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Thing. She assumed that was his code word for sex. She inhaled sharply despite having expected this question. It wasn’t an unfair question, after all. He’d hired her to do a job, full stop. “There is no problem, Ron.” Because Katie wasn’t going to let there be a problem. She had the thing with Luke, whatever it was, within her grasp.
He gave her a curt nod, surprising her by disappearing through the doorway without another word. Katie let out a breath of relief, thankful he’d let it go that easily.
And with Noah and Josh showing up shortly, she and Luke would have proper established boundaries. Now, she simply needed to come to a workable understanding with him. Then control would be restored, and she and her team would make this stalker problem go away for Luke.
Unbidden, a very female part of her flared to life and cursed the fact that she and Luke had been interrupted before they’d completed their thing. Control would be so much easier if she didn’t have the memory of how good almost making love to Luke Winter had been.
***
NEAR EIGHT in the evening, hours after the meeting with Ron, Katie sat alone at the informal dining table at the back of Luke’s kitchen, the house to herself. Ron had taken Luke to ball practice, and Katie had stayed behind to deal with the locksmith and the kitchen cleanup. She didn’t like Luke being out without her, but Ron was with him, and they had all agreed, she could only follow Luke around so much without breaking her cover.
After what had felt like chaos for most of the day, finally, the house was empty. Katie sat with her much-improved leg—thanks to several painkillers—propped up on a chair, her notebook computer open in front of her. Soon enough, though, Luke would return, and it would be only the two of them—alone again—a host of sexual tension bursting with life, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
Sadly, she saw Noah’s and Josh’s appearance later that night as a way to keep her chemistry with Luke from eroding her common sense. A buffer was good. The memories of what they’d done in that bedroom—the kisses, the touches, the pleasure—were diminishing her ability to think straight. And when Ron had surprised them, she’d felt guilty, she’d felt wrong.
But now…now, she felt conflicted. She wanted Luke safe. She wanted Luke in bed. She wanted to do what was right. Could all of these things happen together? She wasn’t sure, and since she had no time to really evaluate things objectively, she had to focus on what had happened today, and on Luke’s protection.
Beside her, Katie’s cell phone rang. No caller ID. Katie tensed. It could be Luke. It could be Ron. She answered. Silence filled the line. “Hello?” More silence. Her gut clenched. Not again. “You’ll get your money!”
She hung up and dialed her sister. No answer. Carrie never answered her calls. She was angry at Katie. As if Katie were the cause of everything bad in her life. Losing her parents. Marrying a creep of a man. And it hurt. Katie felt like she had lost Carrie, too. “Carrie,” she said into the voice mail. “Please call me back. Let me know you’re okay. I love you, sis.”
Katie tried to refocus on her research, but in the back of her mind she worried. Maybe she’d been too hard on Carrie over this gambling thing. It must be hard to have a husband who treated her like a rug, on top of the loss of their parents.
She shook off the thought. She couldn’t let the guilt eat her alive. This job was paying off the gambling debt, which was a monster. Donna was watching over Carrie. Everything was okay.
Katie punched her e-mail and found one from Donna—an Excel spreadsheet of Luke’s team that included everything from their date of signing and contract terms, to their marital status, even spousal names. Donna was using that list to add any red flags that her research had dug up on the different players. Katie planned to go down the list of friends and family with Luke, a process she was quite certain he would not be thrilled about, especially after seeing his reaction to Jessica’s potential guilt.
Katie’s mind went back to Carrie, back to that second silent phone call. She dialed Donna. “Is everything okay there? Carrie is fine?”
“Sugar,” she said. “Everything is peachy. I went by her place this morning. Well…aside from the fact that her loser husband was there, everything was peachy. I think Carrie is coming around. We had a chat about leaving her loser husband.”
Katie perked up. “You did?”
“Yep,” she said. “Even got her to agree to meet that new attorney who opened an office down the hall from us.”
