Trusting The Boss

by Mallory Crowe

  “My version of Russell was able to send me a list of all the Brians who racked up large credit card bills at Drax. It didn’t look too long, but I got your call before I could dig into it. I’m thinking we will know who Joslyn’s mysterious friend is by the end of the night.”

  Emma sighed and looked back to her computer. “I suppose that is good,” she muttered.

  “Funny, you don’t sound too excited about it.”

  “I’ve been thinking about calling the whole thing off.”

  She could feel Jace stiffen next to her. “You’re finally convinced that there’s nothing to find?”

  “I’m convinced it won’t make a difference. Joslyn’s going to prison no matter what. And no matter what her friends or apartment or email or bank statements told me about her, I’d never truly be convinced that it wasn’t my fault in some way.”

  He reached over as though to put his hand on her knee but pulled back at the last moment. Even through her stress, the corner of Emma’s mouth tilted up. The fact that Jace was awkward around her somehow made this whole mess more bearable. He wasn’t some stone statue completely unaffected by everything.

  He took a deep breath. “The problem with blame is that it’s a fluid term. I’ve been to a lot of different places, Emma. I’ve seen bad things happen. I’ve done bad things. If I spent all my time trying to figure out how much blame rested on my shoulders, I would go insane.”

  Oh God. She was stressing out about her sister when she was sitting next to a soldier. Probably an American hero who’d been through so much more than her sheltered mind could ever imagine. “You must think I’m a moron.”

  This time he did reach over and set his hand over hers on the keyboard. She stared at his fingers against hers. The skin of his palms, callused from hard work, brushed up against the back of her hand that she treated with ridiculously overpriced moisturizer every night.

  “While I do think the vast majority of the population are morons, I’ve never thought that about you.”

  Emma raised a brow and ripped her gaze away from where they touched. “Never?”

  “Well, maybe when you first threatened to storm into Hunt Tower and demand to see Victoria Green. But you’ve grown on me since then.”

  She couldn’t help but smile up at him. For some reason, the idea that Jace didn’t think she was an idiot was really important at the moment. Maybe it was because she knew he wouldn’t lie to her. If he thought she was being stupid, he wouldn’t hesitate to tell her to her face.

  “It’s nice to know that I have at least one supporter.”

  “Hey. Just because I don’t think you’re an idiot doesn’t mean I support this. I think your idea to give them what they want and go back home is probably best.”

  Emma chewed on her bottom lip. “I know. But it feels like I’m letting them win. Or Dave win. I don’t know him all that well, but I’m very, very certain I don’t want him winning.”

  Jace gave her hand a small squeeze, and Emma’s stomach did a little summersault. “Come on. Dave’s boss is probably some rich CEO named Brian who’s been cheating on his wife, okay? So don’t bother with the bank statements. We’ll just get the laptop back and try to find the USB drive.”

  “Can we at least try to see what’s on the USB drive?” She knew she didn’t need his permission, but she might need his resources to crack any password protection.

  Jace shrugged. “Hey, if you want to plug it in and see what it will do, go for it. But let’s focus on finding it first.”

  “Sounds good.” Emma jumped up and made a beeline for the kitchen, where she pulled open each drawer and dug through the contents.

  She could feel his eyes burn into her back. “If there were a USB drive here, I would’ve noticed yesterday,” he said.

  Emma slammed a drawer shut and opened the next one. “I’m not looking for a USB.” She stopped her search as her final target came into view. She held up the jangling prize in victory. “I was looking for her car keys.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Emma wandered through the parking garage and repeatedly hit the alarm button on the keys. At this rate, the thing would be out of batteries by the time she found the Jaguar that belonged to Joslyn. She’d never considered looking for a car before. It was New York. No one had cars.

