He swallowed hard, knowing he hadn’t truly earned that trust. Then he tried to channel Kane and meet her gaze with what he hoped looked like honesty. He could tell her the truth about the details: the timeline and the volume of guns. But there would always be too much he’d have to hide.
“We’re on the same side,” she told him softly, making him realize that he’d never be able to truly hide from her.
Nodding, he pushed his conflicted feelings to the back of his mind and focused on business. “How much longer have the illegal gun sales been happening? We’re not sure. It’s been at least eleven years. Possibly as many as twenty.”
“Twenty? Almost no one has been with the company that long,” Leila said, looking shocked as she sank back against the pillows on his couch.
Just her uncle and Theresa, Davis knew. But even if they could definitively say the guns had been sold illegally for twenty years, that didn’t necessarily narrow the suspect pool. Because there was a strong chance her father had started the illegal side of the business as well as the legal side. He might have only brought someone else in later. Someone like Eric.
He hadn’t told Leila that the FBI had narrowed the suspect pool. Now, it wasn’t just those employees with high-level access who’d worked there for a while, but also those who cared about Leila enough to protect her from the BECA scum even when it was costing them huge amounts of money. But she was no fool. She’d figured out that his prime suspects were people she knew well, even people she loved.
Yet, she was still helping him. Some emotion he couldn’t quite identify swelled in his chest. Pride? Attachment?
“How many guns were sold illegally?” she asked, more tension in her voice.
“A lot,” he told her. “Over a decade or more, at marked up prices of course, we’re talking about millions of dollars’ worth.”
“Millions?” She stared up at his ceiling for a long moment, before meeting his gaze again, clearly trying to absorb the information. “Petrov Armor is never going to recover from this, is it?”
His whole body tensed, wanting to jump up and sit beside her, comfort her. He wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that if it was one criminal hiding in the company, taking advantage of it, that once that person was gone, Petrov Armor could regain its reputation. But would he be lying? She’d already shut down the weapons side of the business. Now, with the investigation clearly showing the defective armor was Petrov Armor’s fault, no matter why it had happened, would the military ever work with them again? He knew they were the company’s main client.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. Then, he told her the one thing that wasn’t a lie. “But if anyone can make it happen, I believe it’s you.”
She gave him a shaky smile, then stood and closed the distance between them.
Just as he was ready to stand, maybe to back away, she knelt in front of his chair and put her hands on his knees. The muscles in his legs jumped in response and her smile returned, this time a little more steady. She lifted her hands from his legs to his cheeks, her fingers scraping over the stubble he’d ignored shaving this morning, making his face tingle.
His breath came faster in anticipation, and he had to grip the edges of his chair to keep himself from leaning down and fusing his lips to hers. When he didn’t, the small smile on her lips shifted, making the skin around her eyes crinkle as she pushed herself upward.
Her lips were inches from his when panic made him say the thing he’d been keeping from her for too long, the other thing that he couldn’t continue to hide from her if he ever wanted to be with her. “Your dad’s death was no accident, Leila.”
HER DAD’S DEATH wasn’t a mugging gone wrong. It was intentional. A murder by not just someone her dad knew, but someone he trusted. Someone who had also been using his company to sell guns to criminals and inferior armor to soldiers. All for money. Someone had murdered her father for money.
Leila tried to blink back the tears, but they were coming too fast, rushing down her face in a waterfall she couldn’t stop. More than just the horror of learning it was someone she knew—someone she worked with every day—who had probably killed her father, but also the pure grief of his death. Something she’d been pushing to the back of her mind as much as possible, focusing on work, on this investigation, so she could avoid facing it.
He was gone. The person closest to her in the world.
The sobs came harder, almost violently. Then Davis was kneeling in front of her on the floor, pulling her against him. She held on tight, weeping into his chest as he stroked her hair, until the sobs finally subsided.
He lifted the bottom of his T-shirt, offering it.
She managed a laugh, then did use it to mop up the remaining tears on her face. It was something she would have done as a teenager, with Eric’s shirt, when she’d been grieving the loss of her mom. Now here she was, all these years later, and it was Davis she was leaning on for support. Davis she wanted beside her.
He made her feel safe. Made her feel like she could be herself, without fearing she’d look too weak or seem unfit for her role as CEO. The ironic thing was that she probably should have feared it in front of him—an FBI agent—most of all.
She was falling for him.
The realization hit hard and sudden, even though it should have been obvious long ago. Maybe even the first day she’d met him,
