Hidden Agenda

“Yes, actually. He nearly blew a gasket when I cleaned up my own office. He told me he doesn’t want me to touch his papers or his computer without his express permission.”

“Honey, I think you’re on to something.” Celeste thought for a moment, then suddenly gasped. “Maybe you already saw the incriminating evidence but don’t know enough yet to recognize it. If he suspects you’re on to him…maybe he’s going to take you into the woods and make you disappear.”

Jillian almost regretted confiding in Celeste. “I don’t think that’s the case,” she said.

“Just make sure someone else in the company knows where you’ll be—and who you’ll be with. Oh, and I brought you some more gear to help you with your spying.”

“I’m not supposed to be spying.”

“Do you want to get ahead or not? If you do, you have to take some initiative.”

A few minutes later—and with her wallet several hundred dollars lighter—Jillian was seated across from Celeste at a mall café eating a chicken Caesar salad. Celeste, impatient to show off her “gear,” started emptying her gargantuan purse. She hauled out a wad of wires and laid it on the table. “To record telephone calls.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

Celeste slid her gaze away guiltily. “Okay, how about this?” She pulled out a rather clunky-looking pair of sunglasses. “There’s a video camera in the earpiece. Records up to thirty minutes of video on this tiny flash card. You can pop it right into your computer for viewing.”

“Celeste, where do you get all this stuff?”

“Mostly The Spy Store. Sometimes I order it from the back of Soldier of Fortune Magazine. They have the weird stuff.”

“I don’t want to record phone calls,” Jillian said. “That’s wiretapping, and it’s a felony.” Daniel would have her head if she went against his orders and broke the law.

“Even to bring a murderer to justice? Honey, do you want to be stuck filing and making coffee forever? Because that’s what happens to women in this field unless they go out on a limb. You have to be smarter, stronger, faster and lots more clever than the men just to break even.”

Jillian knew what Celeste had said was at least partly true, even in this day and age. She considered Daniel enlightened, not particularly sexist, yet Project Justice itself was clothed in an air of macho that favored brawn over brains and subtlety. Even her professors at the junior college where she took her criminal justice classes didn’t take her seriously because of her delicate appearance.

“You don’t have to tell anyone you made the recordings,” Celeste reasoned. “Just let the information you glean point you in the right direction. Make yourself look smart.”

Jillian scooped up all of Celeste’s toys and stuffed them into her shopping bag. “I’ll think about it. And, Celeste…thanks.”

Celeste took a big bite of her hamburger and spoke around it. “Us girls gotta stick together.”

* * *

“IS SOMETHING WRONG, Mr. Blake?” asked Letitia, the security guard, as Conner strolled in through the garage entrance early the next morning.

“Wrong? What do you mean?”

“You’re whistling. I’ve never heard you whistle before.” She lowered her voice. “I thought maybe you were trying to signal me that there was some kind of trouble.”

Conner shook his head. “No, no trouble. I’m just in a good mood, I guess.”

Letitia laughed. “Yeah, right. Have a good day, Mr. Blake.”

“You, too, Letitia.”

Conner supposed he deserved the guard’s derision. Three years working in this building and he’d probably never spared a nice word for her. He was a Grade A grouch. A good mood wasn’t a familiar state for him.

But how could he not feel good? In a few hours, he would be in the forest—pine needles crunching underfoot, breeze blowing through the high branches, fresh air washing the Houston smog out of his lungs, birds calling.

A stand of second-growth pine wasn’t quite the same as an old-growth forest in Montenegro, or the rain forest in Brazil. There was something special—sacred almost—about a part of the earth that hadn’t been touched by human development, and he always felt good knowing that he was protecting those areas from other, less responsible lumber operations that would clear-cut the trees, rather than selectively harvesting mature trees and leaving behind smaller ones for the next generation—and for all the critters who called the forest home.

Sure, his way was more expensive. But landowners and governments who managed public lands were more likely to sell to Mayall because of the care they took.

Conner’s musings came to an abrupt halt as he walked down the door to his office and got an eyeful of Dora the Explorer.

Jillian wore pants with enough pockets that she could carry provisions for an army. The camo shirt—what was that, National Guard chic? And those boots—good gravy, they must weigh twenty pounds each. The hat was more appropriate for a survival hike through the desert than a walk in the woods.

He couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing. “What the hell are you supposed to be? Are you auditioning for a role on the next season of Survivor?”

The hurt look on Jillian’s face immediately sobered him. He hadn’t meant to ridicule her.

“I dressed prepared for a hike, as suggested,” she said coolly.

He held up a hand. “Sorry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed, Jilly…Jillian.”

Jilly. Jilly. Why had he called her that?

Then it hit him. Jillybean. This situation reminded him viscerally of another time when he’d laughed at a female’s expense. Her name was even similar. And that expression of injury on her face—uncannily the same.

Jillian pulled out a compact from her purse and tried to see herself in the tiny mirror. “Surely I don’t look that bad.”

“No,” he said distractedly as he stared at her, studying her features, trying to see something that wasn’t there. “You follow directions extremely well and you look…” Adorable. Sexy. How could a woman in camo, covered head to toe, look sexy? “Well prepared. We’ll leave in a few minutes, I just want to check my mail.” He escaped into his office and shut the door.

What was Jillian’s last name? Though the situation had reminded him of something from years ago, this Jillian couldn’t possibly be Jill Baxter, his friend Jeff’s kid sister. Jill had been short and chubby with a mop of frizzy, green-blond hair, a mouthful of braces, and a long, beaky nose.

Still, Conner rifled through the papers on his desk until he came up with the stack of résumés Joyce had given him to look over, a task he’d never gotten around to, forcing her to make a decision on her own. He flipped through them until he found Jillian’s.

Jillian Baxter.

Baxter was a common name—it couldn’t be the same Jill. But he hadn’t seen her since she was fourteen. That was, what, thirteen years ago? That would make her around twenty-seven now. The age was about right.

Though he and Jeff had been good friends at one time, they’d drifted apart after high school. Their families exchanged Christmas cards, but that was about it. He thought about looking Jeff up on Facebook, seeing if he could reconnect with his old buddy. Or, he could simply sift through Jeff’s friends and see if his sister was there, and what she looked like today.

In the end, though, he decided he didn’t have time for such a foolish pursuit. There was no possible way the gorgeous woman sitting at her desk just down the hall with the tiny waist and the sleek hair—and the straight, aristocratic, but definitely nonbeaky nose—was Jillybean, the girl he had humiliated in front of teachers, parents and half the student body.

The girl he’d last seen in her underwear, streaking across the football field toward the locker room as fast as her stubby little legs could carry her.

The girl who had vowed to hate his guts for the rest of his days, who had cursed his unborn children and sworn to condemn to hell if she could—according to Jeff, anyway. Conner had been advised not to get within a hundred yards of her if he valued his manhood.

He smiled at the memory; then immediately a tremendous stab of guilt nailed him right in the stomach. The incident had seemed terribly funny at the time, and he’d gotten extracurricular credit for participating in the science fair despite his invention’s obvious drawbacks. He’d gained yet another notch of notoriety at his high school—the kind teenage boys thrived on.

But it hadn’t been so funny to Jilly. Long after he’d gone off to college, he’d reflected on the incident and realized how mean he’d been to laugh at her expense. But he hadn’t felt bad enough to contact her and apologize.

Had she ever forgiven him? Probably not.

It was a good thing his new admin wasn’t the chubby Jillybean from his past, or he might have to think twice about spending time with her in the woods, alone, where there were no witnesses.