  Jace was right when he said they’d searched every inch of the apartment the day before. If one of them had seen a USB drive, they would’ve checked it out. Emma hadn’t paid much notice to the car keys. She was sure Joslyn had a vehicle somewhere in the country. But she’d been traveling around with Terry, so Emma had assumed she’d either travel in one of his cars or use one of the many town cars in the city.

  Footsteps pounded behind her and Emma turned to see Jace jog toward her. “Did you have any luck?”

  He shook his head. “None of the tow lots that serve the area have any unclaimed Jaguars. This is the closest lot to the apartment. If she wanted to keep the car a secret, she would keep it close to the hidden apartment.”

  “Or she could keep it at one of the other thousand garages in the city,” muttered Emma. A lot this close to the apartment would cost more than most people’s apartments. Jace held out his hand and she gave him the keys as they walked.

  “Did she have a preferred color?” he asked.

  Emma snorted. “Pink. Everything she could get in pink, she would. You should’ve seen her bedroom. It looked like a barrel of Pepto exploded.”

  “I take it you aren’t as big a fan of pink then?”

  “Oh, my bedroom looked the same. I’m a follower.”

  He glanced over and narrowed his eyes. “Really? Pink walls and bedspread and everything?”

  “If Joslyn had something, I wanted the same thing. It wasn’t until we were both in high school together that I realized I wasn’t born with her natural…talents.” He raised a brow and Emma shook her head. “Not those kind of talents. She was a people person. Wherever she would go, she would always have a whole group of followers. I tried to be exactly like her, cheerleader and everything, but I never reached her heights.”

  “Cheerleader with an all-pink bedroom. I hate to break it to you, but I think you were the girl of my dreams back when I was in high school.”

  Emma bit her lip as she tried to figure out what to say to that. Was Jace flirting with her? He had to be. She’d been around enough men to know this was definitely flirting. What changed? It seemed as if he hadn’t wanted anything to do with her earlier. “You fantasized about a lower-level cheerleader when you were a teen? Low aspirations, huh?”

  Jace kept walking and hitting the alarm button. “I think if I had a girlfriend like you waiting for me in a cheerleader outfit in a completely pink bedroom, I would’ve had a much different ending to my high school career.”

  Before Emma could ask what he meant by that, an alarm blared through the garage. They both took off running to follow the sound. They cut between a row of cars to see a deep green sedan with its lights flashing and horn blaring. Jace hit the button on the keypad to silence the alarm and they approached the vehicle.

  “Not pink.” Jace grinned.

  “I feel like I don’t even know her,” she said sarcastically. Her mouth curved up and Emma suddenly realized she was having too much fun. She had come to town to feel guilty and go on a mission to understand her sister. She was further from her goal than ever and was facing threats from a shady man, but instead of wallowing, she was joking and flirting with Jace.

  Jace opened the driver’s side door. “Hop in.”

  Emma frowned. Was he planning on taking a joyride? But Jace already sat down and closed the door, so Emma was left with no choice but to climb into the passenger’s seat. The tiny car was a sporty two-seater convertible with the cloth top pulled up. The cream leather seats were cool from sitting in the covered garage for so long, and there was a definite feminine scent in the car. As though Joslyn’s perfume had managed to hang around for the entire time she’d been away.

 
“Feels like we’re trespassing,” she muttered as she glanced around at the pristine interior.

  Jace snorted. “You’ve been crawling around her apartment for days, but this feels wrong to you?”

  “Well, her apartment was fair game. She’d attempted to murder someone in it, therefore I’m allowed to dig around.”

  “Technically, she tried to kill Victoria on the roof.”

  “Close enough.” She opened the glove box. some lip gloss, car paperwork, the wheel lock key, but nothing that resembled a USB. “Nothing in here.” She picked up one of the tubes of pink gloss with golden sparkles and sighed. “Damn, that’s pretty.”

  “Then take it.” Jace opened up the compartment between the seats.

  “Ew. No. That feels so wrong.”

