He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 50

Chapter 50

Maya’s POV

He arrived again but this time with coffee.

I heard him before I saw him, the particular quality of footsteps in the corridor that Lila’s expression confirmed before she said a word.

She appeared in my doorway with the look she wore when she was deciding whether to intervene.

“Mr. Hargrove is….”

“I can see,” I said.

Mason appeared behind her shoulder, holding two cups from the café on the ground floor, the good one, not the lobby machine, and wearing the expression of a man who had decided today was the day we became colleagues.

“Lila,” I said. “Thank you”

Lila retreated.

Mason came in…

He set the cup on my desk with the ease of someone who had done it a hundred times, which he had, in a different building, in a different version of this dynamic.

He sat down, the chair across from me, the one that had stopped intimidating me somewhere around week three and smiled.

“I thought we could start fresh,” he said.

I looked at the coffee cup…

Then I looked at the bracelet box he had given me yesterday, which I had placed on the corner of my desk this morning for reasons I was still formulating.

I opened it.

Looked at the single strand of white gold and the small diamond clasp,

Looked at it the way you look at something you are seeing clearly and finding unremarkable.

Closed the box.

“Maya…”

“I’m going to finish this report,” I said. “If you have something specific to discuss regarding your shareholder position, I have fifteen minutes at two-thirty. Have Lila put it in the calendar”

He tried again. He was good at trying again… patient, warm, the particular persistence of someone who had decided that the right frequency of gentle pressure would eventually find a crack.

“Lunch,” he said. “Somewhere neutral. Off the building. No lawyers, no filings. Just two people who built something together…”

“No.”

“Maya. I’m not asking for….”

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“I need everything you have on Mason’s current position,” I said, when he picked up. “Not the shareholder register… his personal finances. The holdings outside the company. Anything that moved in the past six months”

“That’s a broader search,” Rivaldi said carefully.

“I know. I have a reason”

A pause. “How long do you need it by?”

“Before Thursday”

“I’ll have something preliminary by Wednesday afternoon.” He paused again. “Maya. Can I ask what you’re looking for?”

I thought about the smile Mason had worn in my office this morning.

The coffee.

The bracelet.

The carefully engineered public gesture on the floor yesterday

The performance of a man who believed he was winning.

“I’m looking for what he’s protecting,” I said. “Whatever it is that made the gracious loser worth performing…”

“Understood.”

I hung up

Picked up my bag

Turned off the desk lamp

Walked through the quiet office, past Lila’s empty desk, to the elevator.

In the lobby the evening security guard nodded as I passed. The city was doing its grey and indifferent thing through the glass doors.

I pushed through them.

Tomorrow I was having lunch with my ex-husband….

Not because I had forgiven him. Not because the persistence had found its crack.

Not because the flowers or the bracelet or the coffee had communicated anything except the specific, operational intelligence of a man who was still playing a game he thought he understood.

I was having lunch because the best way to find out what someone is planning is to sit across from them and let them believe you haven’t.

I walked to the car…

The bodyguard fell into step at a discreet distance behind me…

I thought about Alex…

About the light under his door last night that had stayed on later than it should have. About the coffee cup placed beside the machine before I was awake.

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About the flutter, low and interior, that arrived every time I stood still long enough for it to find me.

I thought about all of it and then I put it in the part of my mind that couldn’t be addressed tonight and focused on the pavement under my heels and the cold evening air and the specific, clarifying feeling of a woman who was several moves ahead of every man who had ever underestimated her

I got in the car.

“Home,” I said.

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