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FIFTY-FIVE

Wyatt

Nothing is right anymore.

This office used to be my second home, and now I can’t wait to get away. Kinsley’s ghost is haunting me around every turn, every corner. I see her at every meeting, at the copy machine, and every single fucking time I walk by her office.

Of course, she’s not there.

The temp agency fell through, so we have another legal secretary we’ve borrowed from the junior partners. While she’s done nothing wrong, she shouldn’t be here. It’s not right. None of it is.

My head and my heart are at war, and while I know we made the right decision, I’ve never felt so terrible in my entire life.

I’m barely eating; I can’t sleep. I’m falling apart at the seams.

Why did she have to be so damn perfect? She was smart, funny, and put up with our bullshit. But I guess she had to be perfect to lure us in, to snare us in her trap.

So, why do I feel this burning need to see her again? To make sure she’s okay?

Because I’m a fucking moron, that’s why.

“Hey.” Maverick raps his knuckles on my door and pushes it open the rest of the way. “Can we talk for a minute?”

I nod and scoot back from my desk. It’s not like I was going to be getting any work done anyway. I haven’t been able to concentrate, not since everything went down two weeks ago. “What’s up?”

“Do you know where Brantley is?”

“No idea.” He’s not at the office; I’m sure about that. He’s barely been here the past two weeks.

He won’t talk to me, and after the senior partners questioned his integrity at our last meeting, he won’t talk to them either. He’s been radio silent all day, and I’m worried. This situation with Kinsley, the betrayal, hit him the hardest. He blames himself for letting her get too close, for giving in to his attraction.

“Fuck.” He comes in with another curse, flops down in the chair across from me, and gives me a pointed look. “I was hoping to share this with both of you.”

My stomach flops, and I’m on the edge of my seat, literally and figuratively. “What is it?”

Maverick runs his fingers down the length of his tie and glances around my empty office. I’m not sure if he thinks Brantley is hiding behind the fake ficus in the corner of the room, or if he’s expecting the boogeyman to jump out and scare him. “I’ve been having Craig in IT do a little afterhours digging.”

“Okay,” I say slowly, anxious for Maverick to get to the point. They’re the ones who found the damning evidence against Kinsley. They were positive the files were accessed from her computer and the information was circulated from her email.

But then her parting words float to the surface of my brain. Did either of you assholes even consider someone was setting me up to take the fall, or do we only care about justice in the courtroom?

He leans over my desk and rests his elbows on top of some notes I had been looking through…yesterday? The day before? “I had them check out when that client information was accessed. Obviously, she was working on those cases with us, so it wouldn’t be unusual for her to be digging around during business hours.”

My damn traitorous heart hammers against my rib cage, and I’m not sure why he stopped talking, but I really need him to spit it all out. “And?”

“When we really started paying attention to the timing, our server was accessed after she’d left for the day. With us. Those files were accessed and sent from her computer, but there’s no fucking way she was the one doing it. She was with us the entire fucking time. The night we were watching movies with Colin and then when she was at the bar with you and Brant.” He runs a hand down his face, his eyes closing momentarily, and when they open, they’re laced with pain and regret.

She was with us. She couldn’t have done it. And we—no, I assumed it was all true after I found her in the coffee shop with Thomas Anderson. The meeting that was likely as innocent as she claimed.

The breath is squeezed from my lungs, and my heart jumps in my throat. It feels like the floor has vanished beneath my feet and I’m in freefall. My head—the whole world—is spinning, and I’m going to be sick.

“She was set up?” My voice is hoarse, my throat full of broken glass.

“Looks like it.” He slams a hand down on my desk, sending papers flying, and neither one of us make an attempt to stop them “She fucking told us. We should have listened, questioned things. We let her go, Wyatt. We fucking let her go.”

“And what do we do now?”

“Fuck if I know. We don’t deserve her.”

He’s right. Of course, he’s right. “We don’t, but I’m selfish enough to want her anyway.”

We need to make this right. We need to find her, but first we’ve got to find Brantley. Where the fuck is he?