Maureen Child - The Highest Bidder

She always found the chance to walk past the house she considered her dream home. It was like an English cottage only bigger. It was three stories high with sloped roofs and dark red shutters on the windows. There were brilliant splashes of pink and yellow flowers crouched around the long porch, and the wide double front doors were arched, like a storybook castle.

“It’s beautiful,” Vance said.

“It really is,” she agreed, and met his gaze only to find him staring at her not the house. “All it needs is a porch swing.”

“You’d like a swing?”

“Oh, yes. That would be nice,” she mused, staring at the house for another long moment. “Sitting outside, watching the sun go down, saying hi to your neighbors …” Her voice trailed off as she turned her head to look up at him.

A soft, warm wind raced down the street. From a few houses down came the rhythmic thumping of a basketball, and a dog barked just because he wanted to be heard. The light in the sky was easing into twilight and Jake was in his stroller, laughing and talking to himself.

It was a perfect moment.

Vance leaned toward her. Charlie went up on her toes, her gaze drifting from his eyes to his mouth and back again. Her heartbeat was pounding and the world around her seemed to take a breath and hold it in anticipation.

His mouth was just an inch from hers when Jake tossed his stuffed animal and then howled in frustration. The baby’s shout broke the spell growing between Charlie and Vance and she could only be grateful for it.

Infatuation was one thing. Allowing herself to make a fool of herself over a man she would never be able to have was something else entirely.

Quickly, she picked up the stuffed dog, handed it back to Jake and told Vance, “We should get Jake home.”

“I suppose it is getting late,” Vance murmured.

She flashed him a glance, then looked away quickly. It was already too late, Charlie thought. Her heart was involved whether she wanted to admit it or not.

A week later, Vance was wound too tight and seriously on edge. The only one he hadn’t lost his temper with was Charlie. Which was ironic, considering that she was the one who had his insides tied into knots that only got tighter with every passing second.

The woman was getting to him and that had not been in the plan. Every damn day around her, his blood ran hotter, his mind clouded a little further and the idea of having her dug claws of need ever deeper into him.

Add to that the fact that he knew damn well she was lying to him about something. They’d spent nearly every night together. Oh, not in bed. More’s the pity, he told himself. But at dinner, taking Jake for walks or just sitting around her small, tidy apartment in Queens.

Hell, he was going to Queens for her. What was next? Brooklyn? At the thought, he jumped up from his desk chair and stared down onto the tree-lined street below Waverly’s.

Charlie was antsy. Nervous. And getting worse every day. She checked through the daily mail as if afraid of what she might find. She jumped when he entered a room and just yesterday, one of the security guards reported that Charlie had been in the records room, where all the old files and reports were kept. Why the hell would she be down there? And why hadn’t she told him? What was she hiding?

His gut told him something was off with Charlie. Another part of his anatomy told him he shouldn’t care. His mind was stuck somewhere in the middle.

When the office intercom buzzed, he stabbed at the button, focusing all his frustration on it. “What is it?”

“Jeez,” Charlie said. “Bite my head off.”

He rubbed one hand across his face and shook his head even as he smiled to himself. It hadn’t taken long for Charlie to feel at ease in the boss-assistant relationship. “Sorry. A lot on my mind. What is it?”

“Security’s on line 2 for you,” she said a little breathlessly.

“Right.” He didn’t think about the fact that she sounded nervous. Instead, he punched a button on his phone and said, “Waverly.”

“Mr. Waverly, this is Carl in Security. You asked us to let you know if anything out of the ordinary happened.”

“Yeah?” Hell, he’d had the whole place on alert for the past couple of weeks in hopes that they might catch whoever might be trying to sell them out to Rothschild’s. Now that they had something, though, Vance wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to hear what was coming.

Carl said, “We had the IT department keeping a tight lock-down on sensitive areas—in general, setting up their version of alarms. They alerted us to the fact that someone in your office was trying to access secure files this morning. And it wasn’t from your computer.”

This morning, when Vance had been at a meeting with a potential client. When Charlie was alone in the office.

“What files?” He shot a look at the closed door separating him from Charlie. Was she worried, knowing that he was talking to Security?

“Apparently,” Carl told him, “they were older records on minor auctions. According to the IT guys, this person didn’t get to anything important. A new firewall’s going up as we speak so everything’s secure.” Carl paused and asked, “Is there anything you’d like us to handle?”

“No.” His brain was racing and anger was beginning to churn inside. He needed to take care of this himself. He needed to look Charlie in the eye when he confronted her, because only then would he know for sure if she was being honest. Her face gave away everything she was thinking, feeling; he’d already learned that much about her. And hell, for all he knew, it hadn’t been her. She might have been in another part of the building and someone else had slipped in to use her computer just to incriminate her.

He wasn’t going to assume she was guilty of anything. Not yet, anyway. But he didn’t like it. He didn’t like the notion that Charlie was a traitor.

“I’ll take care of it,” he told Carl and hung up a second later. All he had to do now was figure out how.

Charlie hated this. Hated feeling on edge all the time. Hated the sense of guilt that seemed to cling to the edges of her mind constantly these days.

Vance was being so nice. And she was lying to him. Every time she spoke to him, she lied. Her grandmother had always insisted, It’s a lie, Charlie, if you know something and you don’t say so. Same as if you were spinning tales yourself . And Gran had been right. Charlie knew something dangerous and she wasn’t saying anything about it because of her need to protect herself. And her son.

Which made her a liar.

And now Vance was talking to Security. Was it about her? Had someone seen something? Was she being watched by someone besides her blackmailer? Oh, God.

Charlie opened up her email program and clicked Reply on the latest threat she’d received only that morning. When that threat had come in, she’d actually tried to open up the older record files this morning, but she hadn’t gotten far before she had shut everything down. She couldn’t do it. Not to Waverly’s. Not to Vance.

Now she typed in a quick note to whoever was threatening her, asking for more time. Even as she hit Send, she knew it wasn’t going to help. This wasn’t going to go away until she either betrayed Vance and Waverly’s or took Jake and ran.

But where would she run? She had no family now. No one. The only people she knew in the world were here, in the city. She had a little savings, but not enough to set herself and Jake up anywhere else. She sat back in her chair, letting her fears rise up until they nearly choked her. When the light on line 2 went out, she shivered. Vance had finished speaking to Security. What was next? Would she be arrested? Fired?