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What, that she was Howard’s daughter?
And what were Howard’s suspicions? Flint had already admitted he’d been in the process of opening his own business. That had all been before Diamond. Before Tamara.
“What did he say to that?” he asked because he couldn’t come up with anything else.
“He understood that I had to do what I had to do.”
“But he didn’t want me to know?”
She shook her head.
Okay, so all was not as he would’ve scripted it.
“He wanted proof, first.”
Proof? Flint needed her back in her chair, across from him, eating sushi. He had no idea how to make that happen.
“He’s not going to press charges,” she said. “He told me so. Especially not if it’s you. You need to know that...”
Press charges? What the hell?
No.
Grabbing the back of the chair with both hands, he stood calmly. His life was what it was. Always had been. Maybe it always would be.
And he’d deal with it.
“Why don’t you leave out all the preliminaries and tell me what your father thinks I’ve done.”
“Someone’s been siphoning money from the company.”
“And he thinks it’s me.”
She nodded.
Her tears didn’t faze him. The stricken look on her face didn’t, either. He noted both, but was somewhere else entirely now. He was in his own world, where there was just him. Knowing that he had what it took to deal with whatever was in front of him.
First was finding out the facts. All of them.
“And you’ve known this how long?”
“It’s why I was working at Owens,” she said, exposing more and more of a nightmare he’d thought he’d already seen in its entirety. “As an efficiency expert, I’d have access to everyone and everything in the company. He wanted me to see what I could find out.”
“You were his spy.” His mind was working. The rest of him was dead to the world. Shock, maybe.
Survival, certainly.
“Yes.” He respected the fact that she didn’t spare herself. Didn’t lie to him.
Ha! Irony to the hilt. She’d been lying to him since the moment they’d met.
A flash of that day in Bill’s office came to him, along with a stab hard enough to stop his airflow. “Bill knew.”
She shook her head. “Well, he knew who I was, but he doesn’t know why I was really there. No one does, except my mom and dad and me.”
She hadn’t been sent to him by Alana Gold. Or for any good reason. Her presence hadn’t been a coincidence; he’d been right about that. But her purpose...
“He wanted you to look into me in particular,” he said aloud. “Your interest in me—it wasn’t real...”
