She followed him in and shut the door behind her.
“I’m not happy about how things went last night.” Drew sat on the front of his desk, blue eyes clouded. “I don’t like how they ended, and I don’t like that we couldn’t figure things out between us.”
“I don’t like it either,” she admitted. “But there’s a bigger problem right now than our fake relationship.”
Something like a smirk bent the corner of his mouth. “All right. Message received.”
Penny took a moment to wrench her mind away from her own irritation. “Listen, I—I think we both said a lot to each other in the heat of the moment last night. And for the record, I still think that some of what we have is really…it’s real.” She struggled for every word. “Honestly, I’m not sure if we should go forward with anything. When we’re mixing reality and lies, it’s hard to know where the line between them falls. But before we talk about that, you have to know something about Michael.”
“Michael Bower?” He narrowed his eyes. “How do you know Michael?”
“I don’t know him, but…I know about people like him.”
“And what is he like?”
Drew was skeptical, and that was fine. Penny took a deep breath. “I overheard him talking to his colleague on my way in here. They must have been waiting for you in the meeting room, but they were talking about hiding debts from you.” A sick feeling curdled her stomach. “They specifically said they didn’t want to give you a reason to look into their finances—that you’d have time to figure it out when you owned the company.”
Drew looked down at his feet, and when he looked back up his eyes were filled with a sharp disbelief. “I don’t know where to begin with that.”
“Maybe begin with their numbers. That would be my suggestion.” Penny’s hands tingled with nervous energy.
“I’m not going to start interrogating them because you think you overheard them talking about this. You could have misunderstood. You could have misheard.”
“I didn’t.”
“Look.” He straightened up so that he was standing at his full height. “After last night, I don’t think it’s the best idea if we…keep going in this direction.”
Her heart stuttered, then stopped, the missing beats a painful absence. “What direction is that?”
“I don’t think we should be discussing business,” Drew said flatly. “You weren’t honest with me about the issue you were having last night. You still haven’t been honest with me about it. And I think it’s best if we keep the two arenas separate while emotions are running high.”
“Are you accusing me of lying?” There wasn’t enough air in the room.
“No. I’m saying that Jack’s gone, Penny. He’s not going to sell the company to us. It’s Michael’s company or nothing. And I’m not willing to leave with nothing. So far, everything looks good, and Michael has a good reputation.”
She had been right. He was more invested in making a deal than in anything else. It had been a mistake to let herself fall for him, even the slightest.
History was repeating itself.
He couldn’t hear her and would rather take a chance on a bad deal than accept the truth.
Penny couldn’t bear it.
She nodded once, then twice, then said the only words that came to her mind. “I’m moving out.”
12
“It’s twenty minutes each way. Is that going to be feasible for you with Logan’s schedule?”
Penny straightened up from the suitcase she was packing and ran a hand through her hair. “Yeah, I think it will. Twenty minutes isn’t the longest commute I’ve ever had in my life.”
Drew vacillated between feeling frozen through and shocked by an awful lightning strike. She’d been angry after the gala. So had he, but mostly at himself.
But then she’d come into his office and tried to tell him how to run his business. It had raised his hackles. Obviously, he wasn’t going to make a purchase without vetting the company.
This was how he’d gotten in over his head with Susan, too. She’d had too much access to the company, and she’d run with it. And she’d nearly run it into the ground.
No, he decided, going back on himself for the third time in thirty seconds. This was my own fault. He had mixed his personal life and business. He had let himself get too close to a woman he should have kept strictly as an employee. He had trusted her, and that was a mistake.
Not for Logan. She had never given any hint that she was less than stellar as a nanny, which was why he hadn’t fired her. He didn’t want to do that to his son.
In terms of their relationship—any kind of relationship—it was not good.
“I can send Mike with the car every morning to pick you up and drop you off,” he said decisively, reaching for any way to take control of the conversation.
Penny frowned. “I don’t think that’s a great idea. It’s probably best if I have my own vehicle on property.”
Drew didn’t think any of this was best. It all seemed like a Jenga tower primed to fall. “I get it. A quick escape is a necessity sometimes.”
“I’ve been in enough collapsing businesses to know when it’s time to go,” she quipped.
“Have you?” Drew’s mind went still and clear with focus. “I don’t think you mentioned that.”
She flicked her eyes to him and back to the suitcase, then reached for another shirt from the dresser. “I had to leave my last job and go looking because it fell apart all around me. That’s how my resume ended up in your inbox.” She sighed. “I didn’t want another Fox Worldwide disaster.”
Penny had mumbled the last bit, but he heard it anyway.
Fox Worldwide?
Her cheeks had gone red, but she didn’t say anything else. She just grabbed the last of her clothes from the dresser and tossed them into the suitcase, then zipped it closed. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”
Yes. I want you to stay and fight with me until we figure this out.
But his mind pulled him away from the thought like it was a hot stovetop.
“No.”
The best he could do was to carry her suitcases down to the front door. Penny took them out of his hands, not meeting his eyes. “Text me if you think of anything else that needs hashing out,” she said, and she left without a backward glance.
“She’s the daughter of Rudy Fox, of Fox Worldwide.” Louis, the head of security at Preston Logistics and a former investigator, was confident. It rang in his voice. Drew had given him two hours to do a background check on Penny. It had taken the man less than forty-five minutes to email a full file. He was good.
But the news was bad.
It was probably the worst start to a Monday morning Drew had ever had.
“The Rudy Fox?” Drew did not want to believe it. But it made total sense. All the puzzle pieces clicked together in his mind.
Penny’s knowledge about the logistics industry.
The way she’d had so much corporate experience in Toronto but ended up starting a new career across the continent.