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CHAPTER29
“What are you doing here?” Devyn asked as he watched Lucas gesture to the waitress for a cup of coffee.
“Trying to save your ass,” Lucas said, looking more serious than he’d ever seen him before.
“What’s going on?” Devyn asked as he tried to brace himself for the blow that he knew was coming.
He knew that he was taking a chance by spending the last month on the road, but he didn’t have a choice. He needed answers and he couldn’t get them from behind a desk. He’d considered sending someone else, but at this point, he didn’t trust anyone to make sure that they didn’t miss anything. He just hoped that whatever it was, that it wasn’t going to set them back. Christ, he wasn’t even sure how much more bullshit he could take from-
“Where’s Miss Dawson?”
“Back in her room. Why?” Devyn asked, noting the strain around Lucas’s eyes.
“You mean your room,” Lucas pointed out as Devyn sat there, clenching his jaw as he met his best friend’s gaze head-on.
“What’s this about, Lucas?” Devyn asked because Lucas was the last person that he wanted to talk about Andi with.
He’d fucked half the secretaries at Carta Hotels and rumor had it that he’d spent the first year working at Carta Hotels servicing Janet. He would just see Andi as a rite of passage. Lucas grew up in this world where secretaries were meant to be fucked and just as quickly dismissed before moving on to the next one. He’d never understood why Devyn didn’t play the same game, probably never would, and now that he knew about Andi…
Devyn would do anything to protect her.
“We have a problem,” Lucas said, grabbing a thick manilla folder from his bag and tossed it on the small table in front of him.
“What’s this?” Devyn asked, sending Lucas a questioning look as he opened the file only to frown when he spotted Andi’s resumé sitting on top.
“How much do you know about Miss Dawson?” Lucas asked, gesturing for Devyn to read on.
“Enough. Why?” Devyn asked, picking up the resumé and set it aside to find a factsheet about Andi beneath it. It had her name, birthday, address, next of kin and a list of employers that didn’t match her resumé. Making a mental note about that for later, he set it aside only to frown when he saw the financial report beneath it.
“Pretty impressive for an assistant, isn’t it?” Lucas asked as Devyn took everything in, from the savings accounts to the retirement accounts and finally, landed on the investment accounts.
“Where did you get this?” Devyn asked, swallowing hard as his eyes went back to the savings accounts.
“You weren’t the only one that wanted answers, Devyn. I got fucked on this deal and I want to know why,” Lucas said, sounding furious.
“What does Andi have to do with this? She was the one that stopped it from happening,” Devyn pointed out as he reluctantly turned the financial report over and…felt his stomach drop when he saw the police report from the night of his attack.
“Did she ever tell you why she was there that night?” Lucas asked.
“She was working,” Devyn bit out, not liking where this was going one fucking bit.
“At ten-thirty at night?” Lucas demanded in disbelief.
“Where are you going with this, Lucas?” Devyn bit out as he turned to the next page, noting that it was Carta Hotels’ security log listing all the times that Andi accessed the building in the last two months and-
“She hasn’t been to the office in the past month,” Devyn bit out, wondering what fucking game Lucas was playing with him as he noted all the times that Andi’s access code had been used to access Carta Hotels’ building in the last thirty days.
“No, she hasn’t, has she?” Lucas asked, keeping his gaze locked on Devyn as he reached over and flipped to the next page to the image of a tall man in a suit walking through security.
“What the hell is this?” Devyn demanded, turning the picture over only to find the same man entering the accounting department, the records department, and-
Oh, fuck…
His office.
“After everything went to hell, I wanted answers, so I hired a firm to find them. I had them look at everyone on my team, the board, and even you, but they couldn’t find anything that stood out. But when they took a closer look at Miss Dawson, they realized that there was something seriously fucking wrong. They started following her. They also had the IT department track her emails, logins, and her company phone records,” Lucas said, making him frown.
“She doesn’t have a company phone,” Devyn pointed out.
“Yes, she does,” Lucas said, reaching over to flip to the next page, revealing one of Carta Hotels’ equipment contracts and saw Andi’s name and signature at the bottom along with a phone number that looked familiar.
“That number,” Lucas said, tapping the number, “has been used to contact several of Carta’s hotels, making arrangements for the audited files and attempting to have money transferred.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Devyn said as he sat there, struggling to wrap his mind around everything that he was seeing and-
Fuck.
“We believe that’s the man that attacked you,” Lucas said as Devyn sat there, feeling sick to his stomach as he looked at the image of Andi wearing flannel pajamas and her favorite Eeyore slippers walking towards Carta’s building with a large man only a few feet behind her. “As soon as they reached the corner, he veered off towards the executive parking lot and Miss Dawson went inside.”
“That phone number,” Lucas said, pointing at the contract, “sent text messages to a throwaway phone every half hour, checking in. Then a little after eleven p.m., it sent a message letting the recipient know that you were on your way to the executive parking lot.”
“There has to be an explanation,” Devyn said hoarsely even as he had to admit that this looked really fucking bad.
“The files didn’t go missing until she touched them and they’re still going missing. Our accounting department and legal department have been scrambling to make sense of this. Hillshire Hotels has-”
“Hillshire Hotels has been advised not to talk to us by their counsel until after the investigation and bankruptcy case is complete,” Devyn cut him off evenly as he thumbed through the rest of the file, which consisted of more financial reports, surveillance images, emails, text messages, phone records, and letters talking about Andi’s past employment, each one more damning than the last.
“Thankfully, I managed to build some relationships with several executives over the past two years. They’re not saying much, but they’ve hinted that there was another hotel that was determined to make sure that this deal didn’t go through,” Lucas explained with a pointed look around them while Devyn sat there, staring down at the proof that he’d been fucked over by the last person that he’d expected.
