Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 70518 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70518 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
“You have nothing to be ashamed of. And she owes you, too.”
He looked down at the ground. “I can never go back to Russia because of what I did. And my grandmother refuses to leave. So I will never see her again.”
“My dad used to say that never is never guaranteed. I don’t mean to minimize what you’re saying, because it has to feel terrible, but don’t give up.”
He shrugged. “She is happy. That is the most important thing. She has always been loyal to her country. And she is proud of me.”
“Are you able to help her, even though you can’t go there?”
“Yes. I pay people there to make sure she is taken care of. She does not know it. At least I don’t think she does.”
I finished with the bacon and washed my hands, then walked over and took his face in my hands.
“You’re a good man, Konstantin Volkov. And there aren’t many of those.”
I kissed him and he put his hands on my hips.
“Thank you,” he said. “You are a good woman, too. That is why I don’t want you to leave. This thing between us…it’s good, Lucy.”
He leaned his forehead against mine and my pulse raced with awareness.
“It is,” I whispered.
I closed my eyes, wishing this weekend could last forever. Here, we were safe. Nothing and no one could come between us. We had to leave his apartment eventually, though, and since he’d shared his deepest truths with me, I needed to do the same.
“When we sit down to eat,” I said softly, “I’m going to tell you about Nate.”
“I applied for a job in customer service, but during the interview, Nate asked me to take the open position he had for an office manager,” I said a few minutes later. “It was hard at first.”
“Why?” Kon asked me, his food untouched as he listened to me.
“Because all the other women in the office thought they should have been hired as the office manager. I was their boss on my first day of work there.” I gestured toward his plate. “Eat, please. I’m going to.”
He took a bite of his omelet and nodded with appreciation. “Very good, Lucy.”
I finished off a piece of bacon and continued. “So I made some changes to things in the office. I implemented more flexible hours and shorter workdays on Friday. I streamlined some things and started outsourcing some of the work for the people who had too much on their plates. And after a few months, I don’t know if I’d say everyone liked me, but they didn’t hate me anymore. Nate started asking me to stay late and help him with special projects, and I didn’t realize at the time it was because he liked me.”
Kon’s jaw hardened and I decided to skip the details of this next part.
“So anyway, we started dating and after a few months of dating I moved in with him. His house was closer to the office, and…” I shook my head. “I liked him well enough.”
“Was that when he became abusive?” he asked.
“No. He actually…so here’s what happened. As the office manager, I had full access to everything. I always had the accounts manager give me a listing of all incoming and outgoing expenses every month, so I knew how much we were spending on things. I was reading through that report one month and I saw that Nate had cut a check for $25,000 to someone, but there was no policy number tied to it. Every payment that goes out should have either a purchase order number or a policy number on it. Make sense?”
Kon nodded. “Yes.”
“I almost asked him about it, but then…something just didn’t feel right to me. He never cuts checks himself. He always asks the office manager to do it. So when he was out of town for a conference, I stayed late one night and did some digging. He had written the check to a man who had recently been released from prison for manslaughter.”
Kon’s brows shot up. “Oh, Lucy. This is bad.”
I exhaled hard, taking a bite of my omelet before continuing.
“I got into Nate’s locked drawer of files and spent hours going through them. It took me a while to piece everything together, but I eventually figured out that one of our life insurance policyholders with a $1,000,000 policy had died a week after Nate wrote that check. The family never got paid out, though. Nate forged a cancellation letter dated a few months before and told the family the policyholder’s policy had been canceled and he just never told them about it. He gave the home office—the insurance company he’s an agent for—an account number that he said belonged to the family, but it was actually an account he had set up. He took that million dollars and kept it.”