Page 54 of Forged in Secrets

He paused for a moment and glanced at Grace. As he suspected, her face was awash with sympathy. No matter how unpleasant Jade had been toward them, he didn’t blame her.

He knew for himself how painful it was to lose a mother, but he had at least been several years into adulthood when Mary Forge had passed away.

“Things fell apart for Jade by the time she hit high school. She was kicked out of four of them, and gotarrested for petty offenses several times. Somehow, she graduated and made her way to UT Austin. My guess would be parental help and a lot of networking.”

“Definitely.”

“Anyway, Craig is now chairman of the board at Lumen, which is where things get interesting.”

He paused, raising an eyebrow in expectation until Grace gave him a quick swat on the arm. “Come on, tell me!” she said, sounding almost as playful as she usually did. The simple, teasing gesture filled him with so much hope that it took him several seconds to locate where he was on the page.

“Right. Uh, so, as it turns out, Lumen is expanding into the med-tech space. And you’ll never guess which company they’ve recently acquired.”

“Just tell me, Forge,” Grace commanded, tilting her paper cup of tea upward as she tried to coax out the final drops.

“Senera.”

Grace set the tea down.

“SeneraPharmaceuticals?”

He nodded. “The very same. And apparently Craig isn’t happy about the acquisition at all. It’s caused some drama on their board.”

“We should probably call Gabe,” Grace said. “That’s a pretty striking coincidence. And maybe Asher or Reilly might remember if Lumen was somehow involved in the Senera case. The name didn’t ring a bell for me, but I was just filing the paperwork at the time.”

“I’ll call him,” he agreed. “But I don’t want to tell him about the thing with the truck.”

Grace sat back in her chair and crossed her arms overher chest, waiting as the short man cleaning the cafe passed behind their table with a bucket and mop.

“What?” Ben prompted.

“You know what,” Grace said.

“No, I don’t,” he said. She rolled her eyes at his obvious fib. “Okay, fine, I do. You want me to be honest with him. But you know how he is. You know how he’s gonna react.”

“Oh, believe me, I know,” Grace said, a half smile tugging at her pink lips. “But we’re gonna tell him anyway. It’s the right thing to do.”

For a long moment, she just looked at him, her pretty blue eyes intense and playful at the same time. Her gaze was a challenge, that much was clear.

He could lean toward her, take her hand in his, press his lips against hers.

Instead, he picked his phone up off the table and called Gabe.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

GRACE

The seatbelt pressed against Grace’s chest, but this time, the sensation brought comfort rather than panic. After being run off the road, she had a new appreciation for the gentle restraint.

“This car is actually pretty ok,” she said, glancing over at Ben as he maneuvered the basic black rental sedan onto a busy street near the hotel. “I was half expecting Gabe to tell us to take up cycling.”

Ben smiled, but said nothing. She yawned, wiping carefully at her eyes so as not to smudge the mascara she’d quickly applied before leaving her room. He had knocked on her door bright and early, and part of her wished she’d taken him up on his suggestion for her to go to bed while he stayed up late doing research on the Gorskys.

“Is there any particular reason you felt the need to leave so early?” she asked, yawning again mid-sentence. “I thought Asher’s flight wasn’t landing until ten.”

“There’s a sunrise to see first,” Ben said, his expressionunreadable as he made his way through the light morning traffic.

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