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“I see.”

  “Loses more money than he makes. Got it bad, boss. Real bad.”

  “How much are these companies paying him for this information, if he’s the one?”

  “We have no idea. All transactions, we’re sure, are cash payments. Impossible to trace.”

  “If he’s the one.”

  “Right. But we’ve been working hard on the other three suspects, sir. Everything just keeps leading to Morton.”

  Ethan exhaled again. “I’m sure you have a plan of entrapment?”

  “Yes, sir,” Grier said excitedly. “An excellent plan we think.” And Grier began, slowly and precisely, to spell out that excellent plan. They would use informants, he said, people who were close to the four suspects but who were also loyal to Chandler’s company. Ethan sat behind his desk and listened quietly, appearing not to be as taken by this scheme as Grier seemed to be. But when Grier stated that they hoped to use Victoria Douglas to cozy up to Morton, Ethan’s head jerked up at Grier so quickly that Grier’s heart nearly stopped.

  “Victoria Douglas?” he asked. Just the mention of her name seemed almost like a tease to Ethan. Ever since an incident four days ago when she literally landed in his lap, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. It was bad before, he’d been thinking about her, dreaming about her, since the first time he saw her on her job interview. But his thoughts of her not only increased after their latest episode, but they intensified. Now here she was popping up again, in another negative situation, and for some strange reason Ethan didn’t like it. He dreaded that Grier was even intimating at getting her involved in this tawdriness by Morton that was nothing short of treason in Ethan’s eyes, and it left him slightly annoyed. “What does Victoria Douglas have to do with this?”

  “She’ll make the perfect informant for us,” Grier said. “The perfect decoy. Mainly because Morton seems to have a thing for her, although he keeps it undercover.”

  “He has a thing for her?”

  “Yes, sir. He even sneaks around and take pictures of her with his cell phone, and then he takes the pictures home and puts them on his computer’s hard drive.”

  Ethan leaned back in his chair. He was trying to remain calm although his heart was ramming against his chest. The idea that Morton, or any other man, would be taking snapshots of Victoria Douglas was more than he could stomach. Why he couldn’t stomach it, since he’d only met the woman twice, he couldn’t say. “What kind of pictures does he take of her?” he asked, not trying to hide his obvious interest.

  “Just pictures. Her walking and working around the office. Talking with her staff.”

  “So Morton’s a pervert,” Ethan said with a tinge of bitterness in his voice.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. We didn’t find nothing like that. He just seems to have the hots for Douglas.”

  Ethan’s jaw tightened as if by reflex. Something was seriously wrong with him and he knew it. Why should he care if some man has the hots for Douglas? She wasn’t his woman and probably would never be. So why should he care? But he did. Said so all over his suddenly concerned face. He had an undeniable case of out of no-where, irrational, old-fashioned jealousy. “Has Miss Douglas shown any interest in Morton? Is this a two-way street?”

  “She’s definitely friendly with him, and they have lunch together in the cafeteria a lot, dinner at her home once, but that’s about it from what my people could gather. They think she might view Morton as a little too old for her.”

  Ethan almost smiled. So much for this infatuation. Because if she thought Morton, who was barely thirty-two, was too old for her, then he didn’t stand a chance. Not that he wanted to anyway, he reminded himself.

  “This is the deal, Mr. Chandler,” Grier went on. “Morton scouts land for CDI all the time, that’s part of what he does. Let’s say you send him out on a mission, to some small, secluded resort town somewhere to scout land, and Vicky Douglas just happens to show up, on vacation or something, in that same location. It’s a small world, after all. So we wire her, they spend a lot of time together, he admits his dastardly deed and wham, we’ve got the scumbag that’s been costing you millions in land bids and project designs. We’ll keep close tabs on Douglas, of course, so that nothing goes wrong, and it all works out in the end.”

  “I don’t know, Marc,” Ethan said as he ran his hand through his neatly cut brown hair.

  “I think It’s a good plan, Mr. Chandler.”

  “I don’t like it. Douglas can’t just show up out of the blue like that. Morton’s no fool, he’ll automatically get suspicious. And if my gut is right, and it usually is, I don’t see Victoria Douglas as the kind of female who’ll wear a wire to entrap her friend, I don’t care what he’s done. No, for this to work she’s got to remain in the dark about what’s going on. And she can’t just happen to be in the same town as Morton. She has to be there on a plausible, work-related purpose. Thieves don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “I agree with you. But what plausible explanation could there be for the head of your logistics department to be in some strange, remote town on company business?”

  Ethan leaned back and hesitated before responding, as if he had to convince himself first. “She’ll be there with me,” he said.

  Grier stared straight into Chandler’s fiery blue eyes. He blinked his own. “With you?”

  “You said yourself this town has to be remote, a place where Morton’s unlikely to have anything much to do or any connections. I have a summer house in the Florida Keys. That could be our next scouting ground. In fact I had considered some time ago building a resort out there and Morton knows I’d considered it. He also knows that I always drop in on the area before any feasibility studies are even initiated, just to make sure it’s where I want to be. I’ll have him show up a few days after I’ve set down roots and Douglas will be along as my assistant, which isn’t unusual for me to have, either. None of these moves, as opposed to Douglas just showing up, should make Morton suspicious in the least.”

