She was what he wanted, in every way. The way she’d responded to him last night, when they’d gone back to bed. He’d made her slick and hot, eliciting deep moans of pleasure from her before she’d come against his mouth, holding his head against her body in a demonstration of unabashed desire. He’d held her until the tremors subsided before pushing in, slow and deep, stroking her into another orgasm from the inside this time. He’d come, too, with a climax that had been nothing short of earth-shattering.
Just thinking about it made his cock rise, tenting the sheet that covered him. He stifled a groan of pleasure. Now was not the time for pleasurable reminiscing. First, he needed to get up and find Meredith. He’d been in bed for far too long already.
He took a deep breath and stretched, rolling off the mattress before pulling the covers up and smoothing them in his best attempt at bed-making, then pulled on his tuxedo trousers and the white undershirt he’d worn to the gala before opening the bedroom door and padding barefoot into the living room.
He found Meredith at the dining table, papers strewn all around her, a half-eaten bagel on a plate just next to her elbow. She was wearing her glasses and the same faded robe she’d had on last night, and her sexy red hair was sticking up in a few places, as though she’d been tugging at it.
She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
“Good morning.” He nearly laughed when she startled, whipping her head up to blink at him in surprise, but his amusement died as soon as he saw the bewildered look in her eyes. He stepped forward immediately, putting his hands on her shoulders and leaning down to kiss her hair. “Is everything okay?”
She gave a slow nod, then stood up, turning to pull him into a strong hug. “It’s better than okay.” Her voice was full of wonder, nearly dazed.
Andrew frowned. What was going on? He reached down and slid a finger under her chin, tipping her face up to look into her eyes. She was grinning now, a megawatt smile that reminded him of a giddy child on Christmas morning when faced with the sight of so many glittering presents under the tree.
“What happened?”
“I checked my work e-mail when I got up this morning and found that our accounts manager had sent over every transaction report associated with our accounts over the past four months, from the time the Christmas Bonus Fund lost all that money. Every stock purchase and sale, every withdrawal and deposit. Since we have such a diversified portfolio, it amounted to hundreds of documents. So I’ve been combing through all of them …”
All of them? “How long have you been at this?”
She shrugged. “Five hours or so.”
He tried to protest that she shouldn’t have been working so hard on something that there was still plenty of time for. Especially something that he knew he could still take care of when his financial manager transferred the proceeds from his personal stock sale into his bank account. But she stopped him, putting a finger to his lips. “That’s not the important part. What matters is that I figured out what happened to the money!”
Given that she was smiling, Andrew was willing to guess that she’d not only figured out what happened to it; she’d also found out how to make up the missing two hundred thousand dollars. This time, he simply smiled back and waited for her to continue, wanting to hear how she had solved the mystery.
“Four months ago, Bob opened up two new accounts. One was a conditional trust into which he deposited half a million dollars of his own money—he transferred it from his personal account with the instructions that the money should be put into the Christmas Bonus Fund if there was any deficit by the day before the disbursement. If there was no deficit, the money reverts to him. But since it was a trust under his name, they didn’t link the accounts, and when Bob left the company, it got lost in the shuffle.”
“I don’t understand. Why would Bob have done that?”
“Maybe he felt he’d had enough success with responsible fiscal practice and wanted to try something risky that could really grow the fund to a new level. Or maybe he was just bored.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, but it would appear that his risk paid off. Because the other account he opened was for that missing half million dollars. Money that got put solely into extremely high-risk investments…and paid off to the tune of an extra fifty thousand dollars! It took me all morning, but I finally pulled all the different transactions together and just finished double-checking my numbers when you woke up! The Christmas Bonus Fund…it’s actually much bigger than what we need now!”
At that, she finally let loose a little of the excitement that he could see on her face, squealing and laughing and hugging him tightly.
Holy shit. She’d figured it out. No doubt someone at the bank dropped the ball and didn’t link the accounts appropriately, but that they could take care of pretty easily. In the meantime, she’d done it. Meredith had saved the Christmas Bonus Fund.