Page 39 of Power Play

Tess, for the first time in the three days since she’d been dropped here, jumped to her feet with real enthusiasm and beat it down the hallway towards the guest room where I’d set her up.

Kit looked at me like I was just the saddest sack in the world.

“What?” I asked.

“Five grand,” she said and lifted her phone. “I have it in writing.”

“Five grand,” I agreed and the silence between us pounded.

“Do you know Harrison?” I asked. “Is he one of your dad’s-”

She shook her head, cutting off the word victim. “I never met him,” she said.

“I won’t say anything,” I said, feeling strangely magnanimous. And she looked at me with such gratitude it made me a little sick to my stomach.

“You almost did,” she whispered. “At the bar.”

I couldn’t lie. I almost had. That natural instinct that made me want her to pay for what she did to me had kicked in, and I’d wanted…Hell, I didn’t know what I wanted.

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “What happened isn’t exactly a secret. It was all over the news at the time, and my dad’s still in jail. People will know.”

“As someone who was once embroiled in a scandal, you would be amazed at how short people’s memories are. We’ll tell people you’re Tess’s nanny,” I said.

“No one is going to believe that.”

“Why?”

She shot me a look that I couldn’t decipher. “Weren’t you planning on being a teacher?” I asked her and the air went cold. She obviously didn’t want to talk about that. “You told me that night in Nashville. You wanted to be a kindergarten teacher.”

“You remember that?”

I remembered every fucking thing about that night. That was the problem.

“Obviously,” I said.

“Well, it clearly didn’t happen,” she said.

“Why not?”

She looked at me funny. “You know why not.”

I knew her dad was a crook. I knew she’d seduced me to get me to invest. That was all I needed to know.

Wasn’t it?

Suddenly, it didn’t seem like enough. None of what I knew seemed like enough.

Tess came running back into the room in a navy blue swim suit with goggles on her head and a blow up unicorn floaty under her arms.

“Yes!” I cried when I saw her. “This is the kind of enthusiasm we need.” I held out my hand to high five her. She jumped up to slap it, missing my palm and hitting my wrist.

“Oh wait, I forgot my flip flops,” Tess announced and ran back out of the room.

“Yeah, don’t forget those!” I called after her. When she was gone I confessed to Kit. “I totally would have forgotten those.”

“Listen,” Kit said. “I’ll go home and get my suit and meet you there.”

---