Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It

by Lucy Monroe

  She listened with fractured attention while he spoke tersely to Marcus, telling him about her discovery. From his side of the conversation, she gathered that Marcus was on his way up to Mr. Kline's office. That fact stymied her. She just could not make the connection here.

  Why Marcus?

  After ringing off with Marcus, Mr. Kline punched another number on his phone pad. He said Allison's the conversation.

  Her mind was too occupied by the one fact that made no sense. Mr. Kline had called Marcus… before anyone else. Allison came into the office, carrying a notepad. She proceeded to pull two chairs that matched the ones in the waiting room into place across from the sofa and glass table. She then sat down in one of them, saying nothing to Veronica.

  A minute later, the head of internal security, Ben Warren, came into the office. He said something in an undertone to Mr. Kline, who was still on the phone, and then came across the room to sit next to Allison. He smiled at Veronica and she forced herself to respond in kind, though a sense of unreality was beginning to take hold.

  Seconds later, Marcus arrived. Mr. Kline hung up his phone and conferred in whispers with Marcus, glancing Veronica's way several times before both men came to join the group by the window.

  She felt like an animal on display at a zoo, the way they kept looking at her. Did they expect her to stand up and do tricks? What was going on now? As more questions popped up in her mind, like numbers on an old-fashioned cash register, she tried to ignore the unease skittering along her spine and her feeling that Marcus had told Mr. Kline about her past wasn't such a silly fear after all.

  Ignoring the empty chair across from the one Mr. Kline returned to, Marcus sat down on the couch next to her. Veronica gave him a sideways glance, but kept her body facing forward. She could not help wondering if he was here because hehad told Mr. Kline about her past. Would he sit in accusation and condemnation of her now, asserting that she had something to do with the e-mail she'd shared with the company president?

  The idea seemed too far-fetched to be believed, but then she realized she was not feeling or thinking in a particularly rational manner at the moment. Feeling guilty for doubting the man with whom she had so recently shared her body and part of her soul, she pushed the doubts away and focused on breathing in a normal, relaxed manner.

  It wouldn't look good if she started hyperventilating for no apparent reason right there on Mr. Kline's designer leather sofa.

  Marcus leaned across her and picked up the e-mail. She got a whiff of his aftershave and the clean, male scent she always associated with him. She wanted to reach out and touch him, take his hand and draw on his strength as her sense of unreality grew in proportion to the strangeness of the situation.

  "Is this the message you found when you downloaded the team's e-mail last week?" he asked, turning his head so that his attention fixed firmly on her.

  'Yes." She looked at him, trying to read some-thing from his closed expression, but not succeeding.

  She wished he'd smile at her, subtly brush her leg with his own, anything to reassure her that her fears were ungrounded.

  "When did you receive this message?"

  'Thursday." Why washe asking the questions? Why not Ben,the head of internal security ?

  He looked down at the paper and then back up at her. "The recipient and sender are blank. Do you have any way of telling who either might be?"

  "No. I've already been over this with Mr. Kline."

  Marcus shrugged. "Kline said you deleted the actual electronic message off of your system. Is that right?"

  She nodded jerkily, her feeling of disorientation growing.

  Looking around, she tried to gauge if the rest of the people in the room found Marcus's behavior as strange as she did. He was acting like a corporate investigator, not a consultant. Allison had her notepad flat on her lap and she'd clearly been taking notes, but there was a tension in her posture that hadn't been there before.

  Mr. Kline looked expectant and Ben Warren looked both respectful and gravely interested.

  Suspicion began to crawl up her spine like a black widow moving in for the kill.

  She turned to Mr. Kline. "I don't understand. Why isMarcus asking me all these questions?"

  Mr. Kline steepled his hands, resting his elbows on the armrests of his black leather chair. "Ben first came to me with his suspicion that someone was leaking important confidential information here at Kline Technology several weeks ago. We conferred and decided that bringing in outside consultation would be the best alternative."

  Allison dropped her pen. She leaned over to pick it up, her movements jerky.

  Ben nodded, his expression grave. "I did some research and Mr. Kline hired a firm with a reputation for getting answers in record time."

  "CIS?" She could barely get the question out past the big lump of betrayal sticking in her throat.

  Kline smiled lethally, his expression smug. "Yes. They're very discreet. Even you hadn't realized that they'd opened an investigative arm and you used to work for them."

  As his words sank in. her feelings shattered like a plate glass window struck dead center by theMariners pitcher's fastball. Marcus had been lying to her all along. He was investigating corporate espionage at her company, and suddenly every conversation they had had since his arrival in Seattle took on sinister overtones.

  He'd been using her.

