by Rachel Grant
“Riversong, I don’t care what your last name is. If you don’t restock the bar for the next shift again, you’re fired.”
Erica whirled around and saw one of the casino managers.
“I know,” Tommy said, bristling. The manager walked away, and Tommy flipped him off behind his back. “Jerk-off.”
“Riversong,” she murmured. “You’re related to the chairman?”
“He’s my uncle.”
She glanced around the room, seeing the lights of the slot machines, hearing the bells and chimes, but the details were a blur as she processed this information.
“Meet me in fifteen minutes?” he asked.
She picked up her drink and slid off the barstool. “I’ll be there.”
After trading her nickels and pennies for a quarter, she found an open classic-style slot machine. She dropped the coin in the slot. If I win, it’s a sign I should go through with it. If I lose, I’ll just go home.
Three cherries came up. She leaned her head against the machine and closed her eyes. She’d won two dollars and fifty cents but feared she’d lost her last shred of self-respect.
“I guess we can have dinner together after all.”
Lee? She spun around. “What the hell are you doing here?” Had he followed her? She shook her head. The idea was ridiculous. He had no reason to follow her. But still, she couldn’t quite let the suspicion go.
He loomed above her and placed his hand against the slot machine, hip cocked, looking all too casual and appealing. She’d enjoyed her day with him at the Archives more than any day at work since before she’d stepped aboard the Andvari. “I saw the exit for the reservation from the beltway and thought it would be fun to check out the casino. Why are you here?”
She scooped her winnings from the mouth of the machine and picked up her drink. “The food is cheap and the drinks even cheaper.” She took a large swallow. Liquid courage.
He touched her arm, then nodded toward the steak house. “Let’s get a bite to eat.”
“Sorry. I’ve got plans. See you tomorrow.” She walked away and took refuge in the ladies’ room. Coward that she was, she stayed there until it was time to meet Tommy.
She didn’t see Lee as she crossed the foyer and entered the wide hallway that led to the Great Basin Room. She waited next to a display of Menanichoch artifacts. The wall-mounted signs gave a detailed history of the Menanichoch tribe and reservation. She stared long and hard at a photo of Senator Joseph Talon with Sam Riversong. Tommy was late. Where was he?
At last, she heard footsteps behind her but didn’t turn. She felt hands at her waist. Tommy’s hands. Close your eyes and think of England. Lips pressed against the nape of her neck. She closed her eyes but didn’t think of England. Instead she thought of Lee.
Self-loathing slid up her spine. Like she’d told Jake a year ago, she wasn’t a whore. “I can’t do this.”
“Do what, Shortcake?”
She whirled to face Lee. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think.
“Do what?” he asked again.
She had to say something, but confessing that her intern’s kiss was welcome in a way that Tommy Riversong’s was not was a bad idea. A very bad idea. She found her voice. “Get involved with you,” she said and slipped out of his arms.
You are here to find the artifacts. Lee Scott is a distraction you don’t need.
She was halfway down the hall when an alarm sounded. Oh God. They know why I’m here. The thought was as irrational as the sharp jolt of fear that accompanied it. She really was losing her mind.
She reached the foyer as four security guards ran out of the Pueblo Room and headed in her direction. Without a second look, they passed her on their way out the front door. Her relief was short-lived as Lee came up beside her. His hand found the small of her back. He steered her toward the security guard stationed in front of the concealing canvas.
The guard muttered something into his headset, then listened.
“What’s going on?” Lee asked him.
“An employee was just found in the bushes outside. Looks like he was stabbed.”
Her stomach churned, but still, she had to know. “Who is it?”
“A bartender, Tommy Riversong.”
“Is he—will he be okay?”
“He’s dead.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
ERICA ARRIVED IN THE WORKOUT room at her usual time, determined to work and live as though the day were like any other. She stretched the same way. Kicked the bag with the same fury. Listened to the same music on her cheap MP3 player.
