“Nathan Sinclair, the rich steel guy?” Carol asked, frowning.
“Yeah, him.”
Carol shrugged. “Not much. He’s rich, hot as hell. But I think he only dates, like, blond super models. People keep wondering when he’ll ever settle down.”
Layla could have guessed he was a playboy who didn’t want to settle down just by looking at him, so she pressed for more information. “Do you know if he ever went to Carnegie Mellon? Maybe he was there for a semester and dropped out?”
Carol’s forehead crinkled, “No, if he’d gone to a Pittsburgh school, we’d all know it. You know how we like to represent. But there’s some other weird factoid about him that I’m trying to remember—” She broke off to yell at a senior citizen leaning against the far wall. “No slacking, Mrs. Peterson! That hip isn’t going to recover by itself.”
After Mrs. Peterson was back in line, doing flutter kicks with the rest of the patients, Layla said, “Good job, Mrs. Peterson. Way to come back!”
That’s when Carol snapped her fingers. “Oh, wait. He didn’t go to Carnegie Mellon. But you know what, his brother Andrew did.”
By the time she got off work, the tired fog that had been dogging Layla all day had disappeared. His brother had gone to Carnegie Mellon, too. Finally, a break in the case, she thought as she made her way into the employee locker room…something she could hang on to and research further. She was so excited about this new information, it took her a moment to notice something off in the locker room.
As she got closer to her own locker, she saw it no longer matched the others. Hers now had words spray-painted down the front of it in red. Words that chilled her to her very bones: “LEAVE, BITCH.”
CHAPTER FIVE
EVERYONE on staff at the center was horrified by what happened, but none of them had seen anything. No patients were on the premise that shouldn’t have been. According to Peggy, no one had come through the door who hadn’t had an appointment. The security guard even checked the surveillance cameras, which they kept at the front and back entrances, but Peggy had been able to verify everyone who came through the door that day as either a patient or a staff member.
“Why would anybody want to do this to a sweet thing like you?” Peggy asked, She rubbed Layla’s back while they watched one of the center’s handymen paint over the red words.
“Maybe it was meant for somebody else and they got the wrong locker,” Carol said. “I’m more inclined to believe that. I know a few of my patients would love to spray paint my locker, but everybody loves you.”
“Not everybody,” she said, thinking of Nathan Sinclair, which was when she remembered she had been in the process of leaving to meet him when she discovered her defaced locker.
She glanced at the wall clock. “Oh no, I was supposed to be there an hour ago.”
“Be where?” Carol and Peggy asked in unison.
Layla didn’t answer. Just grabbed her purse and high-tailed it out of there. Hopefully Sinclair would still be at his office, because now she was even more determined to get some real answers from him.
***
Nathan had been put in a few difficult positions with women over the course of his lifetime. He’d been semi-stalked, cursed, overly-coddled, and pursued by them. But he had never in his life been stood up by one, at least not until Layla Matthews no-showed at their five o’clock meeting. At six, he sent his assistant home. No need for her to witness his fume slow-boil into rage. And rage was definitely what it had become by the time seven rolled around.
Who did she think she was to stand him, Nathan Sinclair, up? He didn’t make a habit of bragging, but he was considered by certain publications one of the most eligible bachelors in the country. Most women would kill for the opportunity to be in the same room with him, but Layla couldn’t even be bothered to call to let him know she wouldn’t be showing up?
“Nathan?”
He looked up to see her standing at his office door. She was dressed in purple scrubs again, but this time they were covered by a white lab coat. He blinked, wondering if she was real or a hallucination called forth from his rage.
“Hi,” she said in that good girl way of hers. She edged further into his office. “I tried to call, but the front desk wouldn’t put me through, because your assistant wasn’t picking up. Luckily, your assistant left my name on the guest list before she left, or they wouldn’t have even let me up here. I’m so sorry, I’m late. Something happened at the center. And then I had to wait for the bus. And then—”
“I don’t care,” he said.
Now it was her turn to blink. “What?”
“I don’t care,” he said. “The deal is off.”
“But, I have a third of the money right here.” She pulled a cashier’s check out of her purse and thrust it at him. “Take it.”
He stood up. “No.”
“Please take it,” she said, her eyes hinging on desperate. “You have no idea how hard I worked to scrimp together this payment. I need you to take it.”
“If you really needed me to take it, you should have gotten here on time. I would have taken it at five. I might have even taken it at six. But now it’s too late. Like I said, the deal’s off.”
***
“The deal’s off.”
More than anything Layla wanted to turn on her heel and walk out of there. Pretend she’d never met Nathan Sinclair and just go. But the huge debt nagged at her. “I pay back my debts. My father used me to take this money from you, and I can’t just let that lie. That’s not who I am.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“What?”
“How do you know?” he repeated, surveying her under his icy grey gaze from behind his desk. “For all you know, you were the kind of person who would be okay with taking something from me and never paying me back for it.”
Layla might have been tired and seriously shaken from the locker incident, but she’d have to be in a coma not to read between those lines. “Are you insinuating I took something from you? If so, tell me, and I’ll do my best to give it back.”
He stared at her for a few angry beats. Then he rolled down the sleeves of his light blue shirt and fastened them before jamming his arm through his suit jacket’s sleeves.
“What are you doing?” Layla asked.
“Leaving,” he answered. He grabbed the leather messenger bag he carried in lieu of an old-fashioned briefcase and came around the desk. “Like I said. You’re late. The deal is off.”