Chapter 2
Chapter two
Lucy
The man looked down at Steff with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
Not the usual reaction. Most people laughed, or reached down to pet her, or did the baby-voice thing.
He just looked at her, almost as if he was listening to something she was saying that the rest of us couldn’t hear.
Then he crouched, slowly, and held out his hand, not reaching for her, just offering it.
Steff pressed her head into his palm once, firm, and he let his fingers run along the line of her jaw.
Then his eyes came up and found me. It was like being caught in a current; something warm and electric and entirely too much, pulling through my chest and down through my ribs and settling low in my belly.
Two seconds of eye contact, and my skin was flushed, my fingers had gone tight around my coffee mug, and there was a buzzing under my skin like I’d grabbed a live wire.
I looked away and exhaled.
What the hell was that?
I’d never had that reaction to anyone before, not even for Artie Wes, the high school football captain who I’d been so obsessed with that I’d sat through an entire season of games in the Illinois rain pretending to understand what a first down was, and once walked into a glass door at Dairy Queen because he waved at me.
Spoiler alert: he hadn’t been waving at me, he’d been waving at his mom.
I took a sip of coffee to give my hands something to do and decided to absolutely not think about what had just happened, because if I thought about it, I’d have to deal with it, and that so wasn’t happening.
“Can I help you?” Dani’s voice cut through my thoughts. “If you’re here to adopt, I should let you know we have lots of options. I can grab you the paperwork—”
“I’m not here to adopt.” He reached into his jacket, pulled out a card, and handed it to Dani. “My name is Warrick Kassar. I’m a private investigator. I have some questions for one of your staff. Related to a financial case.”
Dani read the card. I watched her snap into guard-dog mode; shoulders squaring, chin lifting, the full five-foot-one of her planting herself in front of anyone she’d decided to protect. I loved that about her. Loved that she didn’t even think about it; it was just who she was.
“Which staff member?”
“Lucy Lewis.”
They were just two ordinary words, my name coming out of his mouth, and yet something in the way he said them made my nipples stand to attention.
Then my brain caught up. Private investigator. Financial case. Asking for me by name.
There was exactly one thing in my past that could lead to men showing up asking questions. I’d spent nine months burying it.
Damn it.
“That’s me. Can I help you?”
His eyes found me again, and he paused. For a moment, I felt frozen under his gaze, like he had pinned me in place while he drank me in.
Then he blinked, and the intensity dialed back to something almost manageable.
“You’re not in any trouble. I just have some questions.”
Dani glanced at me. Her look was a whole conversation: You okay? Want me to get rid of him? Say the word, and this guy is gone. I don’t care how big he is.
I studied Warrick Kassar. He was six-two, maybe six-three, and built like he’d earned every inch of it the hard way.
His body was that of someone who hauled things, hit things, and occasionally got hit back.
What caught me wasn’t the size, though. It was that I couldn’t stop tracking him.
I was aware of exactly where he was in the room, the way you’re aware of weather, passively, constantly, without deciding to be.
He wasn’t doing anything. He was just there.
But he was there in a way that rearranged the priorities of every nerve I had, and I didn’t know what to do with that, so I took another sip of coffee and pretended I was fine.
Dani was still watching me. Waiting for the signal.
Two months ago, I would have given it. Two months ago, I would have looked at a man that size and done the calculations I’d been doing since Andrew—exits, distance, how fast I could get to the back door.
No. I was done living that way.
“Sure,” I said. “There’s a break room in the back. We can talk there.”
Dani’s eyebrows said are you sure? And I gave her the smallest nod. I’ve got this.
I led the way through the back hallway. The break room was its usual disaster.
The couch had surrendered to entropy years ago.
The table wore its mismatched chairs like a badge of honor; Margaret had bought every one of them at a different garage sale.
A mug with the words I was normal three cats ago sat on the counter next to the coffee maker.
The month-long yogurt war continued on the sticky notes on the fridge.
If I find out who keeps taking my yogurt, I will put you in a kennel. This is not a joke.
And underneath, in Brian’s handwriting:
Worth it.
“Have a seat.” I gestured at the couch.
He didn’t sit. He moved to the wall and stayed standing, positioning himself so that I was nearest the exit and had a clear path out.
I sat on the edge of a chair, wrapped my hands around my cooling coffee. “So. What’s this about?” I asked, hoping I was wrong about the reason he was here.
