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The elevator stopped on my floor, and Deklin followed me off, even though his office was on the second floor. I didn’t say anything until we were in my office, and Deklin had closed the door behind us.
“Do you remember Royd Kichner?” I leaned against my desk and waved my hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter if you do. He’s a PI and the company’s used him. So has Grandad. I went to Kichner to ask him to find out about Linsey.”
“Big mistake,” Deklin said. “You go digging in a woman’s past, she is not going to like it.” I gave him a look, and he put up his hands. “Sorry. Continue.”
“When Kichner got back to me, he told me that Linsey had visited him. She’d given him a different name and asked him about Grandad.”
“Grandad?” Deklin looked as confused as I’d felt when I’d first heard it.
“When I went to confront Linsey about it, she said that he wasn’t who I thought he was.”
“Who, Kichner?”
I couldn’t tell if Deklin was trying to be funny or was being purposely obtuse. Either way, I answered. “Grandad.”
“What did she mean by that?”
I shrugged.
“What does she think he did?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I need coffee.”
Deklin held out a second cup that I hadn’t seen him carrying. His cheeks were red. “I was going to come talk to you about that club.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. How in the world had my sex life suddenly become a point of discussion with my brothers?
“Not important,” Deklin said. “I was just explaining the coffee. Let’s go back to why you don’t know what Linsey meant about Grandad.”
“That’s simple.” I took a drink of the coffee and was pleasantly surprised that it was good. “I didn’t ask her.”
“You didn’t ask her?” Deklin shifted in his seat, a strange look passing over his face. “Davin, did you basically blast her for asking a PI about Grandad but not bother to find out why…and the way you’d found out about the PI was because you yourself had hired him to dig into her background?”
It sounded a whole lot worse when he said it that way.
“I was just trying to make sure she wasn’t hiding something that would hurt our family,” I clarified. “You know as well as I do that people come after families like ours.”
“Was she asking about money? Trying to find out ways to seduce you?”
I shook my head. “Royd just said that she asked about Grandad and some work Royd had done for him.”
“Do you think she was thinking about trying to seduce him?”
I shook my head. “That’s not really her style.”
“So, blackmail?”
I frowned. “That isn’t really like her either.”
“A long con?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, maybe I’ve missed something,” Deklin said, “but how do you know she hasn’t found something about Grandad? It’s not like he’s been entirely truthful with us.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “She shouldn’t have been looking into him in the first place.”
“Just like you shouldn’t have been looking into her?”