Once Upon a Friendship

Her eyes, when he finally allowed himself to focus on them, sent a shiver through him. She was upset. He grabbed his coat.

“What’s up?”

“I had a call from Gwen Menard,” she told him as they waited for the elevator.

“And?”

She watched the faded numbers as the old machine came down from the eighth floor. “They have some questions for you. I’ve already called Tanner. He’s outside waiting to follow us down there.”

He glanced at her, his keys jangling by his side. “You’re taking me in for questioning?”

Gabi turned then, reached out a hand and let it drop. “Liam...” She broke off and he had the idea that she might be going to cry. He’d only ever seen Gabi cry once. The night she’d exposed her reporter mistake to him.

“Gwen said that if I bring you down now, we can avoid any kind of formal attempt to bring you in for questioning.”

Every part of him stiffened. But he didn’t panic. Or even get angry.

“Walter played his ace,” he guessed. He couldn’t think of the man as his father anymore.

Funny how what was foremost in his mind was the way Gabi’s short black hair bounced when she shook her head. “They found the Schlotsky account papers on one of the hard drives they confiscated. They had to be kept to correlate with the voucher that stipulated a second signing.”

He knew that last part. Of course. He was the one who’d told her.

“And they brought Donaldson in for questioning.”

He raised an eyebrow. She’d had his blanket permission to tell Gwen anything she discovered pertaining to the case that didn’t incriminate him. The Donaldson thing—naming Walter as a blackmailer, but also making Liam look like a forger—could have gone either way.

The elevator doors slid open. He stepped on. So did she, a full foot away from him. They were the only two on board.

“You know they’ve been investigating all five of the top-floor executives named by your father. They found the original Schlotsky forms on Donaldson’s computer. He told them what he told me.”

“I’m sure Gwen ran straight to the grand jury with my father’s blackmail attempt. Which will slam-dunk his indictment. At which point he hands me up on a platter.”

There was no point in thinking otherwise. The way to deal with the situation was to face it head-on.

“Gabi...” He wanted to tell her he was innocent. To ask her to be his wife.

No...wait. What was he thinking? He was panicked. Losing his mind.

He wanted to kiss her and hope that he’d wake up in his bed with her beside him.

To know that he had her heart and that she had his, for the rest of their lives.

But he knew that when the case was over, when life returned to normal, the intensity of his feelings for her could change.

Would change.

Unless he was in jail...

“Don’t, Liam. It’s not worth the risk,” she said. And he wasn’t sure if she was talking about the case or not.

“Don’t what?”

“Look at me like that. We’ll get through this. And then we’ll be normal again. You and me and Marie.” She pointed to the space around them in the elevator. “Remember how we felt when we decided to buy this place? Like three peas in a pod that couldn’t be broken?”

He did remember. Marie had been the one to voice the feeling, but they’d all experienced it.

Her calm calmed him.