Page 76 of Due Diligence

“Yep.”

That word held so much more than Erin could have deciphered. Yep. It was her. The woman that my body needed. The woman I had waited for. The woman I would do anything—literally anything—for. Yep. That was her.

“Hot damn, Marcus. She’s a find.”

“I know,” I responded softly, keeping my eyes on Cass. I couldn’t look anywhere else. I didn’t want to look anywhere else. She was wearing aleather fucking dressthat made my pulse go wild.

“Easy there,” Erin said with a nudge. She was watching me. “Play it cool.”

“I’m incapable around her,” I admitted.

She clicked her tongue. “Oh, buddy, I know that look. You’re done for.”

Cass reached the table and flashed me a bright smile. Her long hair was loose and wavy tonight, different from the straight, neat way she wore it for work. I truthfully preferred her messy ponytail, but this worked too—everything did on her. My eyes followed her perfectly painted red lips, down to her minuscule black dress that hugged every mouthwatering curve on her body. Frankly, she was putting a considerable amount of trust in that dress—that it wouldn’t bust at the seams with how form fitting it was.

“Hey,” I greeted her. “Good to see you.”

She raised an eyebrow—and that was when I knew I way overshot playing it cool and was just being straight-up cold.Shit.I definitely needed to dial it back.

“Good to see you too.” She turned to Erin. “Hi, I’m Cass Pierson.”

“Erin Roberts.” She reached out and shook Cass’s hand. “How do you two know each other?”

“Cass and I went to college together,” I filled in.

“For a week,” Cass challenged.

Fuck, she was mad at me—I could tell.

“Right, Marcus? That’s about how long you made it before you peaced out.”

“Close. It was more like three months. And we took a class together.”

Cass paused and pulled her eyebrows together in a frown. I could see her practically reciting every single grade on her transcript and trying to figure out what class that was. “Econ 100,” she said after a beat. “It was a three-hundred-person lecture in McCosh, and you used to sit up in the balcony. I used to sit in the third row.”

I didn’t have a moment to be surprised she could miraculously conjure up that memory because Erin started nodding and said, “I used to sit up front during econ too. Helped me to keep my focus on the material if I thought the professor could see me.”

“Where did you go?” Cass asked, eyeing her with interest. “And sorry, how do you know Marcus?”

“She’s my date,” I cut in—again, way overshooting cool and ending up so cold I may as well have been in the south pole. Maybe I just needed to be honest with her—that she made me so nervous this just kept happening. That I blurted out the wrong shit and then ended up simmering in regret hours later.

To my chagrin, Cass paused with both eyebrows raised. “Your date?”

“Yep,” I said, eyes locked on hers, pleading with her to read my mind—I wanted it to be you. “My date.”

Erin shifted uncomfortably for a moment before she cleared her throat and said, “I went to Harvard, then got a master’s in economics at the University of Chicago, and now I’m doing a PhD at Columbia.”

Thatclearlymade the whole thing worse because Cass slowly lowered her eyebrows and tilted her head to the side as she looked between Erin and me. However, she recovered quickly and asked, “And you met…”

“He did a talk on the economics of financial data at Columbia and I came to listen. Afterwards, I went up to him and told him his app is the only thing keeping my head above water as I think about paying back all these loans. Do you use Libra?”

“No,” Cass responded sharply. “I’ve never had trouble remembering how and when to pay my debt.” Her eyes stayed on me when she answered, even though she was speaking to Erin.

I needed a reset button. A hail Mary. A fucking magic blue genie. I needed anything to take this back and do it over again. When I emailed Erin, I thought I would enjoy seeing Cass squirm. For weeks, it was a goddamn delight to watch her try and fail to manage her frustration with me. Now, watching her glare at me like I betrayed her, I didn’t feel any enjoyment whatsoever.

I was about to come clean and tell Cass that Erin accompanied me on almost every single public appearance and we had zero interest in each other—that she had zero interest in men, for that matter. But I didn’t get a chance to. Cass simply gestured over her shoulder and said, “Well, it was so good to chat, but I think I’m going to get a drink.”

She left before I could stop her, and when I moved to follow her, Erin grabbed my arm.

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