The Survivor - Cristin Harber Page 0,40
this woman would drive him mad. He wasn’t sure if he’d bothered to breathe. Hagan struggled to pull his mouth away. The way she moved and kissed and held on like he was the last man on Earth had left him insatiable.
He salivated to take her breasts into his mouth, to rub her wetness against her hot flesh. Hagan vibrated with such an all-consuming urge to bring Amanda to orgasm after orgasm that he wasn’t sure how to keep from holding back.
Hagan wrenched his lips from hers and fought to catch his breath.
“You don’t scare me,” she whispered.
Her breathless taunt, full of bullshit and honesty, blinded him with an animalistic urgency to bring her pleasure until she screamed his name.
Hagan grappled with an outrageous level of lust that had started with the honey-sweet kiss. “But you scare the hell out of me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The next day Amanda wasn’t ready for the real world again, but Halle had said the contract was time sensitive. She set her tea mug on her desk and booted up the laptop. It didn’t take long to find the forward. She swiped the email open and read Halle’s message above the original sender’s delivery information.
I am so jealous that you’re closer than I am. See below.
Amanda scrolled down. The initial email had been sent to their company’s generic inbox. The sender appeared to be a Lebanese government official. Amanda tapped her fingernail on the desk. They didn’t have any current clients in Lebanon, and the location alone wasn’t enough to make Halle jealous of a work opportunity.
Amanda scrolled to the greeting and formal introduction of Imad Nasrallah, deputy minister of the treasury. Mr. Nasrallah offered a concise explanation of Lebanon’s gambling tax earned from Casino de Gemmayzeh. Now she had an idea where this might be going and why Halle wished she could work the gig.
According to Mr. Nasrallah, Casino de Gemmayzeh entertained high rollers and slots aficionados alike, and the country owned a majority share of the casino.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” she muttered, then mentally noted, if not a conflict of interest. The country earned taxes and shareholder dividends, and Amanda bet that combination brought in a sizable fortune. It didn’t matter that some countries, like the United States, had a travel advisory on Lebanon. Casino de Gemmayzeh was sure to be a cash cow, as many Middle Eastern countries outlawed gambling. This casino would be able to service a hungry consumer group with few options. “All very interesting, Mr. Nasrallah, but what’s your problem?”
Amanda scrolled through bullet points better suited for a tourist agency until their content focused on the year-over-year growth of taxes, shareholder dividends, casino guest headcounts, and total games played.
The final bullet point referred to an attached spreadsheet. She had her computer scan it, and the document came up clean, but she still wasn’t a fan of opening attachments from unknown senders. She didn’t doubt that Halle and Shah would’ve checked the email and attachment also, but Amanda opted to follow their overly cautious standard operating procedure. She turned to a second, air-gapped laptop that she kept at the ready, and, after saving Mr. Nasrallah’s file to a portable drive that she’d destroy after using, she safely opened the spreadsheet on the separate device.
The spreadsheet had column after column of data. Most of it was unneeded but showed an effort to be transparent. “Boring, boring, boring.” She switched tabs and scrolled again, casually reading line items that had been extracted from the country’s fiscal budgets. Her eyebrows arched. If the numbers were correct… “Not so boring.”
Without double-checking Mr. Nasrallah’s numbers and without the ability to reference the document’s Arabic footnotes, she understood the problem before he spelled it out. The annual income and taxes had grown steadily over the decade; however, within the same ten-year period, that growth didn’t keep pace with the steady increase of players and bets made during the same time period. The discrepancy was slight, and nearly impossible for a governmental budget office to notice. Amanda and Halle counted several casinos as clients, and only with that background could she see the red flag.
She opened a calculator on the screen, and, after several calculations, Amanda whistled. For every two months of spot-on expectations, one month stumbled a tenth of a percentage.
Her phone chimed and interrupted her chain of thought. She stood and stretched, hardly giving it a second glance until she remembered giving her number to Hagan. A warm whoosh of excitement made her giddy. She grabbed the phone.