Page 23 of Working for the Heiress

Her finger traced a path on my chest and she smiled in the semidarkness. “I don’t know the shape of it yet. But not tourism. Maybe I can find a job with search and rescue.”

We lay on the floor of her office, holding one another, thinking about how to use what we know to make a difference. I thought of Wolf grounding his bird after the crash, swearing he’d never fly again. Atlas walking out of the OR and not walking back in. The people we couldn’t pull from the mud. The wind raged on and Lili shivered.

I pulled her close. "When the power comes back on," I said, "the phones are going to start. Denver. Your father. FAA, maybe, about the medical transport delay."

"I know."

"There are things I need to tell you about Raptor Creek. About the crash, and the bearing that failed, and what your father's company did to the men who survived it."

She pulled back far enough to see my face. “I want to hear.”

I believed her. I'd watched her find the rot in her own family tree and decide to hack it down. She was already mine in so many ways and I felt ready to face what was next.

She settled back against my chest. Her breathing slowed. The storm was moving east, dragging its noise with it, and the silence underneath was the kind of peace I hadn't heard in years — not empty, just still.

We fell asleep, woke up in the dark as the rain hammered the roof, and I made love to her again. She cleaned up in the bathroom, her curves glowing in the red emergency light as I watched my woman move with confidence.

For two years, I had been rusting here, paying penance without an endpoint. Guilt over a system too big to fail. And then came her.

Her breath against my chest. Her heartbeat slowing into sleep.

When the power came back on, the outside world would barge through that door wanting answers from both of us. Raptor Creek and Boston and everything between.

I'd be ready, too.

Lili

I woke up to gray light and the sound of Conrad breathing.

The storm had passed. The office was cold and the carpet had left a pattern on my hip and his arm was heavy across my waist. I felt connected to him in a way I never imagined, like I was finally a complete person. It made the work ahead of me seem … not easier, because it was going to be terrible. But it all felt like it had purpose now. Like I knew what my future held.

I lay still for a minute, listening to the building settle, feeling the soreness between my legs and the warmth of his chest against my back and the strange, enormous fact of what we'd done.

His phone buzzed on the desk above us.

He didn't stir. I watched his face — the stubble thicker than yesterday, the lines around his eyes smoothed out in sleep, his mouth slightly open. He looked younger. He looked like a man who'd put something down in the night and hadn't picked it back up yet.

The phone buzzed again.

I reached up carefully, trying not to wake him, and pulled it off the desk. The screen showed a missed call and a voicemail from a contact saved as WOLF.

I set the phone on the carpet between us and lay back down.

Conrad's arm tightened around me. He made a low sound and pulled me closer, his face in my hair, and I felt him surface — the shift from sleep to awareness traveling through his body like a current.

"Morning," I said.

"Mm." His hand found my hip. His thumb traced the place where the carpet had marked me. "You okay?"

"I'm okay."

"Sore?"

"A little."

He pressed his mouth to the back of my neck and held it there, and I closed my eyes and let myself have three more seconds of this before the world started.

"Your phone went off," I said. "Someone called Wolf."