  Grier nodded his head, thinking. “Sounds good, sir. A good plan. I like it. We’ll be leaving nothing to chance.”

  “Right.”

  “But I still say the problem is Douglas. How can we trust the info if she’s not wired?”

  “She can’t be wired. She won’t do it, for one thing, and she won’t be natural even if she does. I know Fred Morton. He’ll see right through it if she’s play acting, trying to pump him for information, rather than being her natural self. No. She’s staying in the dark.”

  “But how are we going to know if Morton’s telling her anything if she stays out of the loop?” he asked.

  “Because she’ll tell me,” Ethan replied, sounding more confident than he was. “It’ll be the right thing to do and she’ll do the right thing.”

  Grier started shaking his head. “This part I don’t like, Mr. Chandler. We’ll be relying too much on Douglas’s integrity- something neither one of us knows for certain she even has.”

  “Agreed. That’s why we’ll have to feed her a line.” He said this and then sat pensively, in full thought, and Grier allowed him time to reflect. When his stark blue eyes looked up again, Grier knew he’d nailed it.

  “A promotion,” Ethan said.

  “A promotion? For Douglas? We’ll promise her a promotion?”

  “For Morton. We’ll tell her that I’ve been thinking about promoting Morton to the presidency, second in line of succession to me. But I need to know if he’s presidential material, if he’s for the company’s best interests, or just his own. Since Morton seems to have a thing for her, I’ll ask her to cozy up to him, all above board and professional, of course, but enough to find out what he’s all about. If I’ve read this Douglas woman correctly, then she’ll be loyal enough to the company that pays her salary to at least want its president to be worthy of the post.”

  “Or she could forget the company and look out for her own skin,” Grier said. “She could cut some backroom deal with Morton, telling him w
hat you’re requiring of her and then reporting back only positive things to you. In return, Morton will become president and she’ll get some sweetheart deal of her own.”

  “That’s certainly possible,” Ethan said slowly, “except that Morton won’t become president and if Douglas starts feeding me all of this wonderfully flattering info about Morton, then I’ll know what’s up with her, too.”

  “I don’t know, boss. It’s a crap shoot.”

  “The truth will be revealed, in any event,” Ethan replied. And more importantly to him, he thought, Douglas’s true self will be revealed as well and he’d be able to see for himself if this woman who’d managed, for some unearthly reason, to garner his full and undivided attention, has his full attention, was as remarkable, as different a sort of person, as he suspected that she was.

  FOUR

  They sat like conjoined triplets at a back booth in Patsy’s, drinking their lattes while Tori did all of the talking. Macy, the real estate agent, seemed mesmerized by the tale. Sheila, the doctor, seemed skeptical. But they listened without interruption until Tori had recited every bit of the few details she could recite. Then they both glanced at each other, and then looked at Tori.

  “That’s it?” Macy asked. At twenty-five, she and Tori were the same age, both having known each other since high school. But unlike Tori, whom everybody considered a bulwark of perfection, the all-American girl with nary a blemish to her good name, Macy was riddled with blemishes, from her happy-go-lucky lifestyle to her inability to keep her mouth shut. Whereas Sheila, who was really more Tori’s friend than Macy’s, often found Macy’s style too ghetto for her, Tori found it refreshing. With Macy what you see is what you get, a rarity nowadays, in Tori’s view.

  “I told you it was crazy,” Tori said. “Did you think I was lying?”

  “Of course I don’t think you’re lying,” Macy replied. “I just don’t get it. What reason did Arthur give for Chandler selecting you?”

  “That’s the point, Mace. He didn’t have a reason to give. It’s almost as if on a whim Chandler’s forcing me to follow him around, and to some town I never even heard of.” Tori said this as if it was a bad thing. It wasn’t. It would be, in fact, a dream come true for her if only her job wasn’t involved. If only this wasn’t some business trip that was surely going to determine, based solely on how well she performed this job of hers, whether she kept her good position or had to start over.

  “Don’t even try that, Victoria,” Sheila said. “Nobody forces you to do anything and you know it.”

  “Yeah, well, this is different. I can’t lose this job, so you may as well say I’m being forced.” Tori exhaled. “I don’t know. This is all so crazy to me! Why would he select me? I’m the lady who insulted him to his face the first time I ever laid eyes on him for crying out loud!”

  “Will you stop making it personal, Tori,” Sheila suggested, growing irritable. “Ethan Chandler certainly isn’t. He apparently feels that the head of his logistics department would be a valuable resource on this business trip. That’s how you have to look at it. Stop trying to personalize it.”

  “Child please,” Macy chimed in. “It is personal, girl, don’t listen to Sheila. You insulted him, yes, but why did you insult him, ever think about that? You insulted him because he was staring at you. Staring at you, Tori!” Macy said this as if that said it all, but Sheila only shook her head.

