mugs in her hands.
She looked through the glass panel, like she'd done a million times before. Only this morning was different because Noah had gone and changed everything.
Again.
He sat at his desk, jacket on, his gaze fixed on his laptop with that razor-sharp focus he had. Noah had two speeds.
Work and sleep.
The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind him were lined with titles she'd watched accumulate over the years—organized in whatever system lived in his head and nowhere else.
She'd been standing there for two minutes. She knew because she'd nearly spilled her coffee each time on her white blouse both times she’d checked her watch. She pushed the door open with her hip.
He looked up before she'd cleared the threshold. "You left last night without saying goodbye."
She waited for the door to close behind her. "I said goodbye to your kitchen, your bathroom, and to everyone in my family." She set both coffees on the edge of his desk and dropped into one of the chairs across from him, doing her best to avoid his rich, dark eyes.
"You didn't say it to me."
"You were occupied." Sarcasm usually worked well for them, but since he didn’t chuckle, she figured she’d missed her mark. She shouldn’t be surprised.
“Right. Dealing with you and looking for you," he said. "And I've been looking for you all morning."
She opened her folder and clicked her pen because this was not happening at work. "Boots should be here in about half an hour. I want to go over what we know before she gets here so we're not fumbling around in front of her."
"We need to talk."
"I agree," she said. "About the card delivered to the station and the puck delivered to your home. We have to—"
“We’ll get to that after we discuss last night.”
Her pulse lodged in her throat like a fat bug. She looked up and stared at him.
His elbows were on the desk with his hands loosely folded and that relaxed expression she'd watched him use on senators and network executives and one city councilman who'd deeply regretted agreeing to a live interview. This was the patient, immovable Noah—the man that was impossible to ignore.
"This is not the time or place."
He smiled that wicked smile of his—the one she'd spent years building an immunity to and failing. “Five years ago, we did some things in closets—"
She glared at him with everything she had. “Do not try to humor me into this conversation.”
He raised his hands and leaned back in his chair as if he'd almost given up. "I bet you drove home last night and spent the whole evening figuring out how to walk in here this morning like nothing happened and how to avoid discussing what did." He folded his arms. "How'd that work out?"
“Great.” She picked her pen back up. “Now, let's get ready for Boots.”
"Fine. Have it your way." He pushed his chair forward and plopped his elbows back on the desk. "Since we do need to talk about a few work-related things. But we're having this conversation. Before we have dinner with Troy and Priela."
"I agreed to that under duress."
"You’re not backing out. That wouldn't be nice, and you'd rip my head off if I tried to do that because something made me uncomfortable." He tapped his finger on his desk. "Pirela's making some new recipe and she wants to use us as guinea pigs."
"Right, because it wasn't my parents who weren't supposed to go to that dinner and backed out. Now, thanks to my mother, my entire family knows we were alone in your bedroom for an undisclosed amount of time doing something potentially romantic.” Ziggy heaved in a breath and exhaled.
"I’m sorry I put us both in that position." He lifted his phone. "Two texts from Jag. One from Reid, who copied Troy, who sent a bunch of emojis that I'm not sure I understand. I even got one from your cousin, Zane." He dropped his cell back on his desk, screen up.
She couldn't help it. She looked and covered her mouth to stifle a laugh.
"What's so funny?"
"My family can be so childish sometimes." She pointed. "Those emojis mean suspicion, protective threat, monitoring, watching, irony, and that last one, I think, is ironic alliance plus maybe something sexual since it came from Zane.”
“I really appreciated Zane’s candor when he came on to speak about the misconceptions of sex clubs, but I think my cheeks were red the whole time.” He stared at her with those big chocolate eyes. The ones that often made her melt.
“Zane and his wife will do that to anyone,” Ziggy said, grateful that Noah could take the conversation down a level and even more thrilled that she could follow his lead. “How about you meet me at my place an hour before we need to be at Troy's?"
