to move on, time to put the case behind him, time to focus on his own life and forget about all things related to Yasmine Talbot.
He left Bryan’s office and walked through the aisles of cubicles, this time wishing he could avoid Yasmine’s—an odd feeling after having spent the past weeks coming up with excuse after excuse to walk by her desk.
She looked up from her work and saw him as he neared.
“Hey,” he said, assuming the posture of a guy who’d just been let go.
Luckily, most of the people who sat near her had just left for a training session and wouldn’t be around to hear him confess his job “loss.”
Her expression, distracted and vague, made it clear he’d interrupted her in the middle of some serious code slinging. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Today’s my last day here.”
Her jaw dropped. “What happened?”
“I’m not as qualified for the job as I thought I was.”
“But you just started. It takes time to learn everything.”
“Honestly, I’m not that into it. I need a job I feel passionate about.”
Two little creases formed between her eyebrows, and he wished he could reach out and smooth them.
“I guess I can understand that. This just seems so sudden—Wait a minute. This doesn’t have anything to do with me, does it?”
“Of course not. It’s a career decision.”
Which sounded about as likely as claiming sleeping with her in the first place had been a career decision.
She sat speechless for a few moments, before he filled in the silence for her.
“I swear this has nothing to do with you. Ever since I finished training, I’ve been feeling like I was in the wrong job, and a talk I just had with Bryan Dermott confirmed it.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He shruggedd. “I’m still considering my options.”
She blinked, then looked at him as if she knew there was something he wasn’t telling her. “I’ll miss seeing you around here,” she finally said. “You really added some interest to our office landscape.”
“I’ll miss seeing you, too,” he said, wondering if this would be the last time.
Would he have the willpower to stay away? Would she?
“So, is this it?” Yasmine asked, looking a little unsure of herself for once.
“‘It’ as in the last time we see each other?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.
“Do you want it to be?”
Against all his better sense, he wanted her to say no.
“No,” she said, answering his prayers.
“Neither do I.”
“Then I’ll call you. Or you call me, okay?”
Alex nodded and smiled. “Okay.”
They stared at each other for a moment too long, something big and uncomfortable hanging in the air between them. The unstated fact that their relationship didn’t have a destination. It was a bus on the road to nowhere, and neither of them wanted to get off.
13
ALEX HAD BEEN PUTTING OFF clients for weeks. Now, with no fake day job to distract him, he could finally get down to business and take care of the people who could keep him afloat financially. The problem was, work was the last thing on his mind.
He’d been sitting at his desk all morning, trying like hell to concentrate and only occasionally succeeding. He seemed to be a much greater success at catching up on his e-mail, filing papers that could have waited to be filed, and eliminating every dust particle from the surface of his desk.
It didn’t help that he was working at home, and the TV was only a room away, beckoning with the promise of Seinfeld reruns and twenty-four-hour news. Not only that, but he’d made numerous trips to the kitchen, coming back to his desk with chips, a ham sandwich, a popsicle, too many cups of coffee and now an ill-thought-out bowl of cereal that had resulted in milk droplets on his keyboard.
At this rate, he wouldn’t be able to fit through his office door in another month, and his big fat lie of an investigation would be the least of his worries.
He finally decided that the only way he was going to get his mind off Yasmine was to give the whole issue some formal closure, so he opened his file on her and started typing notes on his conclusions about her case. There really wasn’t much to type. He’d explored every avenue investigating her, and there was no evidence that she’d engaged in any form of cyber crime—messing with the terrorists wasn’t really criminal—since her release from juvenile prison.
The only question left in his mind was, why did any of