All Chapters of Too Late, Mr. Whitlock: The Heiress He Divorced: Chapter 21 - Chapter 25

The pen was heavier than it looked. Black lacquer, Kerr Capital's logo stamped in gold near the clip. Of course it was.I uncapped it.Across the table, Sebastian relaxed. It was a very small thing, a loosening in his shoulders, the look of a man who'd just heard the dice land the way he'd called them. Celeste leaned forward in her chair. Somewhere to my left, Pell let out a breath through his nose.Grant didn't move at all.I pulled the motion toward me. Three pages. A signature line at the bottom of the last one, with Ashcombe Maritime, by its authorized officer typed underneath in neat capitals.I wrote across it, in letters big enough to read from the far end of the table.ABSTAIN.Then I capped the pen, set it on top of the papers, and slid the whole stack back down the polished wood. It stopped in front of Sebastian, exactly where his pen had stopped in front of me.For a second, nobody understood what t

By eleven o'clock, the fifty-second floor was empty except for Grant, Marcus, and a cleaning crew who had given up trying to vacuum around them.They'd taken over the small conference room next to his office. Pell's bound report sat open in the middle of the table, bristling with yellow tabs. Around it, in rough concentric circles, lay everything Marcus had been able to pull from the finance servers without asking anyone in finance: source spreadsheets, draft versions, email chains, the shipping volumes from Savannah and Norfolk going back three years."Again," Grant said. "From the beginning."Marcus rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. He'd taken off his tie at nine and his shoes at ten. "Sir, we've done the beginning four times.""Then the fifth time will be faster."Marcus didn't argue. That was one of the reasons Grant had kept him for six years. He pulled the laptop closer and started reading numbers aloud, and Grant followed along in the repo

"What envelope?" Grant said.Okafor looked at me. I looked at Grant. For a second, nobody in the room said anything, and I could hear the elevator cables humming through the wall."Ashcombe business," I said."It came in the same handwriting as something else. Your lawyer just said so.""And you just agreed to no personal questions." I held his eyes. "Thirty seconds into the truce, Grant. That has to be a record, even for you."His jaw tightened. I watched him want to push, and I watched him decide not to, and I didn't know which of those two things surprised me more."If it's dangerous," he said quietly, "you'll tell me.""If it's dangerous, I'll tell Okafor."He picked up his folder. He left the croissants. At the door he stopped, the way he'd stopped at my office door four days ago, and spoke without turning around."Eat something," he said. "Please."Then he was gone, and Okafor closed the door behind him and