He opened a notebook and took out a pen. Professional, organized, all business, except that his hand was so tight on the pen I was worried he was going to crush it, and there was a muscle ticking in his cheek.
Mmmm. This was weird.
“Andrew Coleman. He’s the subject of a financial fraud investigation. I’m told you were in a relationship with him.”
Andrew.
Just a name. Six letters. And my whole body went cold with it.
“I was,” I said. “For about eighteen months.”
“Did he ever bring work home with him?”
“He had an office at his apartment, if that’s what you mean.”
“And he worked from home often?”
“Andrew always liked to keep busy. When he was at home, he would typically spend at least a couple of hours in his office.”
“Did you see what kind of work he did?”
I paused, thinking how to phrase it. “Andrew didn’t like me going into his office,” I said carefully. “In fact, he actively discouraged it.”
The PI’s pen paused, and he glanced up at me.
“I see.” His voice was hard, and I wondered for a moment if he really did see the things that I was hiding.
“Do you know if he kept any files at home? Anything that may indicate he was working on something separate from his work at his financial firm?”
“Andrew didn’t talk about work much, but I always had the impression he had a few side hustles. He kept a locked filing cabinet in his office, and a separate laptop that he never took out of the apartment.”
His eyes stayed on the notebook. “And your relationship ended nine months ago?”
“I ended it nine months ago.” The correction was out before I could stop it, but as soon as I said it, I realized I needed him to write down that distinction.
I needed it on the record, in his notes, in whatever file this ended up in.
The difference between something happening to you and something you did was the difference between the person Andrew had tried to make me and the person I’d clawed my way back into being.
It was the most important difference in my life.
He looked at me.
“Can I ask why?”
I hesitated. “Is that relevant to the financial investigation?”
“It helps establish patterns of behavior.”
This was normally where I shut down, where the walls went up, and the humor came out, and I talked in circles until whoever was asking lost interest. I was safe behind the walls. Lonely, but safe. I had the feeling that wouldn’t fly with a PI, though, so I kept it basic.
“It wasn’t working out,” I said. “We wanted different things.”
He wrote it down as I took a sip of coffee. It was cold; I didn’t care.
“Do you know where he is now?”
I frowned. “That implies that you don’t.”
“Coleman’s disappeared. He knows he’s being investigated. We think he’s probably gone to another state, where he’ll lie low for a bit, then set himself up and start all over again. Unless we can get him before he does that.”
Disappeared? Could I be that lucky?
I shook my head. “Sorry, I’ve no idea where he is. But if he has gone, I’ll be doing the cancan on my kitchen table tonight.”
The beginnings of a smile crossed his face, and it rearranged him. He’d walked in gorgeous. The smile made him something else entirely, warmer, less guarded, the kind of face you’d do utterly stupid things to see again.
“Well, I have what I need for now. I’ll follow up if there’s anything else.”
Before I could reply, he turned and strode out, and for some bizarre reason, it felt like the sun had gone behind a cloud. Everything felt dimmer, and the world less bright.
I sat there, staring after him, and after a moment, Dani materialized in the doorway with his business card in her hand. She’d been hovering. Of course she’d been hovering.
“Well?” she said. “Do I need to call the cops, or was he just regular weird?”
“Regular weird, I think.” I picked up my coffee. Set it down again. Picked it up again. “The case is about Andrew.”
“Well, thank fuck for that.” Her voice dropped into the register it only found when Andrew’s name came up. “I hope they bury him.”
“Mmmm,” I agreed, my eyes flicking back to the doorway where Warrick Kassar had disappeared. He’d been careful with me. Kept his distance, had made sure he hadn’t blocked the exit, so I’d felt I could escape at any time. Did all PI’s do that? Or just him?
“So, this PI, you thought he was hot?”
Damn it, she knew me too well. “Dani!”
“For science, Luce.”
I rolled my eyes, but said softly, “Devastatingly.”
Okay, that was a bit more honest than I’d planned to let on to Dani, but he was devastating. His face alone had wrecked my ability to think straight. The trouble was I had exactly zero use for that in my life right now.
Dani held out his card. “Warrick Kassar. And a phone number. Nothing else; no firm name, no tagline, no trusted and discreet service since whenever. You know his name sounds like a hot Bond villain,” Dani said.
“It sounds like trouble.”
She grinned. “Same thing.”