Making the decision to right the wrong she’d committed felt good, until she recalled part two of her disaster of a Friday. Her brother’s phone call had ended her less than perfect day perfectly.
Wanting to cry but unable to summon useless tears, she instead made plans to solve this latest dilemma. Though her life was taking a dramatic turn for the worse lately, she could only be glad for her family’s odd penchant for weirdness.
Without Tom’s precognitive abilities, she would certainly have walked into work on Monday completely unprepared for the charges of fraud and misappropriation of funds. Now that she knew what awaited her, she had only to find out who wanted to frame her and how they intended to do it in order to avoid jail time. Marcus Storm came to mind, yet she immediately rejected the idea of his complicity. No. Storm, though a ladies’ man, was an honest man. It couldn’t be him.
But hadn’t Tom experienced his premonition right after her altercation with Storm this afternoon? Almost to the exact minute when she’d locked lips with the handsome devil. Anxiety plagued her as she tried to figure who wanted her out of the company so badly. Twisting her hands under the covers, she reluctantly rose and began her chores, all the while thinking.
The remainder of her afternoon passed swiftly while she planned and plotted. Between dusting, laundry and general clean-up, she devised a thorough if shaky idea for discerning who might want to frame her. Unfortunately, she had come up with several people who might have designs on her job and reputation.
The hour grew later, and she forced herself to eat a hearty dinner, needing the energy. Tom might have been a bit more detailed with his bad news, she mentally grumbled, finishing dinner and then the dishes. She watched as the sky darkened from indigo to black, while the waning moon hid behind a thin blanket of clouds. And as she dressed in neat, black, close-fitting clothing, she tried to think on the bright side.
At least she now had plans for what would have been a boring, dateless Saturday night.
Chapter Three
Sneaking into Tomanna had been frighteningly easy. The Harmon building was open twenty-four hours a day, the elevators unrestricted up to the seventeenth floor. Taking the stairs, she huffed up eight flights and carefully exited to find the lobby dark. The security guard she thought she’d have to avoid was nowhere in sight.
Tessa frowned. She would speak to her boss about security’s gaps on Monday, after she made sure her neck was no longer on the chopping block.
Tomanna had an eerie feel at night, with only a faint amount of light shining through the hall windows at the far end of hallway. This hall was fairly safe, mostly dark. But as soon as she rounded the bend, she would feel exposed by the frail moonlight that played peek-a-boo with the clouds.
The layout of each floor was consistent—an elevator at one end, and the stairwell and a set of large glass windows at the opposite end, both framing the large square hallway encompassing at least thirty private offices along the corridor.
She had five rooms to check at the end of this particular passage, and the tentative moonlight really bugged her. Uneasy about her visibility, she lowered the nondescript ball cap over her eyes and used her flashlight sparingly, relying more on memory to guide her than artificial light. Four security guards patrolled Tomanna’s two floors in the twenty-story Harmon building, and with her luck, one of them would spot her handy Maglight.
An hour and a half later, after nosing through the offices of seven of the twelve suspects whom she imagined might have wanted her fired, she ducked into a dimly lit storage locker to regroup. Gathering her thoughts, she grabbed her list from the back pocket of her jeans and rechecked her names.
So far she’d eliminated the people she’d competed with for her current position in the company. Nice to know her peers had taken losing their last promotion in stride.
Now, on to the remaining five. Her eyes continued to linger on the name Marcus Storm, which, in good conscience, she’d been unable to leave from her list. They’d had a hell of a confrontation yesterday—her pulse leapt at the remembrance—and with Tom’s timely little premonition rearing its head, she knew she’d be foolish to write him off.
Irritated at how much she wanted Storm to be innocent of wrongdoing, she resolved to check his office next. Davis and the others she’d search after she took care of Storm.
She returned the list to her pocket and listened for any movement before opening and shutting the door quickly. Whoever thought keeping the storage closets lit twenty-four hours a day needed a lesson in energy conservation. She decided to approach Jonas about that on Monday, in addition to the lacking security.
Walking quietly down the hallway, she found the exit and walked up the stairs. There she stole silently towards the ‘Devil’s Den’, what she sarcastically called Storm’s office.
She jiggled the handle, not surprised he kept it locked when everyone else she’d checked had left their doors unlocked. Muttering under her breath, she reached for her spare keys and unlocked the door. It paid having friends in the janitorial department, and she made a mental note to bring Greg the homemade snickerdoodles he liked so much.
Weak light filtered into the room via two overly large windows, giving Tessa an easy look around Storm’s office. She made sure the blinds on his office door were closed, then set to work.
After twenty minutes of searching and a steadily growing headache, she leant back in his surprisingly comfortable leather chair. Just as I thought, he spends too much time working and womanizing. He wouldn’t have time to set me up between working the Craiger-Mim account and seducing his latest dim-witted Barbie look-alike.
That comment had little to do with rumour and everything to do with the scene she’d witnessed a month ago, her conscience asserted. Lunching inside Lacall’s Eatery on a much-deserved day off, she’d been stunned to watch Marcus breaking up with Darla Mitchell, the Mitchell Publishing heiress, on a very public street corner.
Granted, Storm had the looks, and she grudgingly admitted, the charisma to charm his way into any woman’s bed. But he really needed to perfect his break-ups.
Covering a yawn with her hand, she froze when she heard a faint scratching from within the room. She knew no one was in his private bathroom, but she hadn’t checked the closet on the far side of the office. And why would anyone be hiding in Marcus Storm’s closet in the dark on a Saturday night, anyway?
The scratching turned into a steady ticking. Her eyes widened as she noted a fountain pen rolling of its own volition across the floor where it must have fallen, up the side and across the top of his desk to lay in front of her.
The list from her back pocket flew out of her jeans and over her shoulder to flap in her face before falling to the desktop next to the pen.
Frazzled, Tessa could only stare, wondering why the hell this telekinesis had to start up again when it had been dormant since her experience yesterday after work.
Then the office door flew open and she stared, horrified, at an equally shocked Marcus Storm.
She’d been in his thoughts all day and now sat behind his desk, in his office. So much for an escape from Tessa Sheridan. Marcus’ eyes narrowed.
“What are you doing here?” she croaked, looking like a sexy stalker in a black hat and jacket.
He cocked a brow, pleased when she swallowed audibly. “Sorry, I was under the impression this was my office.”
“But it’s Saturday night!”
“And?” He glanced at his desk, curious about the paper she seemed intent on covering. “Isn’t that my Waterman?” he referred to his fountain pen, an expensive gift from a happy client.