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“How can you tell?” He wanted to hear more.
“She was super hesitant before about the whole thing, but then you showed up, and her face changed. There was light in her eyes. And she got a larger tattoo because it pleased you. She's crazy about you. You get it, right?”
Right.
His heart rate picked up as his mind processed Hila’s observation. ‘Crazy about you’ were words that Dafna probably wouldn’t use, but her actions spoke for themselves. She put herself out there, trying new things, paddleboarding, getting a tattoo. She took huge risks for him, actively helping him send the emails, investigating her own company—because he told her it was important to him. She had put in the work. He would put in the work as well. The gig at her company, which stood between them, was over. Gal had already warmed to her and would accept her. He would ask to meet her children.
When Dafna returned, he held her hand, stared at her beautiful profile, and told his pulse to slow down. Dafna let Hila take pictures of her new tattoo. The photos were super sexy, showing her bare back, and just a hint of side boob, and no one but him and Hila would know it was Dafna.
“I booked us a boutique hotel close by,” Dafna grinned at him, “so we wouldn’t have to drive all the way to Tel Mond.”
“That’s great, but next time it’s on me.” She was a multi-millionaire, richer than him, but she wasn’t his sugar mommy. He was an independent man with his own means.
“Sure, now stop pouting.” He smiled, self-conscious, because he was pouting.
“I really should get a place in Tel Aviv already,” Dafna continued when they were out walking towards their cars.
“Why didn’t you?”
“My parents mostly, and because I didn’t want to, but now, after several weeks with you in Tel Aviv, I do. It’s so much closer to the office. It will be good for the boys too—they love it at Ilan’s and sometimes, when they don’t have scout activities or school, they don’t want to come home to the moshav.”
They walked together to her car where she stopped to take out her phone.
“Just checking some messages, and then you can follow me to the hotel,” she told him.
He leaned against Dafna’s passenger door and clicked on the Kisharti inbox. It had around eighty unopened emails, which he hadn’t checked since he’d been so busy at work. It was a hassle, routing the right email to the right salesperson and he had put it off, planning to do it over the weekend. The very first email was from a company called Optitraff.
“Dear Sir/Madam, As much as we liked the product, we terminated our agreement with Kisharti two months ago. We’d love to be clients again once you drop your price or we make more money. For now, please stop mailing us.”
“Shit,” he said.
Chapter 35
Give Me 24 hours
Her shoulder hummed with the taps of a thousand needle punctures. Her head ached. Unshed tears crowded her throat. She held it all in.
Erez had followed her car to the boutique hotel, and they’d gone up to the honeymoon suite. They didn’t open the bottle of wine the hotel left them, or went out to the balcony to gaze at the Judea mountains, nor had they used the vast bed.
He fired up his laptop, and they sat together on the plush sofa to examine the rest of the emails he’d received over the past several days. His jaw was set and his face impassive, as if he threw a blanket to muffle his reactions.
Out of the eighty emails, there were nine clients who said they were no longer clients. Nurit’s excels showed all nine as paying clients. She supposed that these had only arrived now because the companies that left Kisharti were the slowest to respond.
“This isn’t good. I’m convinced your friend Nurit is running a subscription fraud,” Erez’s words were clipped, precise, an accountant giving his verdict. “She keeps clients on the books after they leave, forges their payments, and thus inflates your revenue line. She makes it look as if you have a great churn rate. All so you’ll get your investment.”
“I know it looks bad, but it’s only nine emails out of 1,500–it’s still not very conclusive. Less than 1%. It’s in the purview of a margin of error.”
“We only sent emails to a portion of your clients. I’m pretty sure that if we send emails to all of them, we’ll find more discrepancies and percentages will be higher. This is exactly the reason the investors hired me–to check out for this kind of scam.”
She couldn’t argue with his logic. But she could appeal to his heart. Nurit deserved a chance to explain, and perhaps even somehow to fix it. This kind of public scandal would ruin her friend’s life. She tentatively placed her hand on his arm, and he shifted his gaze towards her, his eyes devoid of any expression.
“Give me a chance to talk to Nurit first.” She ignored the heaviness in her heart, the wail that was building inside, blinking away the unwanted moistness. She was in control when she met the cool green stare. “Erez, please. If you formally condemn her as our reviewer, it will be blown out of proportion. It will ruin her life.”
“You agreed to help me, but you shy away from the truth,” he threw at her.
“I don’t. I swear I won’t try to sweep this under the rug.”
Erez rose from his seat and stretched, rolling back his vast shoulders. They had been at it for three hours.