"Thank you."
She flipped to her first page of notes. "Now, can we talk about the fact that someone sent a hockey puck to your home address, and we have no idea who or why?"
"We're not telling Boots about that one."
"Why?" She set her pen down.
He pushed back from his desk and crossed to the window that looked out over the bullpen.
He opened his coat and shoved his hands in his pockets.
It was something she'd noticed he did when he was working through something—not pacing, just repositioning, putting a little distance between himself and whatever he was sitting with. In this moment, it was his past.
"Four years ago, we did the piece on the NHL player who was living a double life.
He wasn't very happy with me after that interview, and he did threaten me, both on air and off," he said, without turning around.
"Two years ago, it was the youth hockey coach scandal.
That wasn't pretty. Anyone who wanted to rattle me with a hockey puck has two legitimate reasons sitting in the archives that have nothing to do with who I used to be.
" He turned. "But we can't ignore the note. "
She already knew where he was going. She'd gotten there herself sometime around one in the morning when she'd given up on sleep entirely and sat at her kitchen table with a glass of water. "I've thought about that. What if we leave the note out? Just tell her that you received a hockey puck."
"We do that, and she'll dig hard into those two men.
Maybe harder than they deserve and not hard enough where her attention needs to be.
" He pulled his hands from his pockets, took three steps to the side of his desk, and leaned against it.
"And there is no version of a conversation where I can explain what that might mean without lying about it. "
Ziggy sat back in her chair. "But we can't just sit on it."
“We have to. It's not just about finding out who I am.
It's about the fact that we both buried the story five years ago.
That you knew and said nothing." Noah stood, removed his jacket, and gently placed it over the back of his chair before sitting down.
The thing about Noah was that he was meticulous.
Everything had a place—an order. And Noah didn't like it when things didn't follow that pattern, which was odd since things didn't always go as planned on a live show.
"I always figured that someday my secret would come out.
I still expect that to happen. My problem is how it affects you.
" He ran a hand across his face. "I know you don't want to talk about this now, but whether we stayed together five years ago or not, or whether something happens now, I've screwed your career, and I don't know what to do with that anymore.”
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Take responsibility for my choices." She cleared her throat.
“I didn't have to bury the story. I could've told you to go fuck yourself.
I could've taken that story, sold it to the highest bidder, and gotten a job anywhere.
But I didn't do that. And do you know why?
" She really hadn't wanted to get into all this.
Not now. Not tonight. Not ever, really. They brushed it under the rug five years ago, and that's where it stayed.
Except for once a year when things got a little weird.
But outside of that, it was never mentioned.
"I understand why. And I get that I'd do the same thing for you. But could you for one second look at this from my perspective and ask yourself if you'd want me or anyone you cared about to carry this burden for you, knowing what it could cost them?"
"You're making the assumption it's going to cost me something." She held up her hand. "I don't want to argue with you. And I don't want to talk about this at work. Too many people could be listening, and I know what your privacy means to you." She picked up her pen.
"I swept the office this morning," Noah said.
"I'm sorry?" She dropped the pen on the floor.
"For bugs." His tone was unbothered, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to mention on a Friday morning. "Before you got here. I had the security team do it. I told them I'd received another weird anonymous threat and wanted it handled as soon as possible. They didn't find anything."
A year ago, that concept would have stopped her cold. This morning, with two deliveries and a four-month countdown to the worst possible day for Noah, it mostly just made her chest ache. "That was probably smart."
"That's all you got?"
“No, but if I continued, we’d be talking in circles about your paranoia.” She pulled her notes forward and squared them against the edge of the desk. “For the record, I’m nervous, too. It’s why we need to go over all these threats that haven’t been reconciled with Boots.”
“All of them but the puck. That came to the house, and it was personal.” He opened the folder and pulled the four printed messages out, setting them in a line across the desk just like he laid out research before a broadcast—oldest to most recent, left to right.