  Her throat ached from the effort it took to hold in the curses she wanted to hurl at his head.

  She'd learned to trust him.

  The depth of that betrayal ripped her heart to bloody shreds as she sat there trying to appear calm.

  He probably thought she was his chief suspect. And he'd made love to her. No, damn it, not love.

  It had been sex. Sex to gain her trust.

  The room swirled around her, but she remained upright by the sheer power of her will. She would not fall apart in front of her employer. She would not allow Marcus's betrayal to destroy her. She needed this job, now more than ever, and she wasn't going to screw it up by letting her emotions take over.

  Schooling her face into an expressionless mask, she turned to Marcus. She had to appear cooperative. She couldn't risk him mistaking her desire to thwart his every endeavor as somehow indicating a false guilt on her behalf, but the last thing she wanted right now was to help the lying, conniving snake in any way.

  She'd rather eat ground glass.

  She couldn't quite make herself meet his eyes, but fixed her gaze on a point over his left shoulder. "Was there anything else you wanted to ask?"

  His expression revealed nothing. "Why did you delete the e-mail, Ronnie?"

  She couldn't prevaricate, not with the knowledge of her past simmering between them. So, she opted for honesty and hoped he would accept her explanation.

  "I panicked. I thought if it was found on my machine, 1 would somehow be implicated."

  Mr. Kline made a noise of irritation.

  She flinched but kept her gaze steady in Marcus's direction.

  "Why didn't you tell someone about it when you found it?"

  Were all these questions leading her down a path to implicate herself?

  She couldn't afford to let her mind go down that terrifying path. "I tried. I called Allison immediately and asked to see Mr. Kline, but he was out of town."

  Marcus turned to Allison. "Did Miss Richards call you Thursday?"

  Just having him ask the question drove home how completely Marcus didn't trust her word, and her already bleeding heart ached with a pain she could barely stand.

  The other woman nodded. "She wanted an appointment with Mr. Kline, but I asked if she could wait until today. He's usually very busy his first day back from a trip and Miss Richards agreed quite easily to waiting."

  Allison sat up straighter and smoothed her pad. Veronica wondered if anyone else realized the president's personal administrative assistant was nervous. Allison wasn't sure now she'd done the right thing in putting Veronica off, and she was trying
to cover her backside by putting the blame back on her for the ease with which she let herself be put off.

  Marcus nodded, but Allison wasn't looking at him. Her gaze was fixed on Mr. Kline, who glared at his assistant. "You could have asked what Veronica needed."

  "I did try. She said she wanted to speak to you."

  Even in the midst of her emotional devastation, Veronica admired the way the other woman refused to apologize or cringe in the face of her employer's rising temper.

  Marcus unzipped the black case in which he kept his palm organizer and turned the small machine on. "Give me the names of the new product team."

  She assumed he was speaking to her again and listed off the marketing team and the two design engineers for whom she got mail as well.

  When she finished, she couldn't believe she had managed to speak to him in a normal tone of voice, when all she wanted to do was scream at him. How could he have used her that way? How could he have used her desire for him to further his investigation? It was sick.

  Shewas sick, inside. She felt nauseous with the pain.

  Marcus took notes with his stylus on the small screen.

  He turned his head toward Mr. Kline. "Four of the employees Ronnie mentioned are on my list of suspects."

  Mr. Kline's face had gone grim. 'That narrows it down from the fifteen you mentioned in your status report yesterday."

  "List of suspects?" She knew she sounded idiotic, but the reality of Marcus's investigation was sinking only slowly into her pain-fuzzed brain. He had a list of suspects fifteen people long? "Was I on the list?"

  She regretted the question as soon as she asked it, but she couldn't help herself.

  Mr. Kline looked pained. Marcus looked grim and she felt as if her face would crack from strain if she so much as moved a lip muscle.

  She did anyway. "I was, wasn't I?"

  This time she met Marcus's look dead on.

  He nodded. He was trying to say something with his eyes, but she wasn't listening to messages of a personal nature from him any longer, no matter how they were presented.

  "Yes, but as of today, you're off it."

  Was she supposed to be glad about that? He had just confirmed that she'd still been a suspect when he slept with her on Friday night.

  "Why?" Was that shrill voice truly hers? "Maybe I'm the guilty one and I brought the e-mail to Mr. Kline's attention as a red herring."

  Why was she going on in such a self-destructive way? If Marcus hadn't already started thinking along those lines, why was she leading him there?

  Her emotions were getting the upper hand and she had to suppress them. There would be time to grieve later, time to hurl accusations at his head like bricks from the crumbling wall of her restraint. But not right now.