But nothing was the same. She’d told herself once she found the artifacts and Jake went to jail, her life would return to normal. But there was no going back. For her, there was no longer any such thing as normal.
A kid she’d flirted with for information had been murdered. Did his death have anything to do with her? What sort of world had she immersed herself in? She couldn’t live this life—or these lies—anymore.
She needed to tell Janice. Everything. She’d kept silent out of fear. Fear of being fired. Fear of Jake. Fear of Marco. She was done living in fear.
She kicked the bag, punctuation to her decision. She’d tell Janice. Today. This morning.
The door opened and Lee entered. He stood in the doorway, silent, his eyes questioning. He was so tall, so strong. So very masculine. At the Thermo-Con house and again at the archives he’d shown a rascal charm she found terribly appealing.
He’d unknowingly witnessed her shameful decision last night. But he’d also been the reason she’d decided not to go through with it. She hadn’t put him in his place when he’d kissed her neck, then Tommy…happened…and dealing with Lee’s inappropriate advance seemed petty. The police had questioned them separately. When her interview was over, she’d bolted rather than wait for Lee. She hadn’t wanted to face him then, and she didn’t want to talk to him now.
She turned up the volume on her music and faced the bag. In her peripheral vision, she saw him head to the free weights across the room. She shifted so her back was to him and finished her workout.
After showering, she reached their office ahead of Lee but knew he would be up shortly. A strange calm descended upon her as she dialed Janice’s extension. Soon it would all be behind her. Voice mail picked up, and Janice’s recorded message informed her that her boss had a meeting with a client in Virginia and would be in the office after eleven a.m. Dammit. She left a message telling Janice, “We need to talk. It’s urgent.”
Lee arrived. She murmured, “Good morning,” then turned her chair to face her computer. She had work to do.
She heard him setting up his laptop and tried to block him out of her mind. She opened the first of several cell tower reports she needed to finish and got to work. Prickling along the back of her neck alerted her to the fact that Lee stood directly behind her. Longing mixed with fear coursed through her, the same feeling she’d had last night when she realized it was Lee, not Tommy, who had kissed her.
She swiveled around and faced him. Might as well get this over with.
He half sat, half leaned against the worktable and studied her, his face showing his concern. “Did you sleep okay?” he finally said.
She cleared her throat around a sudden tightness. “No. You?”
He shook his head. “I barely slept at all.” He paused. “You were waiting for Tommy Riversong in the hallway.”
It was a statement, but she knew he wanted an answer. She shrugged. Last night she’d told the police the truth—mostly—and after she talked to Janice, what she told Lee would no longer matter. “He asked me to meet him.”
“Why did you agree to meet a twenty-two-year-old drug dealer?”
“He was only twenty-two?” Jesus, he was just a boy. And now he was dead.
“Yes. Why were you meeting him?”
“I didn’t know he was a drug dealer.” She looked at him sharply. “Who told you that?”
“My family is connected. They asked
questions and got answers. Tommy Riversong was a punk, a low-level drug dealer. He’d been arrested several times and pleaded no contest to a drug charge three years ago. After his probation ended, he got the job at the casino.”
“But he didn’t stop dealing,” she said.
“It doesn’t look like he did. My understanding is there were drugs on him. He was probably killed in a deal gone bad.”
Tommy’s death had nothing to do with her. She wanted to believe that. Desperately.
Lee took her hands and cupped them between his own. “Why were you waiting for Tommy in the hallway?”
“I wasn’t going to buy drugs from him, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t do drugs.” Dammit, she sounded defensive—guilty. She slid her hands from between his. “He was going on break. We were going to look at the archaeology exhibits together.” It was close enough to the truth, and more than her intern needed to know.
He reached for her chin, but she pulled away. She was losing her grip on their roles. She didn’t need to answer to Lee Scott. “It’s time we got to work. I need you to do Internet searches on Thermo-Con and Higgins.”
