Page 119 of Due Diligence

He glanced over his shoulder at his apartment. “Did you expect to come in?”

I nodded.

“Fine.” Alex stepped backwards and held the door open, allowing me into his entryway.

Once the door shut behind us, I paced a few steps into the entryway before I turned around to find Alex staring again. His arms were crossed and his posture was sturdy, combative almost. I was the opposite—conciliatory and loose, although I wasn’t sure why. I drew my hand up to my mouth and rubbed my palm over it. My skin hit stubble and chapped lips, byproducts of my sleepless night.

“I don’t know what to say,” I admitted. “I’ve been racking my brain for hours trying to come up with the words. Nothing feels right.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” he asked in a curt, even tone. “Start there.”

My eyes traveled to a spot on the carpeted floor and stayed there. It was a diversion from looking at his face as I siftedthrough the emotions of the past two months. “Maybe I wanted to have something for myself for once.”

He flicked his eyebrows upwards. “So, you’ve been sleeping with our due diligence analyst to feel better about yourself?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe I did it because you couldn’t.”

Alex shook his head. “That’s not you.”

He was right. It wasn’t.

“I think you did it because you like her,” he went on, which dragged my gaze back to his face. He was watching me like I would camouflage if he took his eyes off me. I wished I could.

“I do,” I admitted after a beat. “A hell of a lot, actually, but that’s not why I did it in the first place.”

“Why did you do it then? I know I was kidding around and flirting with her, but I never would have fucked her.”

Fucked her.

I said things like that to Cass all the time. She went wild for me whenever I did. The cruder and filthier, the better. But hearing Alex talk about her like that shot heat through my veins. He had no right to say that. He hadn’t earned that. He hadn’t painstakingly peeled back the gossamer layers that surrounded this ethereal yet complicated person.

“She was more than she seemed.” My anger kept my tone even. “She was so good at pretending to be one thing, but she still maintained her sense of self underneath. I was caught off guard by it at first. I didn’t know how to react to it. But once I figured it out, I was weak to it. I couldn’t keep away from her.”

Alex released a slow exhale. His lips rounded as he respired. After a beat, he said, “So was she worth five hundred million dollars?”

I was slow to respond. I considered my words and put them each in the right place before I said, “For me, yes. For everyonewho stood to gain from the sale, no. She wasn’t worth five hundred million to them. But neither were we.”

He didn’t acknowledge my comment, but I sensed it struck him somewhere deep below the surface by the way he finally looked away from me. After a moment, he returned his eyes to my face. “We have a few things to talk about,” he said. “And you’ve been avoiding me. But now it looks like we’re both ready to show our cards. What do you think?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll start,” he offered, smiling at me—too handsome for the kind of conversation we were having. “You know I did somethingallegedlyillegal. Only three people know about it: you, me, and her.”

“Well, there’s also the company you sold the data to…”

“No concern there,” he answered flippantly. “So, in my best-case scenario, you keep your mouth shut, I’ll do the same, and so will she. The sale goes through, nobody ever knows what I did, and we move on with our lives as twoveryrich men.”

“And in my best-case scenario, you come clean and admit you acted alone, and we try to salvage our futures and the futures of the people who work for us.”

He shook his head. “Fuck no.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not going down,” he insisted. “No. We don’t have to tell anyone the truth. We can just move on.”

“She knows, Alex. I didn’t even tell her—she fucking figured it out. And the fact sheknowsI know about it is killing me. I need to tell her and then she needs to be able to do her job—which is to tell Davenport-Ridgeway we did some really illegal, really fucked up shit.”

He shook his head again. “She’s not telling anyone.”

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