Page 23

22

Brax had insisted on clearing the breakfast dishes, and Gideon helped.

“You cooked, I clean. Them’s the rules,” Brax said.

“I like him,” Jada whispered when the two men were in the kitchen. “Actually, I love him for saving Lucy’s life. But I like him for you.”

Jenny frowned. “You do? Why?”

“I’ve seen him with two women since Gideon and I have been together. They didn’t last long, but he never seemed to be as emotionally invested as he is with you. When he looks at you, it’s like you’ve hung the moon.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Jada pulled her purse into her lap, then grabbed her tablet. “It was great you gave me your username and password, but it turned out I didn’t need it. Gideon had already found a way into your company’s intranet, and he’d hacked into everybody’s email that he thought was relevant. Like I said, my brain hasn’t been firing on all cylinders because of the wedding. I feel like a fool.”

“Jada, don’t feel that way. Take my advice and enjoy it. Being surrounded by your family’s love is a blessing. You’re lucky.”

She looked up at Jenny. “You weren’t?”

Jenny shook her head.

“What happened?”

Brax and Gideon came back into the room.

“It was nothing,” Jenny whispered. “I’m more interested in what you and Gideon found out.”

“What was nothing?” Brax asked.

Damn, the man didn’t miss a thing.

“Just girl talk. Shopping. You wouldn’t be interested,” Jenny said quickly. Brax gave her a long look, but let it go. She knew he was going to circle back later.

Shit.

Gideon sat down next to Jada, and he turned over his tablet. He pulled up some information, then turned it around so that she and Brax could see his screen.

“Jenny, who is Fiona?” Gideon asked.

She frowned. “Fiona? What does she have to do with anything?”

“Can you just tell us?” Jada asked in a calm voice. “We found something in the Vice President of HR’s email, where he mentioned the name Fiona and your name, Jennifer Rivers. He’d deleted the email, but didn’t bother to empty his trash.”

“What did the email say?” Jenny asked.

“Baby, first tell them about Fiona. Isn’t she a friend of yours?” Brax asked.

She looked over at him and nodded. “Yes, she is.” She turned back to Gideon and Jada. “Fiona Richards is someone who started out as a temp in our London office while I was working there. She eventually ended up as the executive assistant to the Director of Operations and the Director of Finance. Normally there was one EA for the five Directors in the C-Suite, but she’d gone out on maternity leave. So, they had to get two temps, Fiona and Angela.”

“I got her personnel file,” Gideon said.

“Yeah, and I went over it with a fine-tooth comb,” Jada nodded. “It was slim, because she was a temp. It says that the two directors she reported to were considering hiring her on in a fulltime capacity, but one day her temp agency called them and said she wasn’t going to return. It was a black eye on the temp agency, and the two directors were pissed. The agency lost their contract with Cyber Tech. It was weird. Gideon and I looked everywhere through the HR records to see if she had reported some kind of harassment that might have been a reason for her to leave, but there was nothing.”

“I hacked PeopleNow, her agency, and there is no record of a Fiona Richards ever having worked there. None. What’s even more interesting is that so far, we’ve been unable to track down Fiona anywhere in London. Three weeks after her disappearance, you were transferred to Bangladesh. Can you tell us why this might have happened?”

“I had put in my request for a new assignment two months before Fiona quit. I don’t think that the two things are related. As for Fiona and my name being linked by the VP of HR here in the States, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“But you know something about her disappearance, don’t you,” Jada prompted.

Jenny nodded. “She was in an untenable situation. It was worse than sexual harassment if you could believe it.”

“What was it, Honey?” Brax asked as he put his arm around her shoulders.

“Fiona was pretty. Actually she was…is beautiful. Curves in all the right places. Blonde. She loves to wear these vintage suits to the office, that really show off all of her assets. She gets them from secondhand shops, so they’re cheap, and she looked great in them. I think Dave chose her as their EA because of how she looked, and Edgar chose her because he thought she was stupid.”

