He hugged me and squeezed my ass. “We’re doing this again in two weeks at the latest. Now you need to sleep.”
“Let’s stay here. My bed is smaller, but we can cuddle.”
“Mm-hmm. I love cuddling you when you’re all mellow after sex.”
We slept wrapped in each other, Lothair’s nose in my hair.
In the morning,when my brain was online again, I remembered I had nothing fresh in the fridge. We drank black coffee and drove straight back to Lothair’s for breakfast. Just as we entered the house, my phone beeped.
Devon:Call me when you have a minute.
“My boss wants me to call him,” I told Lothair. “He never bugs me on weekends unless it’s urgent. I should probably take care of it.”
Lothair hummed with his gaze on his screen, distracted.
“Something the matter?” I asked.
“It’s Paris. He wants us to come by his place after lunch. It seems serious.”
Just like that, my mood darkened. Something was up. “Let me call Devon first.”
24
Smoke Without Fire
LOTHAIR
After a late breakfaston the patio, Terry paced the lawn barefoot with a coffee cup in hand as he called his boss. I was about to go inside and fix another cup for myself when he gestured for me to wait.
“Lothair is here,” he said into the phone, walking up to me. “I’ll put you on speaker so he can hear.”
Terry set the device on the coffee table, and I sat back down.
“Hello, Devon. What’s the matter?”
“Toby Olsen started talking,” Devon said.
I gave Terry a confused look, and he rolled his eyes.
“The screamer,” he mumbled, and I remembered. I would never have guessed that Toby the Screamer would not only try to film us having sex but then go and attack me in a stolen car. Some people were nuts.
“What’s he saying now?” Terry asked.
“That Carlos Sorensen hired him to approach Lothair,sleep with him, and get some intimate pictures. Later, he paid Toby to follow Lothair around and stage a traffic accident at a convenient moment. Toby might have misinterpreted some of those instructions, or Carlos was intentionally vague. In case Toby got into trouble with the police, he was supposed to have a top-notch lawyer plus a fat check as soon as he got out. Except Carlos stopped paying and didn’t send the promised lawyer, so Toby decided to spill instead.”
“Do we know where Carlos is?”
“No. The police won’t issue an arrest warrant since Carlos isn’t accused of a crime. Yet. He’s only being called in as a witness. They might threaten him with obstruction of justice if he doesn’t show up, but that’s it.”
“What?” I mouthed in Terry’s direction, but Terry lifted a hand for me to wait.
“They don’t know about the blackmail, I assume,” he said.
“No, they don’t,” Devon confirmed. “We didn’t tell them, and nobody from Paris’s team informed the authorities either.”
“Thanks for the update.”
Devon said goodbye, and we sat in silence. I was a little surprised by my lack of emotion. I should be angry. My own manager had been sabotaging me for months, maybe years, and I’d been the fool who never suspected a thing. I was annoyed at my own blindness toward Carlos, but my only real worry was Terry’s reaction to the news.
