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“No. I worried like hell about you. Let me take you to lunch.”
“We shouldn’t.”
“I just want to talk.”
Tessa hesitated. “All right. Give me five minutes.”
“Sure.”
Zy hit the head and locked his computer, then headed to Tessa’s desk.
As he arrived, she slipped her purse strap onto her shoulder and dug for her keys. “Ready?”
She drove since he usually rode his bike to work, though this morning’s chill had convinced him that Louisiana definitely had more in the way of winters than he was accustomed to. Maybe having a car wouldn’t be a bad idea. After all, he wasn’t in Cali anymore… But he’d be damned if he wrote home and asked for the overpriced Porsche his parents had bought him. He’d fucking buy something himself.
“Yeah. Mexican? Chinese? Burgers?”
She sighed as he held the door open for her and they headed into the parking lot. “Salad. I’m doing my best to stay healthy. I keep trying to exercise during evenings and weekends like I used to, but Hallie is too mobile now to sit on the floor with a few toys while I do my own thing.”
“You can always call me,” he offered as they slid into her little sedan. “I’ll watch her.”
She smiled, an expression rife with both apology and regret. “It’s not your problem. I’ll figure it out.”
Zy wanted it to be his problem, but she needed this job. And every moment he spent with her was a moment fraught with desire that was getting harder and harder to resist.
“So…what did you want to talk about?” she asked as she backed out of the parking spot.
Anything. He just wanted to fucking be with her. But he had to keep his head screwed on straight and use his time with her trying to get the bosses off his back, not trying to get into her panties. “Nothing in particular. The bosses gave me a, um…side assignment. I’m working with Trees on some internal security stuff. Mind if I ask you about a few things?”
Fuck, he hated lying to her, and he didn’t think Tessa was the mole any more than he thought Trees was, but he had to start somewhere, establish who, if anyone, might have fucked with her computer or broken into her emails.
But his questions went nowhere. She’d never spotted anyone in the office messing with her machine or noticed anything amiss when she’d come back from the restroom or a break. She took it home most nights to get ahead for the following day. And on the rare occasions she didn’t, she locked it up in her desk drawer, as instructed. So there was almost no way someone would have unauthorized access to her computer. And Zy already knew Trees was way too sly to let someone into his computer without him knowing, so none of this shit made sense.
He was still stuck with two questions: How had someone known Trees and One-Mile would be in Acapulco, and who had passed Walker’s email with the schematic of Valeria’s safe house to Montilla?
He’d keep trying to figure it out. He had the shitty feeling the answer was staring him in the face, but he was too twisted up to see it. Probably because that wasn’t what kept him up all weekend. Maybe it should have been, but all he’d thought about was Tessa.
“Are you really all right?” he asked. “What I walked into on Friday night—”
“Don’t.” She stopped at a light and closed her eyes. “I don’t want to think about it.”
Because what Cash had nearly done to her was horrific enough. Zy didn’t want to think about how much worse it would have been if she hadn’t called him and he hadn’t intervened.
“I know.”
“You don’t. I feel so stupid. I’ve known for months Cash isn’t a good person, and I was never in love with him. He was a mistake that came from of carelessness and loneliness. I’ll be forever grateful for Hallie, but…”
“Why didn’t you kick him out sooner?”
“I wanted to. But I needed the money, and Cash promised he’d pitch in financially, which he did. He also promised to give me much-needed help with Hallie, which he didn’t. I talked myself into believing that I shouldn’t separate my daughter from her father.”
Zy got that. And in her situation, maybe he would have made the same choices. “Anything else?”
“Are you going to make me say it?”
Since he had no idea where she was going with this? “Yes.”
“I needed to distract myself from you.” Tears filled Tessa’s eyes. She tried to look away, but Zy couldn’t unsee her pain. “But I’d kind of liked Cash once, and I think some part of me was hoping that he’d make me forget about you, especially after you and Madison started…you know.”
He didn’t know. “You think we’re hooking up?”
“Yeah.”
“Baby, we’re not.”
“Semantics.” She scoffed. “You were. You called her after I signed my contract and all but announced you intended to fuck her again.”