“Was she?” Brax asked.

“Fiona couldn’t put down that she had a degree, because she didn’t, but she was taking night classes, and only had one more class to take to get her degree in mathematics. It was actuarial mathematics.”

Gideon whistled. “She could probably run circles on the Finance Director,” Gideon chuckled.

“That was the problem. Six months into her gig, she realized that he was moving money around into a shell corporation. What’s worse, he had opened it up in her name.”

“How in the hell had he done that?” Jada demanded to know. “She should have been smarter than that.”

“Fiona and I pieced it together later on. Edgar supposedly broke his foot the first month she started, and couldn’t come into the office for four weeks. There were small things that needed to be signed and notarized, that he authorized her to do on his behalf. He’d say he’d read it over at home, and she’d print it out and sign it in front of the notary. Easy.”

Jada groaned. “She might have been school smart, but not street smart. He ate her for lunch.”

“Yep,” Jenny nodded.

“He pulled this in the first couple of months she worked there. That must have been the point she signed the corporation papers and the bank account under her name. But of course, Edgar had all the access to the account.”

“Of course,” Jada said.

“So, four months later when she finds out that over two million pounds have been embezzled from the company, she traced it back to Edgar. Then she realizes all the money has been deposited into an account in her name. She’s screwed. By that time, we had become friends, and she tells me what has happened.”

“Why would you believe her?” Gideon asked.

“You have to know her background to believe her. We had a girl’s night at my apartment one night and exchanged war stories.”

“War stories?” Brax asked.

“Our childhoods. Hers won. She had documentation. She showed me the articles on the internet. Her dad killed her mother, then held Fiona and her little sister hostage for ten hours before killing himself. Her dad was a thief, and the cops had been closing in on him. Her mom was trying to leave with Fiona and her sister, before the cops raided the place. There is no way that Fiona would ever steal anything.”

Jenny looked around and saw that everybody was nodding.

“So, Fiona did a runner?” Brax said. “Do you know where she is?”

Jenny nodded. “She changed her identity, got new papers, and is currently living in Spain. She speaks fluent Spanish, so she’s fine. She wants to hire someone to clear her name and bring Edgar to justice, but I haven’t talked to her since my kidnapping.”

“Did you ever email Fiona?” Gideon asked.

“Sure, we worked together. But I didn’t contact her at all after she left, or after she told me what was going on. I didn’t want any kind of communication going on between the two of us.”

“How about when you were in Bangladesh?” Brax asked.

“Only from a new Gmail account that I made up just to talk to her.”

“That won’t work,” Gideon said. “You still have to point back to other email accounts for backup.”

Jenny frowned. “Yeah, you’re right. But would the company be watching my email?”

“Did you email from your company computer?” Gideon asked.

“No, I did it from my private computer.” Jenny grinned.

“Did you do it from work, when you were connected to the company internet?” Jada asked.

Jenny nodded.

“You’re hosed.”

“So do you think Jenny being shoved in the street could be due to this thing in London?” Brax asked.

“Could be,” Gideon said slowly. “The other wildcard is that the VP of Public Relations, Roy Jeckel, was fired three weeks ago after thirty-five years. When I read through his HR file, it was clear that the company set him up as the fall guy for the bad PR surrounding the Jenny scandal.”

“That wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his decision not to pay my ransom,” Jenny protested.

“Yeah, but they’re saying it’s his fault for all the bad press and their plunging stock price,” Jada said.

“Assholes,” Jenny muttered.

“There you go. We have a couple of people who are suspects. Edgar and Roy,” Jada said.

“Edgar has no reason to come after Jenny. He doesn’t know about her connection to Fiona,” Brax argued.

“If the VP of HR here in the States mentioned the two of them in the same email, then I’d say they’ve been connected,” Gideon disagreed.

Jenny shivered. “I was supposed to be safe when I got back to America.”

“You will be, Honey. I promise.”

Brax pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. She hoped he was right.