Take Me Again (The Knight Brothers 1)

She laughed. “It certainly does.”

“It also explains why, despite our cyber focus now, we still have a key on our logo. Makes it more relatable to people, too.”

She nodded, familiar with their navy Knight Technology logo.

“The company history makes it all the more ironic that we have a multimillion-dollar smart campus deal at stake and we can’t get the damned locks to close.” Sebastian, furrows in his forehead, frowned. “Great-Great-Grandpa is probably rolling in his grave,” he said, sounding frustrated and upset.

“You and your brothers are so dedicated to the business.” She knew Ethan lived and breathed it, even when Mandy had been alive.

“Well, Ethan and I are dedicated. So is Parker, but he fell into it because he had no choice. I feel bad he never accomplished his Olympic skiing dreams. Damned accident.”

She remembered that time vividly. Ethan had canceled a trip to visit her right after Parker’s injury. “It happened while I was abroad, but Ethan told me what was going on.”

Sebastian studied her, his expression serious. “Was it bad? Boarding school?”

She sucked in a surprised breath at the question, giving it serious thought. “It was lonely at first.” She parsed her words carefully, so as not to make him feel worse than he already did for being the reason she had been sent away. “But eventually I made friends.” She pushed the orange juice aside and moved on to pouring herself coffee. It was time for caffeine.

His phone rang then and he glanced down. “The office,” he said, his attention now distracted, for which she was grateful.

She didn’t know if there would come a time when she’d want to confide in Sebastian about her years away, but now wasn’t the time. The past had defined the woman she’d become, and she wasn’t ready to delve into that this morning.

Sebastian ended the call and met her gaze. “That was Kyle Elliott, one of the executives at our San Fran office. He wanted to let me know he’d sent a memo, gathering the top people for my meeting this morning.”

Ashley nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

“Hit up Accounting. They know to turn over everything and anything that you need to reconcile purchases and receipts. Whatever you ask for should be at your disposal. Talk to the head people in the accounting department. See what you can glean from them.”

She patted her lips with a napkin, a move not lost on Sebastian despite the seriousness of the business discussion at hand. His deep blue gaze followed her movement, including the swipe of her tongue over her lips to dampen them.

They might be here on business, might have serious work to do, but nothing personal between them had been settled. At all.

Chapter Five

Sebastian gathered the executives in the San Francisco office and met up with them in the conference room. The meeting was a bust, every executive from each department swearing they did their jobs, nobody stepping up and taking responsibility for the issues the company was having at Keystone.

He then broke them into smaller groups and even talked to them individually, but he got nowhere. Nobody had a clue why the locks weren’t closing correctly when the prototypes had worked fine.

At the end of the day, Sebastian leaned against the back seat of the limo, feeling defeated as he pulled on his tie to loosen the noose from around his neck.

“Bad day?” Ashley asked him, settling in beside him, the scent of her perfume the first thing he’d noticed when she’d climbed in and slid into her seat.

“Frustrating as all hell,” he muttered. “I got nowhere. I met with the executives in a group and one at a time, and no one has an inkling why our one key part is failing.”

Surprising him, she reached out and placed her hand over his, the soft feel of her skin relaxing him and easing his tension.

“To make matters worse, I’ve been trying to reach Stephan Romano to reassure him I’m here and taking over, but so far he’s not returning my calls,” he said of their eccentric client, the CEO of Keystone. “How did you make out today?” He turned to face her, hoping she’d had more luck than he had in figuring out what was wrong at the company.

She pursed those soft lips, causing him to stifle a groan at the sight of the slight pucker.

“I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, not at a one-day glance. If the company bought something, it was billed and paid for; if they sold, it was invoiced and accounted for. Everything on the project lined up, as far as I could see.” She shrugged her shoulders, obviously as at a loss as he was.

“Dammit.” He curled his hand into a fist beneath hers.

She smoothed her palm over his, forcing him to unclench and relax. Intertwining their fingers together, she ran her thumb back and forth over his hand in a soothing motion. After last night, he was surprised she was reaching out physically, even if it was just because she was trying to quell his frustration. But he appreciated the gesture, his body responding despite the nonsexual nature of her touch, his cock thickening inside his pants.