she wasn’t here because she’d found out what he suspected but never told her. “Come into my office and tell me what you need.”
Louise’s gaze bounced from him to Sierra and back. She gave him a knowing look. “I’ll hold all your calls.”
He waited for Sierra to pass before closing the door on Louise’s inquisitive gaze. She’d grill him later. She knew him well enough to know that Sierra, a friend, wasn’t here about a divorce.
Normally he’d greet Sierra with a kiss on the cheek or a brush of his hand on her arm in front of the boys. He’d like to kiss her now, the way he did when the boys were distracted and he stole one from her. But she didn’t take a seat or look like she came here to make out in his office for an hour. Pity.
Sierra simply stood in front of his desk and stared at him, looking unsure and nervous as hell.
“Do you want to do this standing up or sitting down?” Okay, that sounded dirty even to him.
Sierra raised an eyebrow and dropped into one of the chairs.
He went with her prompt and took a seat behind his desk, keeping this professional. She’d made the appointment. He’d give her his full attention.
Sierra stared at him for a good long moment, then pulled a stack of envelopes from her purse along with a slip of folded paper. She set it on the desk, opened it, and slid the check toward him. “Your assistant said a five-hundred-dollar retainer would do.”
He knew she was still short on ready cash, so the five hundred had to be a stretch for her to come up with for . . . whatever it was she wanted him to do for her. Maybe she borrowed it from her mom or Amy.
“I don’t want your money, Sierra. I’m happy to help you with whatever you need.”
“If I pay you, that means you’re my attorney and you can’t say anything to anyone about what I’m about to tell you.”
That confused him. Didn’t she trust him? “Anything you say to me is between you and me. You don’t need to pay for my silence. You just have to ask.”
“You’re mad.”
A little bit. “I thought I made it clear what I wanted with you, and it’s not to be your lawyer.”
She deflated in the chair, her shoulders sagging and all the air going out of her lungs in a loud sigh. “So you won’t help me.”
“Of course I’ll help you. I just don’t get why you didn’t just ask me about this the half-dozen times you’ve seen me over the last week instead of making an appointment.”
Sierra stood and paced back and forth. “I didn’t want you to think I was taking advantage of our friendship.”
“I hope we are moving into a deeper kind of friendship where you trust me and know that I’d do anything for you.”
She stopped in her tracks and stared at him, looking for something, then deciding she saw whatever it was she needed to see to sit back down and tell him what she needed. “This is awkward. You and I . . . We’re seeing each other now. I don’t want to screw that up.”
“Hundreds of people have sat where you are ready to end relationships because they couldn’t trust the other person enough to have a civil conversation about what they needed and wanted from the other person. So, Sierra, what do you need from me?”
She sucked in a breath. “I need your help to find out if David was having an affair or in some kind of trouble that cost him, us, fifty thousand dollars.”
He thought she needed help navigating the insurance and red tape on her property up in Napa. He never thought this had anything to do with David.
No wonder she’d been apprehensive to bring it up to him.
Mason fell back in his seat and tried to get his thoughts together and figure out a way to navigate this. He started with the simple question. “Why do you think he was having an affair?”
Sierra pulled some papers out of one of the envelopes and slid them across the desk. “He took out a fifty-thousand-dollar loan nearly two years ago. For what, I have no idea. I didn’t know anything about it until after his death and the bank contacted me about delinquent payments I knew nothing about. He had the bills sent to his office, not the house. Once the bank contacted me,