Chapter 2 : Alerting the Captain

Raven tried to breathe normally, but the air already felt warm and stale, and she was at the end of her patience. She couldn’t help it. She made a low, frustrated growl that was halfway between a curse and a groan.

The handsome man looked at her, actually looked at her, for the first time.

“Rolling blackouts,” he said matter-of-factly. “Just about all the emergency power goes to the servers, of course. They’ll get to us eventually.”

Raven laughed. The man looked surprised.

“Sorry,” she said again. Why was she apologizing so much? “‘Eventually’ just seems to be the flavor of the day. Someone will take a look at that report ‘eventually.’ We’ll return your email ‘eventually.’” She sighed. “Let’s hope the building services are more responsive than the management.”

The man’s dark eyebrows rose questioningly. “I’m curious. What do you mean?”

Raven pushed the emergency call button, not that it would do any good. As cool and disinterested as her reluctant companion seemed, he was almost definitely right. They would be nobody’s priority when there were precious computer systems to monitor.

“I don’t mean to complain,” she began, measuring her words more carefully. He’d come from the C-suite floor; odds were ‘management’ was somewhere in his title. Executive assistant, something like that. “I just had such high hopes for this place when I got the job, you know? Sinclair and Associates. It’s the dream. And I’m straight out of school.”

“What precisely did you find lacking?”

The cool intensity in his eyes threatened to make her forget herself, but she stood up straight and held on tight to her composure. She was, after all, a professional, and a beautiful man shouldn’t be able to cow her out of shape.

“Can I be frank?”

“Please.”

There was no emotion in his face.

“Well, frankly… I feel like my skills are being wasted. I got sat down at my desk this morning and was given a subsidiary’s public records—public records, mind you, not even anything with real proprietary insight—to comb through. I was meant to look for patterns and irregularities. It took me about two hours. And then I was left to twiddle my thumbs, so I combed a few more public records. Literally the only thing I had access to.”

She stopped for breath, but incredibly, he seemed to be actually listening.

“You’re a risk analyst, then?” he asked.

“Yes. I tailored my whole degree around it. I loved the idea of having a dynamic, meaningful job that really helps steer a company.”

“And Sinclair and Associates is not giving you that?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I can deal with lackluster work; I know a lot of finance is a slog, attention to detail, nose to the grindstone—all that. It’s just that the tasks I have seem like spinning my wheels, and that’s not what I spent the last four years training for. I don’t know. Maybe I’m too impatient.”

“Or just ambitious,” he said. He didn’t sound angry or offended.

She kept going, desperate to fill up the dead air and equally thankful to have a listening ear after this seemingly endless work day.

“It doesn’t matter, though, does it? Nobody listens to me. Not even my supervisor seemed interested in the case reports I brought him. No feedback. Barely an acknowledgment. And he had plenty of time to review them. There was some interesting stuff in there that I would have loved to review, but… no dice. Honestly, I’m considering leaving.”

“What exactly did you find that was interesting?” he pressed, his gaze not wavering from her.

She looked at him steadily, putting on the brakes. “You do work here, don’t you? You’ve signed the NDA and everything? Sorry, I have to check.”

“No, no, I’m glad you did.”

He held up a well-worn building access badge in answer, branded just like hers with the Sinclair and Associates logo. She saw his stern, chiselled face staring back from the ID photo, but the badge was out of sight again before she could catch the name on it.

“Okay. Well, there are visible losses in the public record, but that’s not unusual within a single subsidiary. The interesting part is that those losses don’t seem to have an effect even within the actual subsidiary itself. By the next reporting cycle, it’ll be like the losses never happened.”

“Couldn’t the company simply be bouncing back between reports?”

She knew a test question when she heard it. He thought she was making something out of nothing, probably.

“I mean, it’s possible. Even feasible. It’s probably why there’s been no kind of inquiry into the pattern. But something doesn’t smell right to me in those records. It’s just the consistency of the loss and recovery cycle. It’s too reliable. Business is never that consistent. There are ebbs and flows, but they should waver and fluctuate in a regular market.”

“And these don’t?”

“No. Like I said, I could tell you exactly, and I mean exactly, what their next earnings report will look like. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. There’s something about it that’s not organic. Not believable. As if the losses and gains were being manually produced within the subsidiary’s finances.”

“Fraud.”

He said it flatly, with no inflection, as if she’d just commented on the weather and not potential misconduct in a multi-billion dollar holding company where they were both employed.

“Oh god, I don’t mean I’m looking to be a whistleblower or anything,” she backtracked quickly. “But it doesn’t look good. Any financial reporter could have stumbled across what I did if they took the time to go through what’s available publicly.

“And then Sinclair and Associates would really, really be in trouble. That’s the kind of thing that kicks off audits and investigations. It would just take one article, and the rest of the business world would be all over us. We’d be sitting ducks for competitor investors who could torpedo our credibility as stakeholders.”

“Well, not any investigative reporter.” Why did those dark eyes feel like they were X-raying her? She shouldn’t be saying all this. She wouldn’t even have a chance to quit now; she’d just be fired. “They’d have to have exceptional training and a keen attention to detail.”