The morning dragged on. After checking all the usual Internet sites to see if anyone was selling Aztec artifacts, she called Janice’s cell again. She wanted to make her confession and be done, but her call went straight to voice mail.
Lee was useless. At last she understood how he’d coasted in college for the last seven years: he knew how to look busy without doing any actual work.
She hit the print button on a cell tower report, quietly crossed the room to stand behind him, and nearly choked on aggravation. The slacker was playing Tetris and had completed 428 rows. Clearly he’d been playing for a long time. She placed her hands on his shoulders, and he jolted, causing his finger to hit the wrong button. In seconds the Tetris cubes piled on top of each other, ending his game.
Her fingers tightened on his shoulders as she leaned down and said next to his ear, “I was going to ask you to make copies of a cell tower report, but I see you’re busy.” She marched out of the room, expecting—wanting—him to follow and apologize. But he didn’t.
“Don’t hold your breath,” she muttered as she shoved open the copy-room door. She hit the door too hard, as evidenced by the loud bang, shaking walls, and four men in suits inside the room who stared at her in shock.
With alarm, she recognized JT Talon standing with Edward Drake, Rob Anderson, and a senior engineer named Arnie Ross. She’d never before seen any of these men in the copy room, let alone trying to work a binding machine.
“Sorry,” she said, deciding not to turn tail and run or make excuses. Hell, she could end up fired after she talked to Janice today anyway. She grabbed her papers from the shared laser printer and made a beeline for the industrial copier.
“How’s the Thermo-Con EA coming, Erica?” Rob Anderson asked.
Crap. She hadn’t sent him an update on the project since Monday afternoon. “Yesterday we went to the National Archives and found a name, Higgins. We just have to figure out how that name is connected to the house.”
“Thermo-Con?” said a voice she didn’t recognize, which could only be JT.
She placed her originals in the document feeder, hit the green button, then turned to face the head of the company. “It’s a project for the Menanichoch Tribe.” Remembering the man was one-quarter Menanichoch, she added, “There’s a house on the reservation made out of concrete called Thermo-Con.”
“I know. I love that crazy house. I’ve been nagging Sam to have it repaired for years.”
The copy room door opened, and Lee entered. “Erica, did you want me to copy something?” he asked, completely oblivious to the power players in the room.
“Don’t trouble yourself, Lee. Your Tetris game won’t play itself.”
JT looked at Lee, and a flicker of amusement entered his eyes. Dread, which had been second only to fear on her current playlist of emotions, surged to the top of the charts. She suddenly knew with horrible certainty that JT’s executive secretary had set up the internship because JT knew Lee. Well.
“Arnie, Ed, have either of you ever heard of Thermo-Con?” Rob Anderson asked.
As if she didn’t already feel like crap, now she wanted to smack herself. She’d never thought to ask either man about the historic concrete, but both had been concrete engineers since sometime before the late-Paleolithic era.
Arnie, a balding man who had to stretch if he wanted to pass for five-foot-two, looked up from the papers he’d been reading, then did a double take when he saw Lee. “Good Lord! It’s Bigfoot!”
Lee laughed and introduced himself to the elderly concrete engineer, then asked the man again about Thermo-Con. Arnie’s wild silver eyebrows, which could have been drawn by Dr. Seuss, rose toward the ceiling. “Sounds interesting, but no, I haven’t heard of it. How about you, Ed?”
“No.” Drake checked his watch. “Gentlemen, we’ve only got twenty minutes until the colonel gets here, and the comb binder is clearly broken.”
JT’s gaze returned to her. “Erica…Kesling, right?”
“Yes, Mr. Talon.” He knew her last name. Had he learned it from Lee? Or worse, had Sam Riversong told him about their meeting on Monday?
“We need help,” he said. “We need to replace incorrect pages in a proposal package, but none of us has been able to figure out how to work the binding machine.” He held up a booklet. The comb-cut holes had been shredded by the machine because they’d misaligned the pages when they tried to take the booklet apart.