  Jace stopped his search to look up. “Where your sister’s going, I doubt she’ll miss it.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better about raiding her stash.” Jace sat back after his search and it looked like he came up empty-handed too. “So this whole thing is a dead end?” Instead of answering, Jace started up the car. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “You have such little faith.” The touch screen control monitor came to life and lit up the interior of the car. “We can use the GPS to tell us some of the most recent places she went to.”

  “And she might’ve hidden the USB drive at one of those places.”

  “It’s still a long shot,” he clarified. “But it’s more than we had before.” Jace maneuvered through the menu until he found a list of recent destinations. “Hotel, restaurant, hotel, restaurant… I’m seeing a pattern here.”

  “This screams affair.” Emma stared at the list. Some of the names she didn’t recognize, but the ones she did were very upscale places. One night at these hotels would probably be at least five hundred dollars. Terry had his own place in the city, so Emma doubted Joslyn was going out with him. “Maybe she was with a married guy and this was what she had on the USB. Proof of the affair.”

  “It’s a possibility.” But Jace didn’t sound convinced. He kept scrolling through. “Does anything here stand out to you?”

  Emma shook her head. “I’m not very familiar with the city.” He went to another page of recent destinations and Emma set her hand over his. “Wait. That.” She pointed to the screen.

  “May’s Mart? What about it?”

  “It’s a discount store from down South. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Because it’s a Jersey address?” asked Jace.

  “Well, that. But mostly that it would be in Joslyn’s GPS. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about her, it’s that she didn’t do discounts.”

  Jace hit the “navigate to” button and within thirty seconds, the route popped up.

  “Must be a nice car,” said Emma. “I don’t think my GPS has ever once worked in a parking garage.”

  Jace leaned back and set a hand on the wheel. “So you want to check it out?”

  “What happened to backing off the investigation?”

  “I think finding whatever this guy is looking for has moved up to the top of the priority list.”

  Emma glanced down at the clock. It was getting late and Luke would be expecting her at his place when he got back. For some reason, no part of her cared about making Luke happy at the moment. “Let’s go on a road trip.”

  ###

  Jace glanced over at Emma again as he tried to judge her mood. It had been such a stressful day, but she seemed to be handling it well. To be honest, she was handling the whole thing better than Jace was, but he was working damn hard to not show his concern.

  The second he’d seen the guy approach the café, he’d known Emma was in over her head. The guy dressed well and played the part of a businessman well enough, but Jace could recognize his own. Dave was a professional and if he was sent to retrieve something, he wasn’t going to stop until he got it.

  Something about the way his eyes scanned the street. That they both went to the same table that would allow them to observe their surroundings. Through his suit, his body was toned and maintained in a way that the hotshot Wall Street types just didn’t have time for.

  He was the type of guy who cleaned up messes and apparently someone thought Emma was part of a mess. Shit. It was easy enough to track down what Joslyn or her rich lovers were up to, but professionals were a whole different story. They knew how to cover their tracks. They knew how to sneak around and get a person when they least expected it.

  So until he was able to get something on these guys, he was going to have to stick with Emma as long as possible.

  “Did Luke sound concerned?” he asked as they crossed the bridge into Jersey.

  “Luke always sounds concerned. It’s in his DNA.”

  Jace nodded. He hadn’t met the eldest Devereaux, but from what he’d read and overheard from Emma, he did seem like a bit of a control freak. “So have you always been close to your cousins?”

  “Very. Our dads started DevX together before I was even born. So growing up, it felt like we did everything together. When my uncle bought out my father and moved the headquarters to New York, it was like I lost my brothers.”

  Jace didn’t know that much about the history of DevX, but he was more than familiar with their product considering the US military was one of their number-one customers. “Why break up the family business? It was already Fortune 500 by then, right?”

  “Just different opinions. Uncle Todd didn’t want to have to get permission every time he made a decision and I think Dad wanted to spend more time with the family.”

  “So did Joslyn get along with Luke and Michael as well as you?”