  “What does that have to do with the time of day, I ask you,” she said.

  “He was checking Tori out, that’s what it has to do with it. And since he selected her to go to Florida with him, over all his other employees, he apparently liked what he saw.”

  Tori smiled at her optimistic friend. “I’m sure that’s not it, Mace. Especially not after our. . .”

  “Not after y’all what, girl?”

  Tori hesitated. But what difference did it make now? Besides, she didn’t have to tell them every detail. “Especially not after our second encounter,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me you insulted the man again?” Macy asked.

  “I didn’t insult him, no. Actually I think I . . . knocked him off his feet, so to speak.”

  Sheila was lost. Macy smiled. “What did you do, Tori?” she asked her.

  Tori shook her head. “I’m too embarrassed to even discuss it. Let’s just talk about something else, okay?”

  “Something else?” Macy asked incredulously. “Are you out of your mind? You’re telling us that Ethan Chandler, THE Ethan Chandler, has personally requested that you accompany him all the way to some romantic island in the Florida Keys, and you want to change the subject? Yeah, right. You’d better fill us in on what’s really going on, because I know your lil’ butt. There’s more to this tale than what you’re telling.”

  “Oh, there’s more,” Tori said. “Way more. And it’s all unpleasant. Which is all the more reason why his selection of me is bizarre to say the least, and why talking about it isn’t going to help a darn thing!”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Sheila said as she looked at her watch. Both Macy and Tori looked at her. “That’s all the time I have left before I have to be back at the hospital. Fifteen minutes. So will you please tell us what happened the second time you ran into this man?”

  Tori looked at Sheila. She was beautiful, in an arrogant, insufferable way, with her perfectly permed short cut and her long, slender frame. Unlike Macy, who was short and on the verge of plumpness, Sheila had that model’s physique that drove men wild. Macy only wished she had that gift and Tori just didn’t care whether she did or not. “Well?” Sheila said. “Tell us what happened the second time you ran into Ethan Chandler.”

  “That’s the point,” Tori replied, just thinking about it paining her. “I ran into him.”

  Macy laughed. “Literally?” she asked.

  “Literally,” Tori said.

  She was late, as usual, for a meeting she had to co-chair, and was hurrying for the stairwell, her briefcase swinging wildly, her long hair flapping against her back. She pushed open the heavy door swiftly, expecting to run down the usually empty stairwell without incident.

  Ethan Chandler, however, was already on the stairwell that fateful afternoon and as soon as she was pushing the door open, he was reaching for its knob so that he could step onto the very floor she was attempting to exit. The force of the heavy door, not to mention her deliberate push, collided with his face, forcing his body, now off balance, to fly backwards down the stairs until he was able to break his free-fall and land midway down, his back ramming against the rail.

  Tori didn’t see the collision, but she heard it, and she immediately looked around the door and saw this big man sitting on the stairs, his expensive suit coat flapped open, his big hand touching the blood that was just beginning to ooze from his bottom lip. When Tori realized at once that it was no poor, unfortunate soul, but Ethan Chandler, her heart dropped.

  “Mr. Chandler?” she asked, as if she couldn’t believe it. Nobody, not even her, she thought, was this unlucky.

  Ethan pulled a handkerchief out of his inside coat pocket and placed it against his bottom lip. Then he looked up at his mauler as she stood on the top step, at her shapely brown legs first coming down out of a skirt so short it seemed more like a piece of cloth to Ethan than actual clothing, then he looked up at her face. And he should have known. Her again. That same female he couldn’t seem to stop staring at when he first saw her in Lassiter’s office. She showed some spunk for a kid that day, he thought, insulting him at will, something he flat wasn’t used to. But there she was in all of her swagger, trying to get a job, a good paying job at that, but she didn’t want it so badly that she’d allow him or anybody else to treat her disrespectfully.

  And the way she looked at him, with such hauntingly sad eyes that seemed to burn his soul, eyes that flashed great confidence although he knew they weren’t; eyes that seemed weary to him when they should have been bursting with the joy of being young and free, made him certain that he had
to keep her around. Not to exploit her or to get her in bed, since he certainly didn’t have to recruit for that, and even if he did she wouldn’t be his target.

  But something was telling him to keep her. He handled his businesses the same way. Not by market forecasts or growth potentials or even well paid expert advice, but by gut, as he often told his associates. And his gut was telling him loud and clear that this particular female, he didn’t want to lose.

  He told Lassiter to hire her, despite Lassiter’s very legitimate reservations, but he also told himself to stay out of her way once she did get hired. He wasn’t the type to sleep around with his employees, and he wasn’t about to start now. But that didn’t stop him from checking up on her, without her knowledge, whenever those sad brown eyes of hers came across his mind.

  “Is that really you, Mr. Chandler?” Tori added, still unable to believe her luck. Ethan frowned.

  “Of course it’s me,” he said snappishly, and Tori wanted to die. She loved her job, and felt she could do it well, but she knew she was skating on thin ice now. She therefore decided to give this her all. Apologize, she thought, until it hurt.