Pimpernel

by Sheralyn Pratt

  “Um, excuse me,” Daniel said, wiggling his fingers to get the other guy’s attention. “I’m sure you’re a nice person, but right now I need you to be a Houdini and make you and your bestie disappear before I unload a can of Raid on you both.”

  The man drew the Tupperware closer to his chest protectively as he made an effort to gather the contents of Claire’s purse scattered on the floor. “I really am sor—”

  “I don’t care!” Daniel said over him. “Just get out and shut the door behind you, or we’ll find out how well that atrocity swims in a flushing toilet.”

  The man’s jaw fell open in dismay before he sent Claire a look of regret she didn’t quite understand. All she knew was that in the moment she became keenly aware of the fact that, even standing on the back of her couch, she was barely taller than this new stranger. The guy had to be at least six-foot-four—the kind of tall that probably had strangers asking him if he played basketball all the time.

  “Sorry,” tall guy muttered, before placing all Claire’s thrown belongings in a pile and backing out of the door. The moment the door clicked shut, Daniel grabbed Claire’s forearm.

  “Honey, you literally just saved my life,” he gasped, pressing his other hand to his heart. “If you had even been one minute later, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  Claire did nothing more than nod in response, her mind still taking in the last sixty seconds of her life as Daniel dropped to sit cross-legged on the couch, staring at the scattered belongings on the otherwise immaculate floor.

  Neither of them moved to get off the couch.

  “I feel like the carpet will never be clean again, but it’s illegal to set it on fire,” Daniel said after several moments. “Do you think ‘spider invasion’ is a valid reason to vacate and still get the deposit back?”

  Even though she knew he was joking, Claire felt her stomach drop at the thought of Daniel moving out.

  “Only if you take me with you to your new place,” she said. “Four weeks is far too short a time to live with the perfect roommate.”

  His lips pursed adorably and his bright blue eyes peered at her through mascara-covered lashes. “Ah, sweet talk. My favorite. What’s for dessert?”

  Daniel may have the gay man’s curse of average looks and a non-chiseled physique, but what he lacked in favorable DNA he made up for using flirt and fashion. His fastidiousness over his appearance and environment was the quality that made him the perfect roommate for Claire. He wasn’t OCD like her, but he took pleasure in noticing and correcting the smallest details. This translated into scrubbing sinks with toothbrushes and being incapable of sitting down for a meal if the drapes weren’t properly steamed.

  Between the two of them, it was almost a competition to see who could be higher maintenance, and Claire loved it. For once she felt normal, even though she knew she wasn’t. Then again, neither was Daniel, which somehow made him that much more perfect as a roommate. It was like living with a guy without living with a guy…which brought her attention back to the robe and slippers on the floor.

  Apparently he’d thrown them in self-defense, but she was glad he’d drawn the line at throwing his briefs. If Daniel wasn’t more of a girl than she was, she might have felt more uncomfortable about being in a room with a man wearing only underwear. She definitely wouldn’t have taken note of the fact that his sailor boxer briefs were cuter than any underwear she owned. Plus the aqua blue in the print matched his eyes, which she was pretty sure was not an accident.

  “You’re wearing shoes,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “Want to grab my house slippers so I don’t have to spend the rest of my life on this couch?”

  “Sure,” she said, understanding his reluctance to set his bare feet on the same carpet the spider had touched. She was hesitant, even in her shoes. “I’ll grab the steamer if you grab the surface cleaner.”

  He hesitated. “The cleaner under you bathroom sink?”

  “Yes,” she said, stepping off the couch to gather his clothes.

  He grimaced. “Where the tampons live?”

  Impossibly, after everything that had happened that night, his protest got an honest chuckle out of her. She let him see her roll her eyes as she handed the robe and slippers over. “Fine. I’ll get the cleaner, you get the steamer.”

  “Deal,” he said, and stepping into his slippers while still holding his robe. “Right after I drop this contaminated fabric in the laundry.”

  “Of course,” she agreed and headed over to the sink to get the cleaner.

  Chapter 6

  Later that night, Jack and his group gathered around Margot’s conference room table.

  “Well, once again our little PhD student made us look like amateurs,” Margot said. “At this point, I want to hire her, not get her arrested.”

  Ren nodded. “Even I wouldn’t have spotted the car in the dark like she did. I’m as impressed at her skill as I am surprised that Margot has a car over two years old in her inventory.”

  “That car was never used before tonight,” Margot said a bit defensively. “When I need a cop for something, I call the actual cops. I don’t impersonate them.”

  Ren shrugged. “We’re running out of angles with this girl. I wanted to try something new—shake her up a bit to see if she flinched. It would have worked if the car was up-to-date.”

  Margot’s jaw clenched in annoyance. “That prop car just fell off the radar. I’ll have it replaced tomorrow.”

  Jack listened to their bickering, rolling his lucky coin across the back of his fingers as he considered their stalled position. “The question is, do we have any moves left without showing our hands? Is direct confrontation the only way we have left to move things forward?”

  Margot considered that while Ren kept uncharacteristically silent, his finger nervously tapping on the table.

  “What are you thinking, Ren?” Jack asked.

