Dr. Tempt Me - A Possessive Doctor Romance
Page 59
“You have a lawyer friend, right?”
“Right, I plan on giving him all this stuff.”
“Make sure you give him everything in that pile.” I pointed to the important documents.
He frowned a little. “I figured.”
“But all of it. And I think you should leave out the other pile.”
“Are you sure? He might be able to sift through it all better than we can. I was hoping we could save him some time, though.”
“Trust me, give him the important pile only. The other stuff’s a distraction.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but I saw him think better of it, and nodded. “Okay then, I trust you.”
“Thanks,” I said, and let out a little laugh. “I don’t even know why, honestly, but I have this feeling.”
“Well then, we have a little work to do.” He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“Work? I thought we were done for the night.”
“Nope. Now we get to digitize all those files. Can’t risk giving him the only copies, something might go wrong.”
I groaned. “If I knew you were going to use me for all the grunt work, I never would’ve agreed to this.”
“What can I say? You’re really useful. Now come on, these pages aren’t going to scan themselves.”
I sighed and stood up, and together we started using an app on our phones to take a picture of each page, turn them into PDFs, and collate them.
It would take all night, I knew, but as we chatted about nothing, about TV shows and movies, making stupid jokes about our lives, talking about the hospital, about the future, I realized I didn’t care what we were doing. It didn’t make any difference to me, whether we were scanning documents or breaking into offices.
I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be near him. That was all that mattered to me.24DeanCurt looked haggard as he leaned back in the Panera booth, sipping a coffee, his laptop open in front of him. His shirt was rumpled and his tie was loosened, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“I got your email,” he said.
“What’d you think?”
He gestured at himself. “This is what I think.”
“Did you stay up all night or something?”
He sighed and rubbed his face. “When I first got it, I was like, oh, this crazy shit again. Then I listened to some of the recordings of that insane woman threatening you, and I started going through the documents, and I had to go into the office. Couldn’t help myself.”
“What’d you find?” I felt a strange pulse of excitement.
He closed the laptop and leaned toward me. “Listen ,man, I don’t want to overstate this, okay? When it comes to the law, there’s a lot of shit that can go wrong. The burden of proof tends to be pretty high in cases like this.” He tapped a finger on his laptop lid. “But this shit right here? This is a goddamn goldmine. I’m serious, I want to kiss you on the mouth right now.”
“Easy there, bud.” I grinned, heart racing. “You’re serious?”
“I’m serious. I want to kiss you. Tongue and all. Hell, you can have my baby, I don’t care. I’ll be your sugar daddy.” He drank his coffee. “Sorry, I’m exhausted and wired at the same time and it’s making me all fucked up. But really, Dean. This is incredible.”
“I’m gonna admit something. I’m not completely sure what’s in those files.”
He barked a laugh. “You’re kidding me?”
“I mean, I know it’s important financial statements, but I’m a doctor. I don’t speak accountant.”
“Yeah, well, normally I wouldn’t either, but turns out that a big chunk of being a lawyer involved reading really boring documents and understanding what they mean.” He leaned back and stretched. “You want the detailed version or the summary?”
“Give me the summary.”
“Basically, you have some documents in there that show the hospital taking donations from several different shell companies. The hospital then took those donations and made purchases with other shell companies that don’t actually sell anything, and we know that because we’ve been investigating them for fucking months.”
I tilted my head back and laughed. It felt like triumph, even though I knew this was early days, but still—it felt like a goddamn victory, after everything we’d been through, finally some good news.
Once I calmed down, I beamed at him. “What now then?”
“First, we make out. If you’re not into that, we can move on to step two, which is we send these documents and recordings to a very friendly fed I know who will then forward it on to the investigators that have been all over the Leone family for the past year and a half. Then we wait.”
I felt my elation slowly fizzle. “You’re serious?”
“Like I said, burden of proof’s real high. We can’t just perp walk that bitch out through the hospital, even though I bet you’d love that.”