Chapter 91
Since he was still sitting, she had to lean down to get in his face. She glared into his upturned eyes. “It’s supposed to hurt. How do you think it feels to find out that the man you loved has dismissed you as having every quality you most despise?”
What the hell was wrong with her? He was the wounded party here. “If you didn’t want me to think that, then you shouldn’t have stayed.”
“I had plans, and we'd only just met. I couldn't trust my mom at first because of her track record. What was I supposed to do?”
His gut clenched with anger. “You could have had a little faith.” He threw the words at her. “I had everything worked out. Hell, I had a job set up for you. I went back to this job partly because of you. But I guess none of it was enough.”
“And that’s really what you think?” Some of her anger was sputtering out, giving way to a tone full of confusion. Her eyes were wide and imploring, covered with a sheen of tears. “I thought I didn't have a choice. I wanted to do right by my grandparents…and honestly I was scared too. I was scared of how strongly I felt for you in such little time that I ran. Are you happy now?”
He was silent for a long time, absorbing her words as his own anguish tore through him. Finally, quietly, he said, “You should have stayed.”
She straightened. “I reached out to you several times. You blame me for everything but what about you? You ended things. I only left Quinley… not you.”
He suddenly stood and tipped her chin up so she was looking up at him. His heart felt as if it was being crushed in a vice. He spoke slowly but gently. “I was angry… So angry I didn't want to hear from you or anything about you. I guess I badly wanted… Needed you to stay,”
Tears spilled onto her cheeks. Her anguish seemed to match his own. “Well, too bad this is where we are now,” Her voice broke and she cleared her throat before continuing. “I guess we’re both stupid for behaving the way we did,” she said with a shrug.
Stupid? Stupid didn’t begin to describe how he felt now.
“For my part,” she continued, “I assumed you would come around after a while. And that maybe we could try long distance. When you didn’t, I thought—”
He didn’t let her finish. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Pouring into that single kiss all the apology and regret he’d never be able to voice. He’d never be able to make up for the hurt they'd caused each other. Words alone would never be enough to express his remorse. He could only keep kissing her and pray that that would be enough. He could have gone on kissing her forever. He was about to tell her exactly that when the flashing light on the monitor caught his eye. The feed to the camera was live again and the picture on the screen was not what he expected.
The monitor displayed a wide-angle shot of the warren of cubicles in the lawyer’s office on the eleventh floor. He was almost too distracted to notice. But something on the edge of the image frame caught his attention.
Leaving Candace where she stood, he dropped into the chair and pulled up an enlarged image of the live feed. And there, almost out of camera range, he saw it. One of the acoustic tiles in the ceiling sat lopsided. As if someone had moved it aside and then put it back without checking to make sure it sat correctly.
Nolan whipped out his phone and called J.D. “We’ve got a situation on eleven. I want you to go to the safe and check on the diamonds.”
J.D. responded instantly, saying he’d report back as soon as he’d done it, but Nolan barely registered his words, trusting the other man to handle it.
Instead he was painfully aware of Candace as she rested a hand on his shoulder and leaned over to gaze at the image on the computer screen.
She pointed a finger to the ceiling tile. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.” He zoomed in further on the picture, trying to force his mind into action, looking for other inconsistencies. “Or maybe it’s nothing. It’s a pretty laid-back office for a group of lawyers. They’re always hanging college flags and crap from the acoustic supports. They were probably just careless.”
“But you don’t think so,” she guessed. “Or you wouldn’t have contacted J.D.” When he didn’t confirm her theory, she asked, “But would anyone break into a lawyer’s office?”
He knew the way her mind worked and could tell from the look in her eyes that scenes from John Grisham novels were flashing through her mind, with laundered money, mob connections and confidential papers being shredded in the dead of night. Before her imagination could spin too far out of control, Nolan spoke.
“They wouldn’t. But the eleventh floor is the floor directly below the first floor of Carrington Security.”
It took her a minute to realize the significance. When she did, he felt the muscles of her hand tighten on his shoulder. “Which means,” she said aloud, “that it’s the floor closest to the diamonds that’s not actually part of either Carrington or Messina.”
“Exactly. With the right set of tools and some fancy climbing, someone small could access the crawl space and from there, the duct work. It’s a long climb up to the twenty-first floor, but not impossible.”
As they made their way back to the elevators, he wanted to offer her some reassurances. But what could he say, really? There was a good chance she’d been right. Her brother may even now be trying to steal more than ten million dollars worth of diamonds. And if Andrew was, then it was Nolan's job to stop him.
“I thought you said there weren’t any diamonds here tonight.”
“I lied.”
Nolan's phone rang as if to echo the grim fatality of his words. When he answered it, Candace heard a string of cursing from the other end. J.D. had just checked. The diamonds were gone.
A wave of nausea washed over her as blood rushed from her head. Mindlessly, she groped for a chair. Something to hold on to. Anything to ground herself.