My Husband Doesn't Know I'm His Mistress

Chapter Five — Reid

The Monday briefing ended at nine-fifteen.

I was in the corridor, portfolio under my arm, already restructuring the morning's timeline in my head, when I heard him fall into step beside me.

Reid Parker moved with the unhurried ease of a man who had decided the destination could wait — which, I had learned, meant he had already arrived somewhere in his head and was simply allowing his body to catch up.

"Good briefing," he said pleasantly.

"Thank you."

"The secondary access point analysis was particularly thorough." He said it the way you might comment on the weather. "Where did you train?"

"New York," I said. "Private sector mostly."

"Mm." Two steps. "You have a government methodology, though. The way you structure the access log cross-referencing. That's not private sector training."

The corridor was long. I kept walking.

"I've worked with people from various backgrounds," I said.

"Of course." He was quiet for a moment. Then, "You knew about the Vertex Capital connection before we did. Week two briefing, you referenced their Q3 acquisition structure. That information wasn't in anything we gave you."

"Background research," I said. "Standard for this kind of review."

He nodded slowly, as though considering whether to find that satisfying.

He didn't find it satisfying.

"What's your middle name, Elena?"

I looked at him.

His expression was pleasant and completely still and his green eyes had the patient quality of a man who was not in a hurry because he had already decided how this conversation ended.

"Margaret," I said.

He smiled. "My mother's name. Lovely."

He stopped walking. I didn't, quite, but I slowed.

"I'm having dinner with Daniel on Thursday," he said, with the specific casualness of a man delivering information he knows will land as a grenade. "I'll tell him you said hello."

I kept my face exactly where Elena kept it.

"Please do," I said.

I walked to the elevator. Pressed the button. Stepped inside.

The doors closed.

I stood in the descending elevator and understood, with the cold clarity of someone whose professional instincts had just overridden everything else, that Reid Parker had been watching Elena Marsh for longer than this morning, and that what he had assembled was not yet a name but was close enough to one that Thursday dinner was not a social engagement.

It was a deadline.

I had four days.

My phone was in my hand before the lobby doors opened. I pulled up Jonas's number and called.

He answered on the second ring.

Which meant he had been waiting.

And that — more than Reid's corridor questions, more than the four-day deadline, more than anything that had happened in the last two weeks — was what made my blood run cold.

Because Jonas Okeke did not wait for calls.

He anticipated them.