  Ren met his eyes, a visible debate happening inside them. “I think we need to bring in Kali.”

  Margot immediately tensed, eyes rolling. “What is your obsession with that woman?”

  “It’s not an obsession. It’s a strategic suggestion. Spotting how people’s brains tick is Kali’s wheelhouse. She’s the perfect person to bring in right now.”

  “Why?” Margot snapped. “Because you want another chance to get her in the sack?”

  “She’s married, Margot.”

  “Like that’s ever stopped you before.”

  Ren shook his head, clearly wanting to avoid that piece of verbal bait as he looked at Jack. “My suggestion has no ulterior motives. This is what Kali does better than anyone I’ve ever met. If you know someone better suited, then I’m happy to reach out to them, too. But Kali’s on the top of my list when it comes to someone who can peek behind Claire Ramsey’s curtain for us. I think she’s our best move at this point.”

  Jack looked at each of his teammates in turn, both encouraging him to make a different decision with their eyes. He agreed with Ren. Kali was the best person they could call in to help. But would bringing her in send Margot off the rails?

  The dynamic between Ren and Margot was a delicate one. They’d literally known each other their entire lives due to the fact that Margot came from a family line so old and so rich that there were other family lines of multi-generational servants that lived to serve her family. Men like Margot’s father didn’t hire competent help; he bred it. Ren’s family line, in particular, had worked for Margot’s since the 1700s.

  To that end, Ren was—along with about a half a dozen others—Margot’s personal and devoted bodyguard by birth, and he had fully embraced his birthright. The fact that he was in love with Margot was something Ren was trained to ignore. Part of his instruction was a firm indoctrination that touching any members of the Harbour family in a personal fashion was equivalent to signing his own death certificate.

  Yet there was the small detail that Margot loved Ren back that caused most of the trouble between them. Margot�
�s feelings were something Ren seemed genuinely blind to, despite her frequent outbursts of jealousy aimed at any other woman who had even an ounce of Ren’s respect or attention. And Kali had both those things in spades.

  Not only was Kali a surreal level of beautiful that even got Jack’s brain to freeze up from time to time, but she rivaled Margot as the most competent and intelligent person Jack had ever worked with. Kali had all the brains Margot had, plus she had the physical capacity to keep a side-by-side pace with Ren in the field.

  Kali Fischer was a human juggernaut. And for Margot, a woman who was born and bred into always having the upper hand, Kali was something she didn’t run into all that often: a superior.

  Margot hated her for it. Big time.

  Still, Ren was right. If they wanted to see behind the curtain Claire seemed to have draped around herself, Kali was the person for the job.

  “If we hit a wall, I’ll reach out to her,” Jack decided, even though he had to confess that they’d hit a wall more than two weeks ago.

  Margot didn’t even try to stifle her groan, which got Ren up in arms.

  “You need to give Kali a chance, Margot. She’s a good person. If she wasn’t, we both know I’d be dead right now.”

  “Right,” Margot drawled. “Remind to congratulate her for not shooting you in the head next time I see her. That was really big of her.”

  Ren didn’t even blink. “Considering the circumstances, it was big of her.”

  “Whatever,” Margot snapped. “In the end, you saved her life, too.”

  “But she saved mine first,” Ren said firmly. “She’s good people, Margot. I trust her with my life. Maybe more to the point, I trust her with yours. So give her a chance, will you? You’ve only met her once.”

  Margot’s response was to stand and look at Jack. “Are we done here?”

  “We’re done,” Jack said, happily taking the out. “Everyone do their thing. I’ll call Kali if I think she can speed things up.”

  Margot said nothing before storming back to her office.

  When she was gone, Ren looked at Jack and shook his head. “Women, man. They can be nuts.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jack said and headed for the elevator.

  Chapter 7

  Sitting in the back row of her Friday morning class, Claire’s eyelids drooped in exhaustion even as her heart pounded with anxiety. Thanks to the new numbers from meeting with Chairman Li last night, it had taken Claire until 3:02 a.m. to repeat the new full sequence of all the routing and account numbers of each investor 300 times. Only then had she been able to stop the obsessively looping the numbers, but that hadn’t meant her mind was ready to turn off. And without the numbers to focus on, her mind had chosen a new focus all its own.

  Was the door locked? She was sure she had locked the door…but what if she hadn’t?

  So she’d checked. It was locked.

  Did you accidentally unlock the door when you checked to see if it was locked?

  She knew she hadn’t, but the nagging thought got her to check the lock a second time. Then she’d checked it a third time to be safe.

  The door was locked. She could put that thought to bed…which only left a thousand other thoughts swarming around her like wasps. Most of the thoughts didn’t urge her back out of bed again, but one, in particular, had her terrified of doing just that.

  What if you kill Daniel in his sleep?

  What? That’s horrifying! I wouldn’t do that.

  Not on purpose, but what if you sleep walk?

  I haven’t done that in years—not since I was a kid.

  But what if you did? And what if you went to the kitchen?

  Why would I do that?

  To get a knife.

  No. I would never get a knife from the kitchen!

  Awake you wouldn’t, but sleeping you could.

  I wouldn’t.

  You could.