  Right now she had to help him find the spy, thereby proving it wasn't her.

  Ben made a soothing noise and she noticed him for the first time in several minutes.

  His brown eyes twinkled at her as if she'd just told a very good joke. "Don't go talking that way. No one's going to believe a sweet little thing like you is guilty of selling off the company's secrets. Hell, anyone who knows what a rattletrap of a car you drive knows you don't have a secondary source of income."

  Only someonewould think she was guilty.

  Marcus.

  And he'd know he had justification for doubting her innocence. A year and a half ago, she'd done exactly what the security chief said she couldn't possibly be guilty of. She'd sold company secrets. She'd betrayed her position of confidentiality at CIS and Marcus was aware of that fact.

  She'd had reasons for doing what she did though none of them had been related to wanting to be rich. Alex had wanted to destroy a company that employed hundreds of people, all for the sake of revenge. He wouldn't have been happy if he had succeeded and she wasn't at all sure his marriage would have survived. Not with his wife being the daughter of the man who owned the company. And Veronicahad needed money to save Jenny's life and start a new life for herself and her child. She'd gone about getting it in a way that still haunted her, but would Marcus understand that?

  Clearly not. Not if he'd been investigating her all along. All of the confidences she'd shared with him rose up to taunt her.

  She'd told him about her parents, about Jenny, and still he'd doubted her. What did he think? That she would have sold company secrets again to pay Jenny's college tuition?

  His silence since the other man's comments was telling.

  Pain washed over her like a fever and she desperately needed to get out of that office before she lost it. "If you don't have any further questions, I'd like to go."

  She went to stand, but Marcus laid his hand on her arm. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to yank it from his grasp. She remained seated, her expression one of cold disdain… she hoped. If the torment she felt were mirrored in her eyes, she would be mortified.

  "Just one more thing."

  She nodded, not trusting her voice to speak.

  "Is it possible for me to get the same access you have to the team's e-mail?"

  "Not without Jack's okay."

  "He's on the list," Mr. Kline said.

  Marcus frowned. "We can't go that way. I'll have to use your system for that angle on my investigation."

  Have Marcus in her cubicle on a regular basis after the way he'd betrayed her? She couldn't bear it.

  She swallowed past the constriction in her throat. "Fine. Anything else?"

  She had to get out of the office. Now.

  Marcus withdrew his hand from her arm. "Not right now. If I think of anything, we can go over it at lunch."

  He thought she was still having lunch with him? With his ego, he probably thought she would still willingly go to bed with him too.

  She wanted to tell him to go to hell. She wanted to stomp on his toe and grind the heel of her pump into the soft leather of his loafers. She wanted to pour her now cold coffee right over his arrogant blond head, but she did none of those things.

  She stood and turned to go.

  "Veronica," Mr. Kline said.

  She stopped halfway to the door. 'Yes?"

  "Thankyou for bringing the e-mail to my attention. Not every employee would willingly get involved in something like this."

  She nodded jerkily and started walking again. Just ten more feet and she would be free, free of Marcus's presence and free of an audience when her emotions felt on the verge of exploding.

  Those ten feet felt like ten miles, but finally she was out of the office. She sagged against Allison's desk.

  How could she have been so stupid? So gullible? How could she have believed Marcus's smooth talk about a future? He was allergic to futures and deadly opposed to commitment.

  Well, there was no way in the world or her place on it that she would be sharing lunch or anything else with Marcus Danvers—ever again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Allison waited until Ben and Marcus had left George's office before speaking.

  "You've had a company investigating a possible corporate spy here at Kline Technology?"

  He looked up from his notes and his expression made it clear he was surprised she was still there.

  Why wouldn't he be? She didn't linger in his presence during the day. It wasn't allowed. He expected her to suppress her emotions completely, to play the office robot, so no one would suspect the president of the company of fraternizing with his PA.

  "I thought that was obvious."

  "You didn't tell me."

  'There was no need to have you involved."

  "I'm your personal assistant."

  "Yes, but you aren't my shadow. I'm capable of making a business decision or two without you." The sarcasm stung, but she ignored the pain.

  She had grown accustomed to his brusque manner. He made up for it in the off hours. Or at least she'd told herself he did.

  "Was I on the list?"

  It was the question Veronica Richards had asked. The same emotiona
l devastation she'd seen in the younger woman's eyes filled Allison at the possibility the answer would be yes.

  "That's not important. In fact, this conversation is nor a value add. If you're finished, I'd like to get back to work."

  "Don't you dare use your business double-speak on me. Answer the damn question."

  George laid his papers aside, with exaggerated precision. "Would you care to repeat that, Ms. Jennings?"