LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER EIGHT

you deserve to know what your decision actually cost. Not in theory. In specifics."

"I know what it cost," he said, and his voice had a roughness to it she had not heard before. "I've known for a long time."

"Good." She picked up her spoon. "Then we don't have to revisit it again."

He nodded once, slowly. An agreement and an acknowledgement folded into the same gesture.

They finished eating. He washed the bowls without being asked, which was either very presumptuous or very natural, and she found she did not mind which. She dried. They moved around her kitchen in a silence that had cleared itself of everything difficult and left only the simple fact of two people occupying a space without friction.

"The transaction records," she said, as he dried his hands. "How long will it take your team to pull them?"

Back to business. She could see him adjust — the shift was subtle, a slight straightening, the return of precision. "Three days. Four at most. I'll have them reviewed before I send you anything."

"Send me everything unreviewed. I'll form my own conclusions."

He looked at her. "You don't trust my review."

"I trust that your review will be thorough. I also trust my own eyes more than anyone else's." She met his gaze evenly. "It's not personal."

"Everything about this situation is personal," he said, not unkindly.

"Then let's keep the professional parts clean."

A beat. Then: "Understood."

He picked up his jacket from the chair where he had draped it and she walked him to the door, which was a short walk in her apartment and felt longer than it was.

At the door he turned. "Thank you for letting me in."

"You brought soup," she said. "It would have been rude not to."

"That's the only reason?"

She looked at him for a moment — really looked, the way she had been carefully not doing all evening. The honest lines of his face. The steadiness that had always been his most disarming quality. The particular way he looked at her, like she was the most interesting thing in any room she entered, and had never thought to hide it.

"Goodnight, Kael," she said.

He smiled — the full one, the unfair one. "Goodnight, Aisha."

She closed the door and stood on her side of it for a moment, her hand still on the handle.

Then she went to her desk, opened her laptop, and started pulling up everything she could find on Meridian Finance's board of directors. Because there was a problem to solve and a threat to identify and she was, above all things, a woman who worked best when she had something to fight.

The fact that the apartment smelled faintly of egusi soup and something warmer and harder to name — that was simply a detail. Background information. Entirely beside the point.

She told herself this until she almost believed it.

Then she made herself another cup of tea and got to work.