Cuckoo (Kindred, #3)

THREE-1

THREE

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Invigorated by Brodie’s agreement, they’d enjoyed each other again in the dark. Before he stroked her back to sleep, he added some provisos. She was to stay at the manor every night and had to report in several times a day. Once she was satisfied that CI wasn’t going to burn to the ground without her and Grant there to hold it up—which Brodie assumed would take no more than two days—she was to join him and Tuck at Rigor’s place.

Her task was to return to her old life, sans Grant. Brodie wasn’t the only one who needed to be free of distractions to get the job done. Keeping her eye on the company would be easier without him noticing and questioning every nuance of her actions.

Brodie departed the manor before she was out of her morning shower. He advised her that he’d leave a car for her in a concealed parking space outside the perimeter of McCormack land. Having a car to get to and from work would be easier than having a cab drop her off each night.

She still had her parking spot at CI and the codes hadn’t changed, so getting inside was just like old times. For a while she fooled herself that going through the motions would be enough. That was until she reached the executive floor. The staff there stopped to greet her and express condolences, but when they were all gone, she was left staring at the interior glass wall of Grant’s office. The blinds were closed on the other side concealing her view. Not that she needed to see to know what was there.

Returning to her place of employment was supposed to be a comfort that would chase off the demons that had plagued her. It was supposed to bring her peace and restore her to contentment. Except as she stood staring at the shielded window she felt like a detached stranger, irrelevant to the company that had given her purpose for so long, and all of her insecurities came rushing back.

The appeal of the job came in her importance, in her value to the corporation through the CEO. Without this job and with the man gone, the last part of Zara Bandini, corporate lackey, had died too. She’d been struggling with the loss of that part of her identity.

“Zara!”

Whirling around, she cast off her thoughts of Grant and the uncertainty of her future to smile at Julian who was striding toward her. “Hello,” she said when he came to a stop in front of her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m so glad to have you back,” he said, giving her a pat then turning her body toward her office and walking at her side to accompany her inside. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that things are piling up.”

He didn’t. She knew how the backlog mounted if she chose to go home early one night of the week. That she hadn’t been here for a month left her with no illusions. “I’ll delegate as much as I can. The team works efficiently so long as there’s someone driving them.”

“And there’s no one better at that than you,” he said. “If you need anything signed at an executive level, bring it to me. I’ll act as liaison with the board. It’s not that they don’t trust you—”

“Just that I’m beneath them,” Zara said, nodding and turning to her desk, which was just as she’d left it. With events at Sutcliffe’s compound and Grant’s vicious duplicity, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat at that workstation with nothing but CI business on her mind.

“They want to check everything out before we make any executive decisions. We don’t want anything too drastic to change before the new owner comes in.”

That piqued a different kind of interest, but she tried to subdue her vehemence in the face of Julian’s ignorance. “Have you found him? The new... owner?”

“No,” he said. “Mr. McCormack had a brother, but pinning down his location is proving impossible. He had cousins too. I hadn’t realized he had so many living family members, he never talked about any of them.”

Julian was obviously parroting what someone else had said because he had no close relationship with Grant that would afford him the chance to make such an observation. But Grant was known as a private man who kept his personal life away from work. That there were lawyers probing into his history and his family tree would mortify him, as it would Brodie. Picking up on the similarity between the brothers when she so often noticed their differences didn’t help to assuage her turmoil over Grant’s death.

“You never know, it could be that he finds you,” she said and noted that she should talk to Brodie about asserting his authority over CI before any of the lawyers or board members delved too deep into what he and his family had been doing for the last twenty years.

He smiled. “That would certainly save a lot of time and money,” Julian said, squeezing her shoulder. “Do you need anything? If it’s too difficult being here, we can find you somewhere else to work.”

Again, she felt categorized as the grieving widow when that couldn’t be further from the truth. When she’d heard Grant’s body hit the floor, she’d feared it was Brodie and when she turned to see that it wasn’t, her prevailing emotion was relief. Horrified by such a hideous response to the death of a man she’d been close to for half a decade, she struggled with the nature of her own character and how it had developed since the night she met Timothy Sutcliffe. That was the night her life changed.

“This place is home to me,” she said, glancing toward Grant’s office. “There’s work that has to be done and there’s nowhere else I’d rather do it.”

Getting stuck in a broom closet with a laptop wouldn’t ease her confusion about where she fit in without her corporate identity. She had to sit down and wade into the mounds of work that would have been growing since she and Grant last walked out of here.

If she kept her focus, the structure of CI would help her settle again, she was sure of it.

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