  That’s how the thoughts had started and grown until she’d been too afraid to close her eyes. Because what if she got up and got a knife and ended up in Daniel’s room?

  Claire knew—absolutely knew—that the scenario her mind was painting for her would never, ever happen. Yet, in the end, the what-if scenario had won.

  At 3:51 she had gone back to focusing on the investor numbers while trying to ignore the thought itching in the back of her head: When Monday came, she may be able to grab Ryan and find a way to refund all the accounts, but there was no way she could travel in her current state. She could feel it.

  She was a breath away from having a panic attack in her own bedroom. How in the world could she cope in a plane or an unfamiliar city?

  Re-starting OCD medication wasn’t like taking aspirin. It didn’t take effect as soon as it hit the blood stream. It might take days or weeks before Claire got back to her version of normal. She could probably get through a plane ride with a Xanax or something, but what about after she got off the plane? It might be weeks until she was back to the woman Ryan was used to working with. In the meantime, she would likely be sharing a hotel room with him—terrified that she would kill him in her sleep, or that he would sell her out to Mr. SUV to save himself.

  She wouldn’t be able to help those thoughts or the zillions of others that would no doubt make her behave in ways that could screw up her partnership with Ryan before it ever got started.

  I’ll warn him, she told herself in the darkness. He has a PhD in Psychology. He’ll understand. We’ll make it through.

  By the time her morning alarm went off for class, Claire had almost believed it.

  More than anything, she’d wanted to stay in bed. She wanted to change the sheets and hide in fresh, clean ones that weren’t tainted with the thoughts of the previous night. But if she gave in to the desire to hide and abandoned her daily schedule, that was as good as admitting that she was out of control. And if she was out of control, then she needed to go back on her medication.

  That was an absolute no-no.

  If she went back on her medication, there was a huge chance that her mind would start dropping numbers out of her memorized sequence and make it useless. Yes, she still had her backup cheat book, but what if it got lost? What if she didn’t have it on-hand when the time came to input the numbers? What if she had it in her purse and her purse got stolen?

  She couldn’t leave any room for error. She had to have all the numbers in her mind, and only an obsessive mind could remember so many unrelated numbers in a row.

  But sitting in class later that morning, with her classmate’s voice playing in the background like the wa-wa of a Peanuts comic strip parent, Claire’s mind had no interest in the memorized numbers. In her exhausted state, it was now catastrophizing easier scenarios, like the fact that one of Roger Chan’s pant legs was folded up once while the other leg wasn’t folded up at all. One moment, her mind was fixated quite intently on that fact. The next, after what she thought was a blink, her eyes opened to find everyone in her class walking out the door.

  Professor Smith stood in front of her desk looking thoughtful. “Late night last night, Miss Ramsey?”

  She sat up straight, mortified. “I’m sorry. I recorded it.”

  She quickly brought the app up to show him she wasn’t lying before pressing stop.

  Professor Smith took a seat next to her, his eyes regarding her clinically. “Are you doing okay, Claire?”

  She smiled brightly. “Sure. Yeah. I’m doing great!”

  The moment the words came out of her mouth, she self-critiqued. Her reply had been overenthusiastic and repeated the same idea three different ways. There was a 100% chance Professor Smith knew she was lying.

  “You’ve been different the past few weeks since Professor Eastman was arrested,” he said. “Do you need to talk to someone about that?”

  Match his tone. Match his energy. Say it once. “I still find it hard to believe,” she said. “I worked with Professor Eastman a lot. It’s so strange to have him gone.”

  “And in jail
, no less,” Professor Smith said. “With university officials discouraging visits…which you must want to do. I’m sure you have questions you want to ask him.”

  Claire nodded, not trusting herself to be equally understated with her words.

  “Do you find it stressful to have your mentor accused of the crimes Professor Eastman’s been accused of?”

  Stressful? She was furious with him—well, at herself, really. She was the one who gave Ryan everything he needed to land himself in jail. It was his fault he’d done everything he did to get there. But if Professor Eastman had never met Claire, he would be teaching a class now, not sitting in jail. So that was on her.

  “Yes,” she said, pretty sure that was the response her professor was expecting.

  “What are your thoughts about Professor Eastman’s evidentiary hearing coming up on Monday? A lot of students are planning on being there.” He looked at her face thoughtfully. “Have you considered going?”

  “I have,” she admitted. Pretty much nonstop.

  “Will you go?”

  Again, Claire nodded. “I think I need to.”

  “Me, too,” he agreed. “I think we all have questions, Claire. It’s okay to ask them. You know that, right?”

  “Of course.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “When was your last visit with your therapist?”

  It wasn’t a personal question. Every student in her program was required to see a therapist, even if it was only to check in once a month. “It’s been, um, three weeks.”

  “Then you’re due,” he said. “And remember that you’re covered for visits up to once a week.” He looked her over, his expression paternal. “I’ve gone once a week since Professor Eastman was arrested. He and I weren’t all that close, but we are connected to each other professionally which means I’ve had to field a lot of questions I wasn’t necessarily ready to answer. Some of those questions have uncovered unexpected emotions and reactions. Talking them out with a third party has been very helpful for me.”