Page 78 of Never Let Go

“The company has faced its fair share of controversy. I’m sure you’ll remember seeing it all over the press last year and a few times before.” Her brows puckered as she thought. Then she nodded. “Our boss, Milena Kress, the CEO, is obsessed with privacy and cyber security. Our system is light years ahead of where it should be for one belonging to a dating agency. Absolutely everything we do gets recorded and logged, and the only person who can delete anything is Milena herself, but the system even keeps track of that.”

“So what you’re saying is that Hope can show me my profile. Who accessed it and when?”

I nodded. “She can show you the entire history of your profile, from the moment we received it to the final notes she made after our reveal date. Every keystroke and click related to our case is there. It’ll prove that she was the first at the company to access your profile, that she set us up, and that there’s no trace of me ever having looked at it.”

“Okay, but she’s your brother’s fiancée and you just said she was your longtime friend. The system won’t prove that she never told you about it.”

I smiled and inclined my head to concede her point. “Well, obviously you’ve learned a thing or two from the lawyers you work for.”

She gave me a tight eyed look and I sighed. “Fine. That’s another reason she said you could call her. She said you’d be able to look into her eyes when she told you that she’d kept it from me.”

Clearly, Shelby was still having trouble believing me. I didn’t blame her. Trusting someone when you thought they’d deliberately made a fool of you not once, but twice, had to be hard as hell. My gaze lifted away from hers until I saw Ashley’s smiling face in the crowd and I nodded at her.

She shot me a discreet thumbs-up, and a minute later, the music abruptly changed to a tango. I tightened my grip on Shelby and channeled my instructor from those lessons we’d had. If my words weren’t doing the trick, maybe the dance could do it for me.

38

SHELBY

After the tango, I was out of breath and staring up into Foster’s eyes. The fact that he would show up here—with a white rose, no less—explain everything, and then do that in front of all of these people just to remind me of how much fun we’d had together in the dark told me that he really did have feelings for me.

No man would’ve gone out of his way like that just to mess with someone. His explanation had also really made sense. I would’ve asked him to give me a moment to check that his brother’s fiancée really did work with him and that it wasn’t a lie, but I didn’t need to.

Now that he’d said their names and told me some of their story in the context of Sight Unseen, I remembered that I’d watched a part of a docuseries about the couple. Ashley had made me watch the end of one of the episodes with her before she’d signed up, and Hope and Porter had been the stars.

Of course, I wanted to watch it again—the whole thing this time—now that I knew Foster had probably been in it too, but before any of that, I needed to do this.

I pressed myself up on my toes, my arms looping around his neck, and I sealed my mouth over his. Foster froze for a beat, then wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me all the way into him as he kissed me back.

It was our first kiss in the light, but it was as electrifying—if not more so—than all those stolen kisses in the dark had been. My skin buzzed, my body melting into his. I pushed my fingers into his hair and held on to the back of his head.

Tears were leaking out of the corners of my eyes, but they were happy tears this time. Ashley had been right after all. It’d all been a misunderstanding. Foster hadn’t been playing me at all, and the only reason he’d given away my date back in college was because he hadn’t believed I’d wanted to go on it with him.

I wished in that moment that I’d had the courage back then to have given him just one moment of encouragement. Just one word that would’ve changed his mind and made him see that he had been then and still was everything I’d ever wanted.

But we couldn’t get the lost time back.

The best we could do was to make up for it.

Foster grinned against my lips as he slowed the kiss to a natural end, his fingertips now resting just above my ass. “Do you have any official duties left?”

“None.” I smiled back at him, deciding that I was going to have the courage now that I hadn’t had back then and just go for it. “Do you want to get out of here?”

He groaned, heat creeping into his eyes, and he nodded. “Is that even a real question? Where’s your stuff?”

“My purse is at the table, but everything else is in my car.” I took his hand when his fingers laced between mine. He strode hurriedly off the dance floor. I laughed. “We can come pick up the car tomorrow?”

“That’s a great idea.” He shot me a grin over his shoulder, snatching up my silver clutch—the only one on the table—as soon as we reached it. “Do you have to say goodbye?”

“No, I’ll just text Ashley on our way.” From the corner of my eye, I saw her watching us anyway, and I smiled at her. She beamed proudly at me and put her hands together in front of her chest.

Foster followed my gaze as he raced us to the main exit doors, nodding at her with a quick jerk of his chin. We spilled out into the cool night air. In one smooth move and without breaking stride or letting go of my hand for any longer than strictly necessary, he slid his jacket off his shoulders and wrapped it around me, all the while marching us to a white SUV.

Its lights flashed when we got close and he opened the passenger door for me, helping me in. He jogged around the front of the vehicle and collapsed into the driver’s seat beside me. I turned to him with an amused, playful smile on my lips even as I buckled up.

“You in a hurry to get somewhere?”

He turned over the engine and gunned it out of the parking lot, only glancing at me with that heat still in his eyes before he looked back at the road. “I’ve waited way more than long enough to get you in my bed, Shelby. I hope you don’t have any plans tomorrow. Or the day after that.”