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Now it had been two full days since she’d seen him, and she was burning the midnight oil at work. She glanced outside to see the office lights in the New York cityscape outside her window blinking out one by one until she could see more stars than yellow squares. Yawning, she stretched, then glanced back down at the file on her desk. She closed it and was about to call it a day when an email notification popped up on her screen. She opened it.
She’d been bcc’d in an email to Hardy Priese from a lawyer that wasn’t Rex. She caught sight of the wordsEmpowered in Financeand realized she’d been copied because the email had something to do with the charity. She wasn’t expecting anything important, maybe just something to do with the next financial report, but as she read the email, the phrasing was odd and didn’t make sense to her. Had the lawyer been high when she’d sent this?
Leaving the email open, she opened another window and logged into the financial accounts of the charity. Immediately, her heart sank.
Something was very wrong. Money was missing— expenditures unaccounted for and expenditures that were double if not quadruple the cost she’d have expected to see. Some of the costs were for Hardy’s travel, but that didn’t make sense. Most of the management for the charity was done remotely. Everything was online. There was a travel budget, yes, but it was usually used for the charity recipients, not for those who worked with the charity. So why was Hardy’s current trip to the Cayman Islands being billed to the charity’s account?
Could it be an accounting error? Accidental double-billings happened all the time. That’s why there were safeguards in place, automatic audits.
That was the likely explanation.
Hardy was working on another project with a similar billing code.
But yet . . . it looked like audits hadn’t been conducted on theEmpowered in Financereports for three years. How could that be?
She wasn’t sure what to do. She was one of the volunteers for the charity, but she’d volunteered her time, not her financial services. Only Hardy and his assistant had access to more than the charity’s bare-bones books. Yet she didn’t like what she was seeing. And that meant she was going to have to talk to Hardy about it.
She packed up and was about to head out the door when her desk phone buzzed, surprising her. Embrette had a skeletal crew at night, and she wasn’t used to calls coming through this late. She hit the intercom button.
“Ms. McKenzie?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Ms. McKenzie, it’s Tom from downstairs at the front desk. I’ve got your food delivery here.”
She frowned at the phone. Pressing down the intercom button, she said, “I didn’t order food.”
A long pause, then Tom’s crackling voice came through the speaker again. “Um, yeah, Ms. McKenzie, the delivery guy just showed me the receipt, and it’s got all the right information on it,” he told her. “Your name and office number and everything.”
Puzzled, she shook her head. “I didn’t order any food. So can you tell the delivery guy sorry?”
“Um, Ms. McKenzie? Everything’s already paid for.”
She drummed her fingers on the edge of her desk, thinking for a moment before realization dawned. She’d worked late last night, too, and Kelly had ordered her a meal that never showed. Maybe the restaurant had the wrong date? Her stomach growled. If it was the braised short ribs with pappardelle she’d ordered and never received, she’d be grateful. “Sure. Send the guy up, Tom. And thanks.”
It took a while for the delivery person to ride all eighty-two floors to her office, so she was drafting an email she’d intended to get to in the morning when the knock on her door finally came. “Come in,” she called out.
The door opened slowly, the light from the hallway moving across the dark carpet in front of her desk.
“Just set it on the coffee table by the couch,” she said, still working on the email. “Did someone already add your tip?”
“I think it’s me who is going to give you the tip,” a familiar voice drawled. “And more, if you’d like.”
She gasped. Julian stood leaning against the door frame in the open doorway, a delivery bag in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. He wore a zipped-up black leather jacket, dark jeans, and a simple black baseball cap. His dark grin was just barely visible in the dim light beneath his shadowed eyes.
Skylar swallowed, her heart pounding, then leaned back in her office chair as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
Only the horrible truth was she did care.
Cared that he was here.
Cared that he apparently was back for . . . something from her.
Cared about him.
Cared.
Too much.
