“Okay, you aren’t spies. Whenever Maddy and Jace speak Russian to each other, I feel like I’m in a Bond movie. It’s cool though. I wish I spoke another language.”
“Don’t you?”
She blinked. “No. English is it.”
“I was thinking about math. That’s a language that scares a lot of people.”
“Oh, cute. I guess it’s kind of like a foreign language to people who are terrified by it.” She shrugged. “Equations have always made sense me.”
“That’s kinda how language is.”
“You speak English and French. Anything else?”
“Italian and Spanish. A little German.” And Farsi, though he wasn’t telling her that one since it would give away that he often traveled to Iran. Those missions were highly classified and particularly dangerous these days. Not something she needed to know.
“Well damn, that’s pretty impressive. I’m feeling a little under accomplished here.”
“I’m pretty sure you aren’t. Equations, remember?”
She laughed. He liked the way her laugh sounded. Liked the way her auburn hair escaped her messy bun and framed her face. She was pretty, and though he’d seen her in smoking hot dresses and high heels, he liked her just as much in the jeans and sweater she’d put on. It was a deep mustardy-gold sweater in a chunky knit with a loose neck and a shoulder that kept slipping down to reveal her bra strap. The bra was gray, and he wished he could see more of it.
“Yes, all right, you win. I can do math without fear, and I can balance a mean spreadsheet. I can also do your taxes—and that’s magic, I swear. Nobody likes taxes.”
She made him laugh.
“Only accountants and tax attorneys. And the IRS,” he added.
“Right.”
“Did anybody from the Cardinal Group ever contact you?”
“No. I sent three emails. They never answered any of them. That’s not unusual with some of these clients. I’ve been bugging one of my accounts for 1099 information for almost a month now. The deadline to send them out is in two days, so they’d better get a move on it.”
“The Cardinal Group knows you had a problem with the account then.”
“I didn’t phrase it like that. I said I needed to verify some things in order to complete their tax return. We never tell a client we’re having a problem. We don’t want to give them any reason to doubt our competence. Barnes and Blake would be horrified.”
“But not Barton?”
“Barton unofficially retired last year. He was eighty if he was a day, and his wife finally put her foot down. He still comes in every once in a while, but he’s not involved in the day to day anymore.”
Regardless of how she’d phrased her emails, he didn’t like that anyone at the Cardinal Group knew she’d been having trouble with their account. The research so far indicated the firm was run by two men who represented a group of venture capitalists with money to burn.
It gave them a prime opportunity to skim a little bit off the top and pad their own pockets, which is what Colt suspected was going on. But what made Charles Martinelli run and why did someone burn down the building after the records were erased?
“Colt?” she asked when he didn’t say anything.
He jerked his attention back to her. “Yeah, baby?”
She smiled. “I really shouldn’t like it when you call me baby, but I do. I don’t know why. Anyway, you seemed distracted there for a second.”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“About my situation, right?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “You’re thinking it’s not good they know I had trouble, because if they are up to something illegal, then they know I’ve seen something wrong with their finances.”
He hated to admit it to her, but Angie was smart and she wasn’t going to accept any half-truths. “Pretty much. Could just be that Martinelli fucked up a spreadsheet and quit work because he reached a breaking point.”
Not that he believed it after seeing Martinelli’s place. But he wasn’t about to panic Angie with that knowledge. She already knew enough to be worried.
Angie nodded. “It could happen. Charles always seemed like he had his shit together—but as Liam reminded me, Type A personalities can flame out when they overload.”
“Was Liam close to him?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Anyone else?”
Her face scrunched adorably as she contemplated the question. “Honestly, I thought Jenny Clark was talking to him a lot lately. Jenny went through a terrible divorce last year. She has two kids and she shares custody with her ex, which has been hard on her since he left her for another woman. Charles is a horn dog, so he was probably just trying to get into her pants—or maybe he did get into them. I don’t know, but I saw her in his office quite a bit over the past month.”
“Do you think she’s talked to him since he quit?”
“She’s never said so. She seemed as puzzled as the rest of us when he didn’t come back to work.” She pulled in a breath. “I should tell you that Charles tried to get me to go out with him. He was pretty obnoxious about it for a while, but I thought he’d finally taken no for an answer because he stopped trying. Like I said, horn dog.”
Colt didn’t like how that made him feel. Yeah, he told himself it’d be better for her to find a normal guy to settle down with—but when he pictured it, it made him want to flip tables and roar.
“How long did he persist?”
“Pretty much the entire time I’ve worked there, which has been almost two years. There was an ebb and flow to it. He dated plenty, but he didn’t stop asking me out. I never went for a lot of reasons, but mostly because there was something off-putting about him. To me, anyway. He was arrogant and too full of himself. He was a lot like my ex in that he liked to play the field.”
“Any man who couldn’t see that you deserved the best he had to
