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“So your boss is involved,” he said.
“Now I think that Knoll probably went to Seymour, who gave the vague instructions to Jerome,” she agreed. “Jerome doesn’t know how to spell ‘indiscreet,’ let alone behave that way. But he is a greedy little prick, so I suppose he was perfect for whatever this is.”
Jess took a sip of her bourbon. She hadn’t shared her thoughts on this with anyone. Getting it out in the open was both exhilarating and exhausting. What was the man across from her thinking? That her logic was flimsy? Some days she thought so too.
“I could be wrong,” she admitted. “I suppose there could be a logical explanation for all of this. Knoll might not be up to anything...sinister. He could be a completely legitimate businessman.”
“You’re not wrong,” he said, after a long pause. His expression didn’t waver, and she wondered if he was debating how much information to share with her. Who is this guy? “Maurice Knoll is a legitimate businessman. But he also has long-term ties with organized crime. Rumor has it that he’s also recently become a diamond smuggler, and that he’ll be receiving his first shipment sometime this summer.”
Whatever she’d expected him to say, this was not it. She struggled to keep her face placid, but her hands, resting on top of her closed laptop, trembled. Organized crime? Diamond smuggling?
Hope flooded through her veins, making her bounce with joy. “That’s such good news!”
He burst into gravelly laughter. Reflexively, her thigh muscles squeezed together and her breathing went shallow. Ignore it.
“Is it?” he asked, still chuckling.
“Yes!” Obviously. Maybe he was using the University systems for his illegal activities. Maybe the worms she’d uploaded to the servers could help her find out how. “If I can prove what he’s doing, catch him in the act, then I can expose him. Get my life back.” She looked down at her laptop, itching to get to work.
Out of the corner of one eye, she noticed that the man’s smile faded, and his bright eyes dimmed. She owed him a huge thanks. It was downright life-affirming to have her suspicions confirmed and to have direction again.
But wait, who was he and why did he know all this?
A wonderful thought occurred to her. She lowered her voice. “Are you, like, an undercover agent with the FBI?” That would explain all of his aliases, his insider knowledge of Knoll, how he quickly identified her as a fraud on Saturday night.
To her surprise, he wrinkled his nose and narrowed his eyes. “No,” he said flatly.
She quickly erased a silly mental image she’d formed of the two of them standing with arms crossed on their chests like superhero partners, victorious over Knoll as he cried on the floor next to an open suitcase of glittery jewels.
“Listen, Blondie,” he said, his voice so quiet that she had to lean forward to hear him. “This isn’t going to end with you and the Feds catching Knoll red-handed with a suitcase of shiny diamonds.”
She was intensely grateful for her poker face, embarrassed that he’d pinpointed her thoughts so easily. “How’s it going to end then?” she asked.
He gave her a wolfish smile: cold eyes and teeth. “With me stealing the diamonds.”
Chapter Four
He was going to steal the diamonds? Under-react, Jess. Under-react. Which made him a...
“You’re a professional thief?” With relief, she noted that her voice hadn’t risen. In fact, her tone was downright conversational, as though she sipped bourbon and ate pickles with career criminals every evening. Speaking of, she picked up another crispy spear and forced herself to take a large bite.
His cold smile grew warm again, turning into an honest-to-goodness grin, with sexy crinkled eyes and everything. He even laughed a little. “I’ll hand it to you, Blondie, you’re a cool customer.”
She acknowledged the compliment by a small twist of the lips. “Why go to the trouble of tracking me down?”
He looked mock-disappointed in her, wagging a long finger back and forth. “You’re going to pretend you don’t know?”
Well, crap. Of course she knew. He was well aware she’d borrowed Jerome’s keycard on Saturday night. If Jerome was in some way related to Knoll and this guy was after Knoll’s diamonds, then she might have information he could use. But wait, that only made sense in one scenario. “You think Knoll is somehow using his role as University trustee to smuggle the diamonds?”
“You tell me.”
“I have no idea,” she fired back. “I didn’t even know he was a criminal until you told me!” Well, not for sure. The unauthorized digging she’d done into his bank accounts over the past few months had certainly raised a lot of questions. But she hadn’t been able to link any of his financial weirdness with why he wanted all the University system access. Not yet, anyway. Her fingers itched to open her laptop.
He leaned back against the booth. “What did you do with the keycard o
n Saturday night?”
No, sir. That was her own work and her own business, thank you very goddamn much. She just gave him a Mona Lisa smile and sipped her bourbon.