The greatest minds in the company—these four men designed bridges, skyscrapers, oil wells, and managed millions of dollars in projects—couldn’t work the manual comb binder. She smiled and felt some of her apprehension dissolve. “No problem.” She brushed JT aside and quickly disassembled a booklet and replaced the pages.
The copy room door opened, and Janice entered. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Erica’s stomach dropped. She’d been waiting for this moment all morning. In truth, from the moment she started working for Talon & Drake. But she couldn’t talk to Janice here and now. Not in front of JT Talon. “Did you get my message?” she asked, her voice cracking on the last word.
“Message? No. My cell’s dead.” Janice held up a piece of paper. “I just received an e-mail from an ethnozoology lab giving a preliminary evaluation for the Thermo-Con EA.”
She felt a surge of relief. This they could talk about. “Wow, the lab was fast.”
“I don’t remember authorizing osteological analysis for Thermo-Con,” Janice said in her rarely used I’m-disappointed-in-you tone. “Erica. This is your first EA. You need to check in with me every step of the way.”
“Did I forget to mention the bones?” In spite of her best efforts, she let out a sharp, nervous laugh. “This was a test for some bones we found under the sump of the Thermo-Con house. Sam Riversong wanted an expert to determine if the bones are human or not.”
Janice was silent, then nodded. “That’s exactly the sort of thing you need to tell me.” Then she smiled. “But you did well, sending it in right away. Especially since, the expert believes the bone is human. He still needs to run the definitive species test, but knowing our tight schedule and the delicacy of dealing with human remains, he wanted to give us the heads-up.”
“Riversong also authorized a C-14 test so we’ll know how old the remains are. We should get the results on that in the next few days.” Her mind raced. Could she use this to push for a meeting with Sam this afternoon?
Then reality hit her. The man’s nephew had been murdered last night. She couldn’t disturb him now. Besides, in a few minutes, she would have a conversation with Janice that could change everything.
Janice set the e-mail printout on the table. “When you’re finished here, come to my office.”
After the corrections were made, the men headed to their meeting, while Erica and Lee copied the cell tower report. That done, she headed for
the door, then remembered the e-mail. “Lee, will you grab the e-mail for me, please? It’s next to the binding machine.”
“It’s not here.”
She returned to the table. He was right. “It must have gotten mixed in with the proposal papers,” she said. “I’ll ask Janice to print another copy.”
In the corridor heading toward their office, anxiety slowed her pace. She wasn’t sure if she was nervous about her upcoming confession to Janice or what she wanted to ask Lee, but she brushed her fear aside. “You know JT Talon,” she said, keeping her voice casual.
“We’ve met.”
“You know him better than that.”
He shrugged.
Dammit, she wanted to know how well he knew the man. “Do we have more nepotism?”
“Is it really nepotism when you’re given the lowest job with the lowest pay?” he asked.
“It is when you’re getting paid to play Tetris.”
“The Thermo-Con searches were boring.”
She turned on her heel to face him. He stopped just short of crashing into her, and she patted his cheek. “Poor baby,” she said in a sarcastic imitation of a motherly voice. “I’m sorry your work was so taxing. Maybe after you finish your computer game, you should take a nap.”
He covered her hand with his own, rubbing her palm against the stubble he hadn’t bothered to shave. His green eyes fixed on hers, and his mouth curved in an alluring half smile. “Only if you take one with me.”
She rolled her eyes. She’d give him grief for hitting on her again, but she was the one who’d stepped close and touched him. The air thickened as his intense gaze ensnared her. Gone was the feckless intern; in his place was a compelling man she wanted to know.
She heard footsteps, breaking the spell. She tried to pull her hand away, but Lee gripped her fingers tighter.
“Well, well, well,” a familiar voice said. “If it isn’t my favorite…Cream Puff.”
She ripped her hand from Lee’s and whipped around. The last time she’d seen Jake, she’d been locked in a stinking Mexican jail cell.
