He smiled and ran his hand behind his neck. “Basically, and this sounds like I may lose my man card here, but can we take this slow? If we blow this and have to see each other every other day at work, it’s going to be a train wreck. I don’t want that.”
Ari nodded in false agreement. “Yeah, I don’t want that either.”
“But please understand. I’m all in for finding out if this will work. I just don’t want to rush it.”
“Makes sense,” Ari agreed. “I can take things slow.”
“Good,” he said with a relieved smile.
“So how do we handle this?”
“I think tonight, we end this here, and I don’t come inside. Because once I get inside, I’m staying,” he laughed and Ari blushed.
She unlocked the door and quickly walked through the house, checking all the rooms for anything weird while Nick waited on the porch. When she finished, she said, “All safe.”
“Good.” He leaned down and kissed her again. “Call you tomorrow?”
“Sounds good.”
He kissed her again and then twice more before she finally pulled herself away and shut the door. Nick didn’t leave the porch until she set the alarm and turned off the lights.
Chapter 9
Ari sat straight up in her bed, surrounded by nothing but pitch dark and she held her breath. On instinct, she reached under her pillow for her phone. Someone or something had made a banging sound out in the living room and Ari’s throat lodged in her chest.
Another crash came from the living room, and she turned on her phone to light the room. For the third time that day, she fought a panic attack. Not one to lie in wait, she got out of bed, tip-toeing across the hardwood floor over to the door. She pressed her ear against the smooth surface, her thumb on the keypad of her phone, ready to dial 911.
Footsteps passed her door, clumsy and loud. She heard a man’s voice followed by a sharp, low, “Shhh!”
Ari sighed and swung the door open, “Oliver! What the heck are you doing?!”
Oliver and Veronica swayed against one another in the hallway. Veronica at least had the good sense to look apologetic.
“We had too much to drink and walked back here,” she said.
Oliver shrugged and pulled his latest conquest into his bedroom. He winked at Ari before he closed the door.
Exhausted and still a little tipsy, Ari shuffled back to her room. Just before she closed the door, the hallway light splayed across her room and dresser. She noticed immediately. The box was gone.
Ari knew she had seen the box when she came in her room for bed. Sleek and black, glinting like a secret. Confused, she flipped on her light. She walked to the dresser, opening the first drawer, tossing socks and panties on the top, next to her jewelry box and a photo of her parents. She felt around inside.
Nothing.
Shoving everything back inside, she did the same to the lower drawers, even pulling the dresser away from the wall, wondering if maybe it fell behind. Again, no box.
Ari turned to the bed, straightening the covers and looking under the pillows, one by one.
“Where did you go?” she mumbled, turning on the bedside lamp, and there it was. On the small table on top of the book she’d been reading. Tiny gold flowers glinting in the light.
Not where she left it. She would’ve sworn on it.
Ari wracked her brain trying to remember if she’d moved the box when she got home, but she had been giddy over her kisses with Nick, not to mention sleepy from the drinks at the bar. She couldn’t remember clearly, and obviously no one had broken in—the house was empty when she came home and the alarm had been set. Judging from the muffled banging through the wall, Oliver hadn’t noticed anything unusual when he and Veronica had gotten home.
Ari turned off the overhead light and got back into bed. She picked up the heavy box and opened the lid slowly. Inside she found the note, exactly as she’d left it.
Clutching the box in her hand, Ari drifted back to sleep, thinking of mystery men and secret messages.
***
Ari spent the weekend fighting a hangover, dodging questions from Oliver, and catching up on paperwork. Monday morning yielded a staff meeting where her boss’s boss, Mr. Lincoln, attempted to enforce a new dress code—less casual—and by the time it was over, the stack of pink slips from missed calls sent Ari into a full blown meltdown.
“I spent four hours yesterday catching up on my files so I could tackle my already overwhelming to-do list, and a two-hour meeting, about not wearing denim, just set me back two more days! I can’t catch a break!” Ari paced around Stanton’s office waving the pink papers around as evidence.
“I hear you, girl. Things are swamped right now.” He pointed to the organized stack on his desk as though that represented “swamped” or something. Everything in his office was neat and orderly. The photos of his family on the shelf behind his desk. The neatly stacked “In” and “Out” trays. “These kids can’t stay out of trouble for a minute. But you know how this operates. Better jump on this stuff now or it’ll only get worse.”