The President's Property

Natalie Shaw counts seventeen ways this can go wrong before she even steps off the bus, and she is still missing one. The Hawke Security building rises thirty-four stories over Westport's financial district, black glass and steel ribs. The guard does not check a screen or ask for ID. He nods at the elevators. They were expecting her. Alexander Hawke does not sit down, and he does not offer her a chair. *I expected your sister.* *She's not well.* *That's why she owes me money.* Elena borrowed sixty thousand dollars from Rico Vargas to cover a gambling habit. Vargas sold the paper to Hawke at a discount. With the interest and the fees added before the transfer, the folder on the desk reads ninety-two thousand, four hundred dollars. Natalie offers the only thing she owns. She is a forensic accountant, and she will audit his books for nothing until the principal is cleared. At her billing rate it would take eighteen months. She is not billing, so she says twelve. He accepts, and then tells her what happens if she runs. A phone call. A fraud charge. A sister who goes to prison and stays there. They give her a windowless converted supply closet with a chair that lists to the left. His chief of staff warns her that the surveillance feed goes straight to Hawke's phone and that he watches it while he sleeps, then adds that the warning was not a kindness. And a number she does not recognise sends her three words: *You're in. Trust no one.* Nobody in the building knows why she is really there. Her father was a contract forensic accountant at Hawke Security. He was looking at certain accounts, he left her a voicemail she did not play for three months, and then he was dead. The transfer document that moved Elena's debt is signed by a man whose faded security badge Natalie has already palmed out of a desk drawer. The badge is years old. It still works. A dark contemporary romantic suspense in dual point of view, with a forensic audit used as a crowbar, a murdered accountant, a man who has been sitting on that murder file for three years, and an anonymous contact who only ever texts when it is too late to ask questions. The romance is closed-door.