35. Nicole’s Office

35

Nicole’s Office

NICOLE LAMB

Nicole was in her office, sitting on her desk and sharpening a long, steel katana with a whetstone, stroking the round stone along the edge and ruminating on the metallurgy of the forged blade-style irons she was planning to design next.

Kingston stepped inside and closed the door behind himself. “We didn’t actually talk about what happened.” He glanced at what she was doing. “Do you want to put that back on the wall?”

She laid it aside but didn’t hang it up with the rest of her collection. “Nah.”

He smirked at her with a jump of his dark eyebrows and a half-smile. “Interesting.”

Nicole leaned back on her arms as he approached, his long legs taking only a few sauntering steps across the room. A Sidewinder employee badge with a photo of his chiseled face was clipped to his suit jacket’s breast pocket.

A white lace pocket square might be tucked in there later that day, and her face heated.

Kingston leaned over her, his arms braced around her, and he looked down between them at the pale blue dress with a fifties-style circle skirt she wore.

When he looked up, his eyes were alight.

Yeah, she would’ve had to tuck the skirt around her legs if she’d had to don Tyvek coveralls to enter the lab, but the paperwork and CAD work had built up to where she’d known she would be stuck in her office all day.

And Kingston was still in town. The heat in his gaze had scorched her when she’d worn the white sundress the day before.

Afterward had been fun, too.

Even though she was still mad at him, and didn’t see him as forever material, and suspected much.

She asked, “Did anyone see you come in?”

“No one was in the hall. I don’t think anyone saw when I badged myself into the engineering area’s back hallway.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

“On the down-low. How exhilarating.”

The drop in his voice that sounded almost like malice made her skin heat, but she answered honestly. “I don’t want anyone to know about us yet. I need to think about what to tell them.”

Arvind and a few other lab people had noticed her red eyes for weeks.

Finally, their gentle probes had broken her down. “I have terrible taste in men,” she’d told them. “If I like a guy, that’s a huge waving red flag. He’s either a cheater or a thief.”

She didn’t want to explain to them that nothing between her and Kingston had been resolved, and yet everything was back on.

He leaned toward her, and his warm breath trickled over the skin of her shoulder and throat. “Our little secret.”

Dear Lord, the scent that puffed out of his collar was like dark caramel, freshly cut wood, and something dark and masculine that made her want to bury her face in his neck and inhale forever.

She closed her eyes as his hand caressed her curves. “Did you want to talk about?—”

His lips moved on her neck. “If you want to talk.”

No. No, she didn’t.

He drew her dress strap down over her shoulder and cupped her breast, running his thumb over her peak through her dress. “I’m staying at the Four Seasons Aviara again,” he murmured against the top swell of her breast. “Spend the weekend with me. We’ll get a bottle of wine, sit on the beach, and talk this weekend.”

“Okay.”

They didn’t talk.

All weekend.

Kingston had to go back to Connecticut on Monday. He said he was needed at a meeting Back East. He couldn’t stay.

The next Monday, Nicole was eating lunch in the downstairs break room with Meghan and Morgan when Afifa from HR walked in, carrying her lunch box, and sat with them.

After the usual chitchat, Morgan yawned and stretched, looking around the break room at everything except Afifa. “I wonder when that supposed second round of layoffs is coming.”

Meghan shot Nicole a look and rolled her eyes.

Pressuring Afifa seemed wrong. If Afifa knew something, she probably wouldn’t have been able to tell them. Even so, the lower-level HR associates probably weren’t in the know.

“So, Morgan, how about this heat wave?” Nicole asked. “Eighty-three, today.”

“Oh, it’s all right.” Afifa waved her fork with a bite of red-flecked chicken in the air. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know when or if there will be more layoffs. For the first wave, Human Relations received an additional email at the same time everyone else got theirs, detailing the packages we were to offer, and that was all. That is all we have heard.”

“So that’s the only email you’ve ever gotten from our Last Chance overlords?” Nicole asked her.

“Oh, no. We get emails daily, just not about layoffs.”

All three of the other girls leaned toward Afifa.

“Do tell,” Nicole said.

“Just routine business emails or asking for information,” Afifa said. “I just admit, it would be good to put a face to such interrogating emails.”

“Like what?” Nicole asked.

Afifa rolled her large, dark eyes. “Benefits and compensation packages. Where our 401K is managed. Passwords for the intranet so they can go hunting for clues, I guess. And then last week, out of the blue in the afternoon, a phone call demanding that Kingston Moore—the new sales man, you know?”

Nicole joined Meghan and Morgan in nodding.

“— demanding that Kingston Moore be issued a badge immediately, that day, that hour, as if we had been remiss.”

“Were you—remiss?” Meghan asked her.

Afifa shrugged. “Gia paid me twenty dollars to tell him he couldn’t have a badge because he was a remote worker.”

“Oh,” Nicole said. “Was there a bet?”

“Of course, there was a bet, which I got in on. I won an additional ten dollars after he was locked in the copier room last week after over a month but less than three.”

Oh, Kingston probably hadn’t caught the door after?—

She hadn’t even thought about?—

Nicole’s cheeks warmed.

“And it was odd,” Afifa said. “The man on the phone said that Kingston Moore should have all-access, meaning his badge should open every door in the building. Odd.”

“Every door?” Nicole asked.

“Yes, and his name was odd, Morrissey Sand, like the desert.”

That’s who Kingston had been talking to on the phone that day. Nicole asked, confirming, “Morrissey Sand?”

“Yes.”

“Odd.”

Kingston had said he had friends at Last Chance, and Gia Terranova had told her Kingston had someone powerful protecting him.

And that guy’s name was Morrissey Sand.

Huh.