“What did you do that for?”
“Same reason you apparently dumped yours in New Mexico. So people like me couldn’t follow you.”
“So they’re following us now?”
“Now, they can’t.” He gave her a hard look. “But I have an ugly feeling both of us are about to be officially declared fugitives.”
“And neither of us deserves to be.”
Plans began swirling in his head and clicking into place, although the plans of what he couldn’t do seemed much clearer than what to do instead.
“Someone wants to find you,” he said, as much to her as to himself, “but not to send you back to jail. Why? There’s something else going on.” He glanced at her. “I suppose I need to temporarily revoke my policy never to listen to crap about innocent bond skips. I think it’s about time I heard your side of the story.”
She stared at him then, ironically silent.
“Isn’t that what you want?” he asked. “For the bounty hunter to hear your case and take your side?”
“I’m not sure it’ll make a difference. Andrew seems to have this whole thing locked up tight. That was my boss. Andrew Waller, CEO of FTI. Or as I’ve recently renamed it, Fucking Thief Incorporated.”
“An hour ago, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But now I really need to hear what wasn’t in the file I read about your case.”
Lydia sucked in a deep breath, which pushed out her already impossible-to-ignore chest. He rerouted his thoughts quickly.
“The short version,” she began slowly, “is that this started six months ago when I accidentally ran across a discrepancy in the accounting logs at my company. I told Andrew right away. I was thanked most vigorously for my ‘sharp eye and dedication’. Before long, it was clear that was just a brush-off. That’s when I got suspicious that the ‘mistake’ in the books was something more.” She let out a frustrated growl. “I should have kept my nose out of it. But I couldn’t let it alone. I started staying late and nosing around through files. It took some doing, but I finally pieced it together.” She shook her head and looked at him. “Andrew was siphoning funds into offshore accounts.”
“What did you do?”
“I should have acted immediately, but I was scared. I wasn’t sure who to tell. And as it turned out, I didn’t get the chance. I woke up to a knock on my door.” She leaned her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes. “I had this bad feeling before I even answered. Sort of the same way I felt when you first showed up.”
He felt a strange twitch in his stomach at that, but he didn’t answer.
“That’s when it dawned on me that maybe I hadn’t been as sly as I’d thought. There are security cameras in the building that picked up my every suspicious move, something that looked really bad for me when the accusations were turned.”
“So you weren’t stealing, you were trying to prove your CEO was.”
“Exactly. But he found out and twisted it around so I’d take the fall. While it wasn’t quite the same as the gun-toting jackholes who busted into the beach house, I was put into cuffs and hauled away for a crime I didn’t commit.” She gave a tight smile. “But not before I managed to smuggle out evidence that he was the one behind it all along.”
Nate hadn’t had a chance to reply before she jolted upright. “That’s what this is about. He knows I have the documents, but not where they are now, how many copies I’ve made, or what I intend to do with them. He wants to get a hold of me first, before the cops do. Maybe he wants to work a deal.”
Nate sat quiet for a while, nodding while he thought this through. If she was telling the truth, this was all making a new sort of sense. “If you’re right, the copy you had at the beach house will have been destroyed by now.”
“Lucky for me, I have two more copies. One in each state I drove through on my way here.”
“New Mexico?”
Lydia nodded. “Santa Fe and Flagstaff.” She hesitated. “So does this mean you believe me?”
“Until a better explanation comes along, I’m not sure I have a choice. I’m not going back until I know ‘gun-toting jackholes’, as you so eloquently put it, won’t be waiting there to send either of us into permanent retirement of the really bad kind.”
“I suppose as alliances go, I’ve heard better.”
He arched a brow at her. “And believe it or not, I feel an obligation to protect the fugitives in my custody. I don’t want to see you hurt.”