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“You didn’t send it.”
I blinked at her. “Yes, I did.”
She shook her head, her hair swinging along with cute, dangly earrings. I reached up and felt the tiny stud in my ear.
“Well, I didn’t get it,” she said, sounding put off.
My eyes widened as I felt a trickle of panic. “What do you mean you didn’t get it?”
She held up her phone and I grabbed her wrist so I could see her inbox on the screen. “I. Didn’t. Get. It.”
My mind started to spin, wondering where it did go. I stared at Mallory. She stared at me.
“If it didn’t go to you, then where did I send it?”
I grabbed my cell from my crossbody purse and opened up my own email. Swiped to the Sent folder and—
Screamed.
Right there in the middle of Kincaid’s, like I was trying out for a horror flick.
All talking on the deck ceased and everyone turned to face me. I didn’t pay them any attention. All my focus was on the name in the To section of my email along with the attachment titled Sex Quiz.
“Oh my God.” My heart was trying to beat right out of my chest and my hands shook.
Mallory snagged the phone from my hand as I willed the ground to open up and swallow me down. A single-person sinkhole would be perfect.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, eyes widening, then meeting mine. “How did that happen?”
Since I didn’t seem to be actually dying, the bar patrons went back to their fun while I was going to have a stroke or expire of mortification.
I grabbed the cell back, stared at it, willing my eyes to be wrong. “You’re Mallory. He’s Maverick. They both start with the same two letters. M. A. You were doing that annoying Jeopardy music and it must have auto-filled the rest of the address and I wasn’t paying any attention.”
“With your boss’s boss’s name.”
I nodded, trying not to vomit because she didn’t know everything that happened today. “Mal, I just sent a sex quiz to Maverick James.”
2
MAVERICK
* * *
Friday 10:18 am - Eight hours before the scream
* * *
The last thing I expected this week was to be in Montana. Since the project in Hunter Valley wasn’t going smoothly–meaning it was somehow ridiculously over budget and behind schedule, I had my assistant rearrange my appointments for me to be here. It had been my idea to convert a local ranch property into a posh inn. To shift the development of our corporate chain of hotels from large mega-properties like on the Las Vegas Strip, New York’s Fifth Avenue or Belgravia in London to exclusive destinations with only a handful of guests. These new additions offered top amenities with unusual and custom excursions.
The first one in the San Juan Islands in Washington State had a waitlist after only being open three months. The latest in Banff opened last month. The project here in Hunter Valley was the third and while I’d been monitoring it closely, I doubted it was going to be ready for prime ski season. Not with the long list of issues.
That wasn’t going to work. I’d had enough excuses and cost overrides from the project manager. Not for me and not for the board of directors who’d backed me.
I flew up here to get it back on schedule and figure out what the hell was going on.
While it was my family’s last name on the side of the corporate headquarters in Denver, it was my ass and personal reputation at stake. I was CEO and it was my–and my brother Silas’s–company. I didn’t like to fail, and it wasn’t going to start now.
The jet landed an hour ago and my first stop in town was for coffee. I’d driven down the quaint Main Street, found Steaming Hotties, which was one hell of a name for a coffee shop, and parked out front. I took in the exposed brick walls, high-beamed ceilings inside. Eclectic tables and chairs were filled with even more eclectic customers ranging from old-timers in overalls to two moms wrangling toddlers with chocolate mustaches and crumbling muffins in their little fists.
