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I leaned my head on her shoulder, still catching my breath.
“And if you try to pretend you weren’t into it, I’m not going to believe you,” she said.
I wanted to deny I’d ever done any such thing, but the fact was, I knew what she meant. The last time we had done this, I’d tried to put a wall up afterward because I had known we were crossing a line.
Fuck it. The line was well and truly crossed now, and there was no going back.
“I won’t tell anybody if you don’t tell anybody,” Alison said.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I agreed. “I think that’s best.”
“And then maybe we can do it again sometime.”
“Oh, I’d say you can count on that.” I’d utterly given up on the idea of trying to resist her. I knew that I was fighting a losing battle.
She hopped down from the table and collected her clothes. “I think I’ve had enough of work for the day. Shall we see about dinner?”
I had to laugh. A part of me feared that she would find this overwhelming and would object to what we were doing.
I should have known better. Alison was made of tougher stuff than I’d given her credit for.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s see if we can heat some pasta by candlelight.”
Chapter twelve
ALISON
Sleepwasimpossible.
There was the fact that I’d just had sex with Brianagain—apparently, that wouldn’t stop any time soon—but I was equally distracted by hunger. The two-day-old Italian food had been borderline inedible, even with the help of the candles, and I hadn’t been able to get much of it down.
With a sigh, I sat up and threw off the heavy sleeping bag I’d been using as a blanket. There was no chance of getting any sleep tonight.
I fumbled my way to the candle, and lighter Brian had left me with. He’d given it to me in case I needed to find the bathroom in the middle of the night, but I was going to use it for another purpose.
As long as I wasn’t sleeping, I might as well take another look at the finances.
The quicker I could get through my work here, the sooner I could go away and not come back.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know if that was what I wanted anymore. I had to admit that I was having a good time here, and ending my time with Brian didn’t sound nearly as appealing as it had at the start.
But maybe, if I could finish my investigation, we could keep seeing each other without the professional conflict. Perhaps that would make things easier for both of us.
That was what I was hoping for, at any rate. And he did seem as though he was willing.
I returned to the little desk I’d been using and set my candle down. Pulling the papers toward me, I lowered myself into the seat and bent over them.
Trying to see all those numbers by candlelight was hard work, but it was good as a way to take my mind off my hornier thoughts. For a while, I lost myself in adding numbers and comparing line items against sums.
And then something brought me up short.
It was in the numbers from the year before last. They weren’t adding up properly. In fact, they were many thousands of dollars short of where they should have been.
My heart raced.
This couldn’t be right. I had to have made a mistake.
I repeated the arithmetic, taking it slowly and carefully this time, double- and triple-checking each number as I added it, moving my finger slowly down the page so that nothing would be missed.
