Page 48 of Due Diligence

“Seriously?” His face lit up with alarm. “You want to go through the ledgers?”

“Did I not just say that?”

Marcus’s expression tightened into an even deeper frown. “Yes, but I’m trying to understand this. I thought I was just going to upload the documents and wash my hands of them.”

I nodded. “That’s fine. You’re always welcome to do something else.”

“And what are you going to do if I stop?”

“I’m going to be doing my job, which is to review your ledgers and make sure they’re complete before I set the accountants on them. Believe it or not, I’m totally capable of doing that without you by my side.”

He pushed his hand through his brown hair before he shook his head. “Damn. Your capacity for this shit is incredible.”

“Well, I wasn’t the valedictorian at Princeton for nothing,” I replied as I located and clicked open the most recent ledger.

It took me a few beats to realize Marcus was sitting behind me without saying a word. I glanced back at him and he was staring at me with one eyebrow raised, his lips parted, and his green eyes focused on my face.

“What?” I asked, scanning his expression.

“Say that again.”

“What?” I repeated, just to annoy him.

“No, say the thing about Princeton again.”

“Oh,” I commented. I forced myself to look back at my laptop. “I was the valedictorian.”

After a few more seconds, Marcus let out a near-delirious chuckle. “You’re kidding me.”

“Do you really think I would joke about something so Googleable?”

When he didn’t respond, I turned to face him again, only to find he was still staring right at me. “Please don’t tell me you’regoing to make a big deal about something that doesn’t even matter anymore.”

“Cassie, don’t belittle it. That’s a huge deal,” he insisted, surprising me in the process. When I didn’t react to his statement, he actually broke into a smile and said, “That’s incredible.You’reincredible.”

“And yet only one of us is a millionaire.”

“Why do you do that?” he commented, frowning again. “Why is it that every time you get a compliment, you chew it up and spit it out?”

“I don’t do—”

“We’ve only been working together for two weeks and I already know this about you,” he said. “It’s like you’re incapable of hearing people say anything nice about you.”

“It’s just a thing of mine, I guess.”

“Why?”

Even though I knew it was stubborn, I shrugged.

“No, don’t do that. There’s obviously a story here.”

I averted my gaze from his face. I briefly toyed with telling him the truth—with telling him about all those times those well-meaning compliments twisted into something noxious. The words got stuck on their way up though, tangling themselves together and distorting themselves until all I could manage to say was, “I just don’t like other people telling me what I am and what I’m not. And I need to leave it at that.”

Marcus turned my response over a few times. He would drop it; I could tell by the way his eyes came up to meet mine and stayed there. Slowly, he nodded. “Got it.”

“Good,” I responded, hoping my tone wasn’t as acidic as it sounded in my head. I cleared my throat as I faced the laptop again. “I can do the ledgers myself if you’re tired of this.”

“No, I’ll stick around for a little bit longer.”

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