Page 77 of How Not to Date a Griffin

“This is a list of the businesses he’s bought out since the beginning. A simple search turned up some small articles from local papers, as well as complaints about increased vandalism in the area.”

“Your dad?”

“I think it’s safe to say so,” he admitted. “There’s not a trail of crime that leads to all of them, but I bet with a few phone calls, we could verify the timelines from the owners. That’s why I need you,” Nolan said, pulling up the list of numbers he’d compiled.

“Me? What for?”

Nolan leveled him with a stare. “Do you think they’d rather commiserate with another victim of my father’s scheme, or the son of the man that stole their businesses from them?”

Reid winced. “Okay, yeah, I see your point.” He glanced over Nolan’s head to the clock behind the bar.

“What about the conference today?”

“They’ll have to find some way to survive without me. Something tells me they won’t have that much trouble.” Absently, he wondered if his father would even check in on him. Probably not.

“And so we’re… today?”

“Yes. We need to find all our evidence before they realize we know,” Nolan said, scrolling through the phone numbers.

The sun was rising, cresting over the city and casting Reid’s restaurant in a soft morning glow. They had the entire day to find what they needed.

It took him a moment to recognize the silence in the room. Unlike before, when he and Reid were alone together, this silence was heavy, pressing. It wasn’t comfortable and easy.

“It’s still early. We can’t call these people at six a.m. They’ll get pissed before they even figure out why we’re calling,” Reid said softly.

Nolan had already realized this. But to do nothing would drive him mad, so he aimlessly flipped through all his documents, poring over the fine print and hoping to find something more concrete than a list of complaints.

While damning as a whole, it was conjecture, and his father likely knew this. Probably had a plan in place to refute it. Probably had enough money to make it go away.

They needed something solid.

Money. Account. Tomorrow.

There had to be a paper trail. Somewhere.

“Do you want breakfast? I can whip something up real quick,” Reid offered.

Nolan’s chest squeezed tightly all over again at the hesitant tone in Reid’s voice. If cooking is what Reid needed to feel better in this moment, he wasn’t going to deny him.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said, fingers pausing on the mouse pad of his laptop. “Thanks.”

But then he was alone as Reid disappeared to the back, alone with his thoughts, and at the moment they weren’t very good company.

His hands fell into his lap, shoulders slumping as he stared at the screen, unseeing.

Nolan had thought himself lucky. Lucky that someone like Reid was giving him the time of day, even after the disaster that many of their… dates had been.

Because that’s what they were doing all along, weren’t they? Dating.

Maybe without so many words, but what else did you call it?

It suddenly made much more sense why Reid kept showing up at his door night after night.

A flash, a memory of warm hands and soft touches and softer kisses. Reid arching beneath him.

Had that all been a lie, too?

Almost as soon as the notion had crossed his mind, he dismissed it.