Was that a compliment? She couldn’t tell. She couldn’t read him at all, and she was usually very good at reading people.

“Are you trying to flatter me?” she asked, throwing caution to the wind.

“No, just stating facts.”

It was getting hot in the elevator without the air circulating. There was sweat glistening on his neck at his perfectly trimmed hairline. She felt her own face flushing, her underarms getting sticky.

“You don’t mind if I take this off, do you?” she asked, tugging at the collar of her suit jacket. “I’m melting.”

“As long as you don’t mind if I do the same.”

“Not at all.”

He peeled off his precision-tailored jacket, and she caught the flash of a luxury brand’s logo patterned on the lining. Even assistants in the C-suite made good money, she guessed.

As if reading her mind, he said, “You’re thinking of quitting, you said. You’d walk away from all this money? No one here gets paid pennies.”

She shrugged. Honestly, she was trying not to notice how his white button-up was beginning to cling to the smooth muscles of his stomach, the strong bend of his shoulders. He was fit and trim in an effortless kind of way that didn’t scream gym rat and equally made clear he cared for his body at least as well as he cared for his tailored suits.

“Money isn’t everything,” she said honestly. “I know that’s a pretty silly thing to say, considering my whole career is watching and tracing the money, weighing monetary risks and plans.”

“I know what you mean,” he said.

That same cool lack of inflection. But now those X-ray eyes were trailing over her bare arms, the line of her skirt where it hugged her hips. The gaze was hungry. Devouring. And she found she didn’t mind.

“I’d rather be somewhere where I was making a difference in the company. Somewhere I’d be listened to.”

He nodded. “Very understandable.”

“A job like… well. I overheard one of the senior associates before I got on the elevator. Between all the cursing, I gathered that one of the analysts who reported directly to the board got fired. I don’t know why or what he did or if he deserved it, but…”

“That’s the kind of job you want. The kind of position you would stay at the company for.”

Raven sighed. “It sounds callous when you say it that bluntly.”

“Not at all. I admire boldness.”

Oh no. He was rolling up his shirt sleeves now, revealing strong forearms. Had she ever found forearms, of all things, sexy? Well. Now she had.

“I appreciate that… And I really appreciate you listening to me. I know you’re a bit of a captive audience at this point.”

“I don’t mind,” he replied, and she believed him. “I would, normally. Mind the chatter that is. But your chatter is both very insightful and very substantial. It’s given me a bit to think about. Not least to tell Mark to keep his voice down when discussing sensitive company business outside a conference room.”

Despite the reassurance, she cringed. “I’m not looking to cause trouble. Or get anybody in trouble.”

“No, you’re doing your job as a risk analyst. Plugging up holes in the ship where you find them and alerting the captain.”

The captain? What the hell was that about?

Before she could formulate a less rude way to phrase that question, there was a shudder and a clunk somewhere behind the sealed elevator doors. She stood up straighter, wiping her brow and composing her expression.

“It sounds like the cavalry has arrived,” the man noted, checking his obscenely beautiful luxury watch. “Sooner than expected.”

There was a bit of clattering beyond the elevator doors, and then they shifted open incrementally. The first blast of cool, outside air hit her face like a blessing, and she took a deep, steadying breath. She had been anxious—but she’d kept a lid on her anxiety. She prided herself on being in control. And even in an emergency—or in the presence of an incredibly attractive and wealthy coworker—she wasn’t about to let that slip.

As the doors inched open, she saw the glossy face of a firefighter appearing, sweat-streaked and weary, through the gap. To her relief, she saw that the door of the elevator was only a few inches above the floor of the lobby outside. They nearly made it to the ground floor when the power went out. A freak accident, if there ever was one.

The attractive man swung his suit jacket over his shoulder and gestured for Raven to step out ahead of him.

A woman rushed up to him as soon as he stepped out, showering him with profuse apologies for how long the rescue had taken.

“There’s no trouble,” the man answered briskly. “I had a rather enlightening conversation with… tell me, what is your name?”

He was speaking to Raven.

“Raven Cannon.”

“Well, Miss Cannon, it’s been a pleasure meeting you. And interviewing you. You’ve got the job.”

Raven stopped herself before she could blurt out a clueless question in response. Instead, she managed a very quick “Thank you.”

Instead, the woman—clearly his assistant—whipped out a tablet and began busily tapping away. “What position, precisely, Mr. Sinclair?”

Raven’s stomach went cold, then warm. Mr. Sinclair. Then this was Kade Sinclair, the secretive and powerful CEO at the helm of the entire company. Her boss. Everybody in the building’s boss.

“Senior Risk Analyst to the Board,” Kade replied. He then looked at Raven. “You start tomorrow morning.” Raven didn’t have to ask if he was joking. She could tell this was the kind of man who never, ever jokes. “Megan, send over the necessary paperwork. And Miss Cannon—plan to be early tomorrow. There’s a task I think you are uniquely qualified to assist me with.”