A woman like her.
He ran a hand over his face, rubbed his eyes, and then gripped his head like he had a headache. What the hell am I doing? Am I actually this desperate?
“She’s real careful, Mr. Morgan. She always uses her name to check into the hotel and it’s always booked and paid for in advance. By her. She’s seen these men in public before, and there’s not a single trace of anything suspicious or scandalous. Two of them are married, all of them are pretty well off. I mean, they’re nothing like you, boss, but they’re wealthy enough to pay her a grand a night.”
“That’s all she charges them?”
“As far as I can tell. She doesn’t do random guys, either. She takes them out to dinner first. Only then do they get to go to the hotel with her. They never go to her house and she uses a different hotel for each man. I don’t have any idea how they hooked up with her. I couldn’t connect any kind of web presence to her name or credit cards at all. All of the men are regulars. I clocked Mr. Smith seeing her once a week. Mr. Hamilton even hit her twice last week.” Andy chuckled. “She must be damned good at what she does.”
Donovan pinned the man with a glare that made Andy gulp like a teenager caught smoking weed in the stairwell. He didn’t say a word, just kept a steady, critical eye contact until Andy dropped his gaze and rushed to fill the heavy silence.
“No criminal record. She got a bachelor’s degree from St. Cloud though she doesn’t use it. Accounting. She has a savings account but it’s not huge. Just twenty grand. Her brother’s bills are five times that. She’s been making regular payments to her parents to help them out. She has a small retirement account left over from her corporate job but no other investments.”
Donovan turned his attention back to the file. She’d never been married. No children. A single woman on the verge of suffering the strident call of her biological clock. Ordinarily he’d run like hell in the opposite direction, but Lilly wasn’t the typical woman. He wasn’t interested in dating or marrying her.
I’m interested in hiring her. That’s all.
He smothered a wry laugh and shut the file, though he couldn’t drag his gaze away. It sounded so simple. So clean. So basic. Nothing as dirty as what he really wanted from her.
“That’ll be all, Andy. Thanks.”
Andy stood, but didn’t rush toward the door. “Sir?”
Surprised, Donovan raised his gaze to the man’s face. “Yes?”
“She seems like a real nice lady. I mean, despite… She’s nice.” At the skeptical look that must be on his face, Andy hurried to explain. “I always like to run in to the person I’m investigating in some part of their everyday routine, just to see how they respond. She’s polite and well mannered. She spoke to me, she didn’t give me the brush off. She wasn’t rude. She has some kind of mutt she must love a great deal because she takes him for a long walk every single day. All her neighbors speak well of her.”#p#分页标题#e#
“What’s your point?”
Andy’s cheeks flushed and he stuttered but he didn’t drop his gaze. “I don’t know what your intentions are and, frankly, it’s none of my business. I just wanted you to know she’s not some skank looking to make a quick buck or a gold-digging bitch out to screw every lying bastard out of his money. She’s nice. I’d like to be her friend and I don’t say that about many people.”
Donovan wanted to ask if he qualified as someone Andy would want to have as a friend, but he already knew the answer. He was the boss man, the hard ass who made the money and paid the lawyers to screw everyone until they got the best deal. Even I wouldn’t want to be my friend.
He spun his office chair around to look out the window. Cold, so cold and numb and hard. He was tempted to strip out of his Armani suit and stretch out in the sunlight shining in through his window. Maybe he’d thaw out.
Nope, he’d tried that already. All it did was first give him a miserable sunburn in some unspeakable places, and then eventually tan him as dark as island native. He was still so numb he couldn’t feel a thing. “I don’t need a friend, but I’ll keep that in mind.”
Andy didn’t say anything else but took the opportunity to escape.
No, what I need…
Donovan used his reflection in the glass to straighten his already perfect tie. His next business meeting might actually be one of the most important of his life.
The reason Andy hadn’t been able to find anything to connect Lilly to the men is that he’d failed to make the connection to the local BDSM community, probably because she’d been out of “circulation” for a few years. That was actually good. Donovan didn’t want anyone to be able to connect her to the underworld of sexual deviants like him.