Page 25 of Cocky Brutal Sinner

She wouldn’t try to set you up if she knew you had a girlfriend…

Yeah, right. If Mama knew about Brinley, she’d never stop harassing me to make things official, and that can never happen.

If I can’t figure something out, I might be stuck fending off Italian women for the rest of my life.

“Watch it!” Ryan barks at Nate as he dips a mozzarella stick into the bowl of tomato sauce. “If you drip that on the poker table, you’re paying to get it refurbished.”

Nate looks insulted. “I’m not going to drip on the table. I’m a grown man. I’m more careful than that.”

Ryan shakes his head and points at me. “No more bringing messy snacks, Beau,” he orders. “Clean food only. This is a respectable poker room.”

I shrug. “Fine. Next week, it’s all celery and carrot sticks. Save Ryan’s precious velvet tables.”

“Well I didn’t say you had to go that far,” Ryan grumbles.

I always bring food to our biweekly poker game, and so far, we’ve managed not to ruin the tables with crumbs and nacho cheese. Sometimes, Ryan just gets a little overprotective of the furnishings.

“I don’t know how you can care about food at a time like this,” Luke matters. “Not when we have no updates on Peppermint.”

“Let it go, Luke. Do we really need to worry about that on poker night?” I groan. I really don’t feel like spending my whole night throwing the guys off the scent instead of actually relaxing.

Luke just glares at me. “Peppermint cost me, Beau. This isn’t just about a deal not going through. I lost real money, not to mention the damage to my reputation. I want whoever did this found. Yesterday.”

“We’re working on it,” Nate says. “We’re all looking into our employees. Drawing lists of suspects.”

“It’s not moving fast enough. It’s time to start confronting our top subjects. Let them rule themselves out before we turn over the background for every janitor at the House of Cards.”

“Hold on. We can’t just go around accusing people without proof,” Nate says. “Not to mention, Peppermint might catch wind that we’re looking for them and find some way to hide.”

“Nate’s right,” I add. “We can’t jump ahead too quickly. If Peppermint invaded us for this long, they’re probably clever. No need to spook them.”

“If you want to narrow down the suspects, you need to look for patterns,” Ryan says. “When things were posted. How many of the articles are true, and how many are bullshit.”

“There’s a kernel of truth to all of them,” Luke says. “That’s why Peppermint is so dangerous.”

“It could be a journalist,” I suggest. “Someone who gets information from tips, someone who knows how to dig.”

“I was talking to Pippa about this,” Ryan says. “We both think it’s not a journalist writing these articles. Professional journalistic ethics aside, the details are too intimate. It’s not like someone could pick up the details about James’s contract marriage from just anyone. It’s got to be somebody we know personally.”

“Or maybe they just got lucky,” I add. “They got enough secondhand gossip to write some invasive stuff. It’s not like Peppermint has written about every scandalous thing we’ve done, so they can’t know everything.”

“Did your PI find anything, Nate?” Luke asks.

“Not yet. He’s assembling profiles on people who have access to us, but it’s a massive project. He told me we might not get results for weeks,” Nate says.

Luke sighs, disappointed. I glance over at James, waiting for him to offer the Sequel PI team. I know it’s way bigger than the one at UPS, and it could probably shave down those weeks to days. But James only takes a sip of his whiskey. He hasn’t said anything for a few minutes, I realize. Not that that’s weird for him. James isn’t a big talker. There’s something tense about the way he’s holding his jaw, though. Like he knows something, but he’s choosing not to say it.

“It could be someone who works at Terrace,” Luke suggests. “I know the PI cleared them, but maybe they missed something.”

“It would make sense if it was someone at Terrace,” Nate says. “They could listen in on us and talk to anyone who works in the building.”

“We can go to the next staff meeting and question them,” Luke says, nodding.

“What? No!” I snap. “You’re not interrogating my staff. It’s hard enough to find good servers as it is.”

“It was just a suggestion! What’s got you in such a shitty mood?” Ryan asks.

I hesitate. I can’t damn well tell them that I know exactly who Peppermint is, and the closer they get to her, the more my anxiety pushes my blood pressure up to a dangerously high level. Fortunately, there’s something else bugging me.