Hidden Agenda. Kara Lennox
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not bad so far. It’s hard work, but nothing I can’t handle. Mr. Blake’s job is interesting, so I think mine will be, too.”
“Huh. Does he make you bring him coffee?”
“I don’t mind.” When she got to know him better, she would request that he not order her around like a chambermaid. But she had a sneaking suspicion Conner was being a jerk on purpose. He wanted to see how easily she could be intimidated, how far he could push her before she either cracked or pushed back.
If a billionaire formerly on death row couldn’t intimidate her, Conner certainly couldn’t.
“He’s got a hot man-booty.” Letitia took a sip of her coffee, then added another packet of sugar. “But I don’t know whether I could put up with him just to enjoy a little eye candy.”
“He’s a nice-looking man,” Jillian agreed blandly. What an understatement! “Is he married?”
“No, not anymore.” Letitia laughed. “Can you imagine committing yourself to that for life? At least if you’re an employee, you can walk away. No one was surprised when he got divorced.”
Divorced? Jillian had guessed he wasn’t married. He displayed no family photos on his desk, didn’t wear a ring and hadn’t mentioned a wife or kids. But she hadn’t pegged him as divorced, either.
“What happened there?” she asked, going for broke. Why not? Ordinarily she wouldn’t engage in idle gossip about her boss, but she was here to gather intelligence, right?
“No one knows. He’s tight-lipped when it comes to his personal life. But my guess is, Chandra got tired of sitting at home waiting for him. First he was always traveling, then he was always here, works sixteen-hour days most of the time.”
“Chandra Mayall?” That pushy, exotic creature who’d barged into Conner’s office that morning was his ex-wife? Of course he would marry someone like that. She’d probably been a cheerleader in high school.
“Yup. The boss’s granddaughter—and his sole heir, I might add.”
Conner Blake must have looked like a good catch to Chandra. But Jillian agreed that eighty-hour workweeks weren’t conducive to a good marriage.
“He’s young,” Jillian said. “I expect he’ll find someone else.”
“But not you, I hope,” Letitia said. “You wouldn’t want to be hooking up with a murderer.”
“He’s not a murderer,” Jillian said firmly, trying not to think too long and hard about how angry he’d become when she’d organized papers without his permission. And how he didn’t want her to touch anything on his desk or in his office.
“He’s got motive,” Letitia said, warming up to her topic. “Greg Tynes was having an affair with Chandra.”
“More gossip?”
“This I know for a fact. I saw them together. In the parking garage. Kissing.”
This was good stuff! “But Chandra is his ex. Why would he care?”
Letitia gave her a look that told her exactly how naive her assumption was.
She shivered slightly. Was it possible? She could think of little nice to say about the man, but could he possibly be a murderer?
In high school, when his cruel prank was still fresh in her mind, she’d envisioned all sorts of ways she might make Conner Blake pay for his crime. Her revenge fantasies had included such soap-operatic scenarios as transforming herself into a siren, tricking him into falling in love with her, then jilting him at the altar. Or waiting until he was running for congress, then revealing to the press what he had done to her just days before the election.
She’d grown up and realized how outlandish her fantasies had been, how improbable and immature. But never in her wildest imagination had she envisioned sending him up the river.
Now, that would be payback—sending Conner to prison. The thought brought her no satisfaction. He might be a despicable fathead, but could she really believe he was capable of taking a human life?
She didn’t have to draw conclusions. She only had to report what she found out and Daniel would follow up. Tonight’s report would be a juicy one.
CHAPTER THREE
THE NEXT DAY, when Conner returned from lunch, he found a surprise sitting on his desk. Jillian had delivered a report based on the armload of trash he’d shoved at her only yesterday. The papers were sorted into file folders, neatly stacked on his chair, and a printed report—complete with graphs, charts and a spreadsheet—sat in the middle of his desk.
He was torn when it came to having an assistant. On one hand, he needed someone to keep him organized. Paperwork, scheduling, computers, meetings—he wasn’t terribly good at any of it. But he hated having assistants underfoot. Give him a nice stand of oak trees and he could read them like a book. He could tell a tree’s health just by looking at the color and texture of the bark, the number of branches and how they grew, the gloss of the leaf.
Stick him behind a desk and he was close to useless.
His job performance as director of timber operations was only so-so. This company was only as good as the wood it harvested, and that harvest was only as good as the men and women out in the field finding the stands of trees, evaluating them, negotiating for the purchase and supervising the harvest. From his office he could give his buyers directions, look at photographs and approve purchases or not. But it drove him crazy not to have firsthand knowledge.
And the paperwork—God, how he hated paperwork. All the hoops they had to jump through to keep this certification or that one, proving they adhered to green policies, that they had performed all the correct environmental impact studies. He’d had no idea how hard his predecessor’s job was when he’d accepted the promotion.
It was easy to blame Chandra, but deep down, Conner had no one but himself to hold responsible. He was the one who’d been thinking with his privates, rather than his brain and his heart, when he’d agreed to the corner office. He’d have done anything to keep Chandra happy.
In the end, though, his decision to settle down had backfired. Chandra had fallen in love with an adventurer and world traveler who brought home exotic presents—carved teak boxes, silks and Oriental rugs. She’d seen him as a modern-day Indiana Jones.
But she’d grown weary of his constant travel and had begged her grandfather to promote him. Yes, because of Chandra, he had advanced in the company at lightning speed, bringing home ever-larger paychecks.
But an executive who’d traded in his bullwhip for a smart phone didn’t interest her any longer. The divorce had been executed with surgical precision. Conner had lost his wife, his home, his dog, his savings, and he’d been left with a job he despised.
He wouldn’t be here forever—that was his only consolation. But leaving Stan—a man as dear to him as his own grandfather—in the middle of this hideous controversy over Greg’s murder was unthinkable. With treatment, Stan might beat the cancer. But prison would kill him.
Conner simply couldn’t abandon the sinking ship.
He’d met with Stan’s lawyer, who at Stan’s request had allowed him to go over the evidence collected by the police. One anomaly stood out to Conner right away. Stan wasn’t strong enough to hoist two hundred pounds of deadweight into a car trunk. That was a point in Stan’s favor.
But Conner still had no clue who might have murdered Greg and framed Stan. Any one of the directors, looking to move up, could be responsible. All of them had been interviewed by the police, including Conner. In fact, they’d looked at Conner pretty closely, since he was Greg’s immediate boss. But once they’d zeroed in on Stan, they’d abandoned all their other suspects.
Conner forced his attention back to his job, looking over Jillian’s report. She’d