  “She was always busy. She was out with friends all the time and the boys would entertain me while I was home alone. They were very sweet about it. I remember one time I was so upset that I’d never had a boyfriend that Rourke took me to the drive in, just me and him. It’s a bit creepy looking back, but I remember being so happy to be there with one of the most handsome boys in town.”

  Jace frowned. “Rourke?”

  Emma was quiet for a moment before she answered. “Luke and Michael’s younger brother. They had a bit of a falling out a few years back. None of us have seen him since.”

  “Whoa. Do you think he’s okay?”

  She shrugged. “Knowing him, he’s fine. He’s like a cat. No matter what life threw at him, he’d land on his feet. I just wish he’d call once in a while.”

  Jace sensed the topic of her missing third cousin was a sore topic, so he switched back to Joslyn. “Since they don’t seem one hundred percent supportive of your cause, I’m assuming they’re not losing any sleep over Joslyn being in prison?”

  “She’s in jail awaiting trial,” pointed out Emma. “Important difference.”

  “Fine. They don’t care about her being in jail?”

  Emma took a deep breath. “I’m assuming I’m paying you enough to keep secrets?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Michael and Luke think that Joslyn killed my parents.” Emma was dead silent after the revelation, as though waiting for him to gasp in surprise.

  “I figured.”

  Emma jerked to the side and frowned. “You knew? How did you know!”

  “When the head of security at Green’s fingered Joslyn as the one who was responsible for the attacks on Victoria, he looked at the police file for your parents’ car accident. I know that their car was sabotaged and she was suspected, but nothing could be proved.”

  Emma rested her head in her hands. “Oh, God. I can’t believe people know.”

  He reached over and set a hand on her knee. “Don’t worry. It’s not public. I just have connections.”

  “It’s not something I like people knowing.” She glanced down to his hand on her knee, but didn’t move away.

  “Is that because you think she did it or because you think she’s innocent?”

  “It’s because I never made up my mind. Luke and Michael w
ere never fond of her to begin with, so it was easy for them to paint her as a killer and move on with their lives. But I couldn’t accept it so easily with no evidence. But I could never look at her the same. I came home from Oxford and moved into the family home. It was left to me. They had a stipulation in their will that anyone considered an official suspect in the case of their murder would get nothing. The police didn’t know that when they pointed a finger at her, that they were destroying her future. And when she asked for my help, I never called her back.”

  Jace thought back to the crazed woman he’d taken down that night. He didn’t know all the details from the night Emma’s parents died, but he sure as hell wouldn’t be surprised to learn she was behind it. “Have you tried to talk to her again?”

  “Her lawyer had told me that she doesn’t want to see any family members. You’d think that once someone is in jail, you could force them to face you, but apparently they still have the right to piss off family from behind bars.”

  “Well, if she doesn’t want your help, I don’t think you should feel bad about going back home without cracking into her psyche.”

  Emma sighed. “You’re right. And I’ve known that. But it was nice to do something. Luke and Michael are off changing the world, Joslyn has been traveling to all corners of the earth and getting into all sorts of trouble and I’ve been…hiding. Hiding behind different majors and colleges and my big-ass mansion. I just wanted to feel like I was being active instead of passive.”

  “Why don’t you get out there and do something you want to do? Not something your sister or family makes you feel obligated to fix or find out. But you have the time and resources to really make a difference if you wanted to.” Jace tried to think about how different his life would be if he’d grown up with money. Would his dad have drunk less or would his poison just be higher-shelf liquor? And who knew how different things would’ve ended up for his brother.

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Maybe now that Joslyn is going away, it’s my turn to live and stop playing it so safe.”

  Before he could ask her what she meant by that, the GPS told him to get off the highway and onto a secluded service drive. The lights along the road were sporadically burnt out, making it harder to see anything in the dark street. “I’m just going to make a wild guess that this isn’t the type of area Joslyn would usually frequent?”