“What are you doing in my house?” Usually, he met me on the back patio.
“Your interior decorator needed help finding your place.”
That made him look up. “What’s Wendy think?”
“Practically jumping up and down with excitement.”
“Good. I’m paying that woman enough.” He shuddered and took another bite. “It’s my birthday present to Wendy. She’s been pestering me to redecorate for twenty years. I figured it was time.”
“Well, you’ve made her a happy woman, Chief.”
“How’d you run into the designer?”
I cleared my throat. “She showed up outside of Sullivan’s. Which is coincidentally only one number different than your house, but on SE Virginia. Oh, and she’s my ex-girlfriend.”
He folded his paper carefully, ironing out the wrinkles. “She didn’t see anything, did she?”
“No, you know Sullivan isn’t that careless. But I made a point of getting her attention and getting her out of there. She thinks I have work to do in this neighborhood.”
He looked at me sharply. “She doesn’t know what you do?”
“As far as she knows, I’m the owner of a start-up called Exploratory Solutions.”
“Good. Keep it that way. I ran a full background check on her, she seems like a good woman. But we can’t blow your cover. If you managed to keep your cover while you were dating, it shouldn’t be too hard now.”
I nodded and slipped my hand into my pocket for the USB I needed to hand off to him. I slid it under his carefully folded newspaper. I didn’t want to risk Saidy walking in and seeing me handing something to the chief. Explaining that away would be difficult. “New drop-off times. And he’s coordinating something big. Just don’t know the particulars yet. It’ll happen in the next month.”
He patted the newspaper. “Big money?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “We’re pretty sure it has to do with an entire warehouse. Some type of auction. In person.”
His face lit up at the possibilities. “It doesn’t begin and end with Sullivan. He’s a facilitator. We want everyone in connection to him. Make sure when we do this, it’s everyone connected.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Contact me when you and West have specifics. Now, let me read my paper in peace.”
I turned around and grabbed the basket, hurrying back to the living room. “Sorry it took so long, I accidentally knocked it off the counter.”
I handed Wendy the basket, nodded to Saidy, then turned to go. What I really wanted to do was stop and ask Saidy when we would have the chance to talk, but that would have been a little too awkward in front of my boss’s wife.
“I’m going to go close the door on my car and be right back,” I heard Saidy say just as I opened the front door.
I held the door open for her, and she gave me an impish grin as she stepped outside onto the porch. We walked side by side down the sidewalk.
I jolted when she slid her hand into mine and squeezed it briefly before letting go again. “Thank you for being so sweet to me today. I was so flustered about doing this job. I was determined to make a good impression. Instead, I was late—sort of—and lost. And you were nice. Even after everything.”
“I think you made a good impression.”
“Really? What makes you think that?”
I snorted. “She looked positively gleeful when I came out of the kitchen and you were showing her paint chips. I think she thinks you invented paint.”
Saidy tilted her head back and laughed. The top of her head now reached my nose, but she was wearing some really high heels, so that explained it.
Then, she looked at me questioningly. I wondered if she still felt the same attraction that I felt for her. Maybe? Maybe I was only being hopeful. Maybe she really was over us.
“Well, good luck with your decorating.” I gave her an awkward wave as I turned to go back to my van. I stopped at the edge of the curb.
If I didn’t ask, I would always regret it.
“Where did I go wrong?”
She turned to look at me. She didn’t need to ask what I meant. “You never chose me. I didn’t expect to be treated like a princess. You know that. But when it came down to it, you weren’t even there.”
“That’s not true—”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to argue about it, Fletcher. We were great together—for a time. But that ended. And I need to get to work. So please just go.” Her voice cracked on the last few words.
With a sigh, I turned and headed to my van.
I stopped when I felt her eyes on me still.
“I want to do better, Saidy. I want us to be better together.”
“When, Fletcher? You’ve been promising things would get better for a while now, and it’s only gotten worse. I can’t keep being miserable waiting for better.”
Her heels clicked against the pavers as she walked up the sidewalk and porch steps, into the house of the very man who’d just asked me to keep my secret a little longer.
Chapter Ten
Fletcher
“Well, we’ll finalize the details on our end as soon as you give us the go. We already have the warrants, and the cooperation from the county sheriff. It’s a go.”
I nodded as I listened to the police chief finish updating us.
Turned out that it didn’t take long to find the rest of that information he’d wanted. Three days, to be exact. Three days of long hours and nights decrypting the files I’d encrypted for Sullivan. And then there was the fact that we were trying to find out what had happened to Jenkins. Jenkins had mysteriously disappeared, Sullivan was acting cagier than normal, and West was now trying to get hired as the fixer.
Sullivan asked me to be available in the next week at a moment’s notice. He promised me triple payment to be available ‘some evening soon for a private business deal.’
It could only mean one thing. A
