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“Kissing booth.” He turned his attention back to his laptop.
Years ago, Ryder’s mother had warned her never to poke a bear with a stick. While she’d always remembered her mother’s advice, she hadn’t taken it then and she wasn’t going to now.
Big, grumpy bears didn’t scare her. She liked hearing them growl.
Ryder tsk-tsked. “Funny, I figured you for a big draw at the dunk tank.”
His fingers froze.
A shiver of anticipation danced down her spine. Picking a fight with a client might not be the smartest move, but it was so much better than sprinting across the aisle and jumping his bones at five thousand feet. The butterflies in her stomach disagreed, but what did they know about anything?
“Here’s the brief on Sarah Molina.” He clicked a button on his laptop, and her tablet pinged in her black fake-ostrich-skin tote. “That should entertain you for a while.”
…
Trapped in midair, halfway into the nine-hour flight, Devin acted out his own version of Jack typing in the old Steven King movie, The Shining. But he was punching random letters on the keyboard to keep the horny away instead of the crazy.
The looney in this case sat curled up in the seat across the aisle, her bare feet tucked under her pert ass. Dragging his gaze back to the mumbo-jumbo on the screen, he went back to pummeling the keyboard.
Ryder wasn’t the first woman who had hightailed it the other way from him without any prior hint of dissatisfaction. Hell, a man couldn’t get to twenty-eight without at least one raging-bad breakup, but she was the first who’d sneaked out at dawn while he was drooling on his pillow.
He’d woken up that morning to an empty bed. The air had still been thick with the smell of sex, and his balls had been as heavy as fifty-pound barbells. She’d ignored a week’s worth of follow-up texts and calls. That kind of rejection stuck in a man’s craw—especially when he couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who’d run away.
Ryder crossed the aisle and slid into the bench seat on the opposite side of the table. Wispy hints of her heady cinnamon perfume reached out to him and sent his thoughts back to that night in his bed—although judging by the tightness behind his zipper some parts of his anatomy had never left the rumpled sheets.
She tapped her tablet screen and brought up the first page of Sarah Molina’s employment record. “So, Sarah has been Dylan’s executive assistant for thirty years?”
&nbs
p; “Yep, she climbed the corporate ladder with him. Rumor is she had to yank him up a few rungs, but she did it.” Grateful for the safe distraction from where his thoughts kept traveling, he relaxed back against the booth.
“His father founded the company. Why wouldn’t he float up that ladder?”
“George had some wild days when he was younger. He and my dad refer to them as the lost years.”
Devin had more than a few of those lost years himself, documented in bright ink across his body. He hadn’t gotten them as a carney as he’d told her, but training as a mixed martial arts fighter had seemed like a circus.
“Your dad and George are old buddies, huh?” She tilted her head. “Never hurts to have connections.”
She didn’t come right out and say “spoiled rich kid,” but he got the drift loud and clear. Of course, she didn’t understand that his father had demanded a hefty price for the privilege of being born with the last name Harris and the bank account that came with it. Devin had rebelled by being just the kind of reckless idiot his father had always told him he was. His brother, a certifiable genius, had stayed on the straight and narrow, but had still suffered the Harris family curse…in a way far worse than just dealing with daddy’s disapproval.
“Depends on the connection.” Refusing to go any farther along that dangerous path, he scrolled down his notes on the laptop. “Sarah used her company computer and email address to book her tickets to The Andol Republic.”
Ryder glanced up at the ceiling and sucked on her bottom lip, obviously mulling the facts. “She is either dumb as a box of rocks, wants to get caught, or doesn’t care that we know she’s the embezzler. Which do you think we’re dealing with?”
“She’s not dumb.” He shook his head. Iron-willed. Mean as a wet cat. Deviously determined. Oh, yeah, those pretty much summed up the executive assistant who’d spent three decades by George’s side. “I think she’s pissed off.”
“Why?”
“George hired a second executive assistant eons ago, about the time when the money started going missing. Sarah didn’t take it well. There was a big dust-up, but George wouldn’t relent. Then about a month ago, he hired another young assistant. You remember Suzie, the frazzled receptionist from yesterday?” When he paused, Ryder shot him a pointed stare that practically screamed, “Get on with it.” “Sarah is territorial and doesn’t want anyone messing with her turf.”
“And her turf was George Dylan.”
He nodded.
“So had they ever mixed business with pleasure?”
“No idea. And I don’t want to know.” He shook off the image with a grimace. There were some people he never wanted to imagine buck naked and doing the nasty. George was at the top of that list. “What may or may not have happened between them doesn’t concern us. We need to get to Andol, find Sarah, and get the money back.”
