The Project

CHAPTER12

“Ilove road trips,” Andi said with a heartfelt sigh as she searched through the large bag of junk food that she’d taken her time selecting from the gas station that she’d convinced him to stop at so that she could get the snacks required for this trip.

“It’s only an hour and a half. I don’t think it counts as a road trip,” Devyn said, taking a sip of the Big Gulp that he’d tried refusing until she’d explained that without it, she wouldn’t be able to get two candy bars for the price of one.

“Anything over an hour is a road trip and requires you to buy junk food like you’re an unsupervised ten-year-old with a hundred dollars,” Andi pointed out with a solemn nod as she selected a candy bar before she shifted her attention to the notebook that she’d been working on for the past two weeks.

“And you did a really good job,” Devyn said, reaching over and plucked the candy bar out of her hand as he made his way around a slow driver.

“I take pride in my work,” Andi murmured absently as she grabbed another candy bar and settled back against the comfortable leather seat as she went over the notes that she’d made on Roman Palms Hotel.

For the past two weeks, she’d spent every waking moment searching through every file that she could get her hands on, hoping to find something that would clue them in to their mystery VP’s identity. Every day, she sat on the couch in Devyn’s office, going through Carta Hotels’ files and the files that Hillshire Hotels sent over before everything went to hell, slowly putting all the pieces together and figuring out just how much damage this project had caused.

While she did that, Devyn worked on running Carta Hotels, dealing with the board, and doing whatever it took to keep them happy and buy them more time. When it was time to call it a day, he grabbed her bag, waited patiently for her to realize that he was standing there, and once he had her attention, he grabbed the files that she was working on, took her hand and dragged her to the elevator before she could get distracted again, which happened more than she cared to admit. Then, he drove her home, where they continued working on the project until it was time to call it a night while she did her best to stop worrying about him.

“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t get real food for breakfast,” Devyn said, finishing off the candy bar before he reached into the bag and grabbed another one.

“I don’t make the rules,” Andi said with a heavy sigh as she took a bite out of her candy bar and went over the list of things that she needed answers to once they reached the hotel.

“There are rules?” Devyn asked, sounding amused.

“I really feel like you should know this,” Andi said with a sad shake of her head as she glanced up to find his lips twitching.

“And I really feel like you should take pity on me and tell me what you know about this hotel,” he said with a teasing smile that had her returning his smile as she glanced back down at her notes and found herself wondering about something.

“Roman Palms Hotel is one of Carta Hotels’ top-earning hotels, which is kind of weird because it would have been the perfect hotel for our mystery VP to hit, but so far, there’s been nothing. What makes you think that we missed something?” Andi asked, unable to feel like they were wasting their time with this. They had less than four months to fix this mess and she wasn’t sure that spending their time on a long shot was a good idea.

“Besides the fact that I have a hunch?” he asked as she felt the car slow down.

“Besides that,” Andi murmured in agreement as she looked back up only to frown when she saw that all the other cars were also slowing down.

“For the past two years, they’ve been hitting two of our hotels at a time, never the same hotel twice, and up until this point, they’ve been able to hide it. Now, either they’ve been really fucking lucky up until this point or…”

“They’ve done this before,” she said, worrying her bottom lip because that’s what had been bothering her.

There had been nothing and then suddenly two years ago, right after the Hillshire project started, the transfers started, moving money earmarked for the stock purchase through the hotels and back to dummy accounts and every single transfer had gone through so smoothly. There hadn’t been any red flags raised. As soon as the money was transferred to the hotel, the account manager for each hotel was contacted by Jamerson, letting them know that it was a mistake because of a glitch in their system and not to worry about it and just sign off on the transfer and it would all be taken care of before the end of the month. Once the authorization was secured, the transfer was scheduled to return and then the money would disappear like clockwork.

“Or they had practice,” Devyn explained, only to sigh heavily when traffic came to a standstill. “Shit.”

“That makes sense,” she murmured, taking a sip of the lovely chocolate milk that he bought for her as she thought that over. “And if they tried this before, then they might have left more than a fake name behind.”

“And then we can finally put an end to this nightmare.”

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