Page 22 of Indecent Proposal

My mouth fell open. In the eyes of my entire social circle, there was no ‘better’ than Richard. He was rich, handsome, charming, well-connected, polite, and funny. What more could a girl possibly want?

In fact, in many ways he was the opposite of Vaughn. I couldn’t see Vaughn charming anybody, and Richard hadn’t ever offended anyone as far as I knew. Vaughn looked like he’d stumbled out of the woods and into a suit by accident and was hating every minute of it. Richard had never been camping and looked like he’d been born wearing Tom Ford.

Maybe that was why I was attracted to this man. He was the antithesis of what I’d been trapped in. That made sense. And that was a good thing. I could use a rebound, a swing of the pendulum. And that was all it would be.

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “Really. Thank you.”

“You cared about him, right? Even if you weren’t in love with him?”

I nodded.

“Then it’s okay to need someone to vent to. You can love someone and still be frustrated. And now you can finally talk about it. That’s okay.”

“Thanks.”

Vaughn shrugged and gave me a small smile that, for once, wasn’t him pulling my pigtails, so to speak. It was kind. “It’s nothing. Really.”

For a moment we stared at each other, and I felt like both of us were waiting for the other to do something. Do what, I didn’t know. I found myself wanting him to walk over and kiss me. To pull me into his arms so I could collapse whole-heartedly against his strong, broad chest and allow him to sweep me away with his hands, his mouth, his body.

Did he want that, too? Is that what I was reading in his face, in his eyes?

Vaughn cleared his throat. “All right, then. I’ll be back in a few days. Follow the rules,” he reminded me.

“And if I don’t?” I challenged.

Vaughn paused, almost at the front door. He narrowed his gaze on me, making me feel pinned in the most decadent way. “You’ll find out, and it’ll make that spanking I gave you feel like child’s play.”

I shivered at the low, warning growl in his voice. I didn’t know if I loved that he was teasing me and giving me nothing, or if I hated it and wanted to demand to know more. But before I could make up my mind, he was out the door and gone.

CHAPTER8

Vaughn

Idrove back to the city, and as soon as I arrived I began looking into the financial firm that Richard worked for. Hardman Holdings Inc. It was abbreviated to “HHI,” pronounced ‘hi’, which clearly someone, somewhere, thought was catchy and funny.

They were a firm that handled investments for clients in various areas, primarily the stock market, and would fund projects or even charitable foundations on behalf of their clients. It was one of those rich people things. Oh, you wanted to look like you cared about charity? Just pay these people to manage all that financial stuff for you, make you look good, choosing where to donate and how much.

I didn’t know of any scandals that they were connected to, but these places could be good about covering up that kind of thing. There were two kinds of illegal financial firms:

The first was the kind that were super obvious like Bernie Madoff, where you should’ve known but everyone chose to ignore it. People didn’t want to look deeper. They relied on the fact that their friends were in on it, and this guy was ‘one of them’. He was in insider. Why shouldn’t they trust him? And then nobody wanted to look deeper and admit they’d been a fool.

The second was more insidious. If Hardman Holdings was trouble, then they were the second kind of trouble, and that worried me more, because this was the kind where they knew what they were doing. Basically, it was a shadow company where they claimed to do one thing and it looked all good on paper, but for those in the know, they were a different kind of company altogether.

Nothing was coming up through a cursory investigation. I called in a financial guy I knew to look at Hardman’s annual reports and to tell me what he thought. In the meantime, I got a ping on the sniper: it was Aces.

Obviously Aces was not the sniper’s real name, but it was a shortened version of ‘ace in the hole’—a reference to how well he could make his kills. I hadn’t met the guy personally, but in our world when you reached a certain level of skill, everyone kind of knew about everyone else. He was a formidable opponent and he wasn’t going to give up easily, especially now that he’d missed his target once.

I would have to act like I was being watched at all times now. Aces was, like me, a war vet and after being honorably discharged he’d turned to sniping-for-hire. Maybe I could pull some strings and try to get his war record, learn more about him. I had never gone out of my way to do that before, but I also hadn’t crossed paths with him either. That would change, now. I had to know my enemy.

However, while I waited, I received a call from someone I had been unable to talk to before: Susan Frietag was one of Richard’s former secretaries who had quit when she came into some family money, and had been traveling. She was in Italy earlier but had just come back to the States and was willing to meet with me.

I met her at a café, inside rather than outside. I didn’t think Ace would be so bold as to shoot a woman in a public café on the sidewalk, but I didn’t want to take chances. Keeping it to a public place, though, was also important. Less chance of someone attacking us or trying something because we were alone.

Susan was a much more wiry and fit woman than I’d expected. I’d checked out her social media, however, and saw that she’d been doing mountain climbing, long hikes through Iceland and other areas, hiking the King’s Road in Scandinavia. So she probably was a lot stronger and more fit than your average former office worker.

Her eyes were sharp, and I got the impression that she was more aware of her surroundings than most. “Hi, Vaughn?”

“Yes, hi, thanks for meeting with me.” I sat down. “I know this is a bit sudden.”

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