Page 30 of The Hardest Hit

“Thanks!” she said, leaning over the emergency break, and kissing him as hard as she could. “Call you tomorrow!”

It wasn’t until she was halfway through moving her samples to the smaller unit that she realized she still didn’t have his number.

12

Evan – Cookie Crumbs

Evan was waiting for the meeting to start. Bob Degrossier was talking to Tall Todd about the impending Absolex collapse.

“It feels like insider trading,” said Tall Todd.

“No way,” said Bob. “I bought some of those shares. And no one tipped me off. It just looked like a good deal. Do you know the kind of network you’d have to have to start a cascade like that?”

Evan continued to sip his coffee and check his phone. Ignoring Bob’s blatant lie about being tipped off. Evan was well aware of the network he’d need. It was his network after all. It was just that most of the network didn’t know it belonged to him.

“I’m just saying,” said Tall Todd, “it feels…” Todd hesitated and made a hand gesture that expressed some form of oddity. “hinky. The market doesn’t usually move that way.”

“You’ve been smoking that market voodoo shit,” said Bob. “It feels like just another sloppy decision from their management. Last year it was the utter bomb of the Zanilex product line and those senate hearings all over the news. Someone probably dropped that they were heading for a devaluation in the fourth quarter. Ask Deveraux.”

“Ask me what?” asked Evan, looking up.

“Your grandma was doing those senate hearings, right? And weren’t there rumors they tried to put a hit on her or something?”

“They made some threats,” lied Evan. “Some people showed up to be threatening. It never tracked back to Absolex, of course.”

“But you still had some of their shares, right?”

“Business is business,” said Evan with a shrug. “With the way things are shaping up, I’ll be taking a loss though. I should have sold last week, apparently.”

“I did,” said Bob smugly.

Evan shrugged. “Can’t win them all.”

His phone beeped with an incoming message and he looked down and saw an unknown number. He hesitated and then pressed to receive the message.

Delicious. But I’m having a problem with crumbs.

There was a second delay before an image loaded. Evan managed to not spill his coffee on his phone, but it was a near thing. The picture was of a cookie. Well, partially a cookie, but mostly Olivia’s cleavage with a smattering of cookie crumbs. He’d stopped at her work earlier in the morning and dropped off a package at the front desk with cookies and his card taped to the inside of the box. That had definitely been the correct decision.

Come over tonight and I’ll help you out with that.

You’re going to spoil me.

Evan found himself smiling. The last three women he’d dated had expected very expensive somethings for two dates and half-assed sex. Olivia was spoiled by cookies.

Yes, that is my plan. Seven?

See you then! XOX

“Lingerie model?” asked Bob, craning to look at Evan’s phone.

“None of your business,” said Evan, tucking the phone away.

The staff meeting was as boring as always. The Absolex collapse was touched on, but Tall Todd’s opinion seemed to be an anomaly. Short Todd even went so far as to say that Tall Todd needed to stop doing so much coke, which made everyone laugh.

Back at his desk, Evan found himself wandering away from his to-do list—both Olivia and the encrypted hard drives. He’d done the usual newspaper archive search on Randall, Owen, and the plane crash, but they hadn’t told him much more than what he remembered from when it happened. What he wanted was the FAA’s report on the crash. He knew his grandmother had it, but he couldn’t ask her for it without her wanting to know why. And he couldn’t ask Pete or Jackson to get it without them reporting the request to his grandmother. And maybe what he ought to do was simply forget about it and focus on the fact that he was seeing Olivia tonight. He pulled up the text and photo again and couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across his face. Olivia was definitely worth focusing on, but… the question of whether or not their grandmother had killed her husband, which subsequently led to the plane crash, wasn’t exactly easy to ignore. Finally, he reluctantly dialed Aiden.

“Ev! What is up?”