One More Taste (One and Only Texas #2)(60)
The breath caught in his throat at the sight of her bare knee poking out from beneath a quilt. Damn it.
Something definitely wasn’t right, and he intended to find out what it was. Yes, Emily deserved privacy. She deserved better than a boss who snooped into her personal life. But she also deserved a good home situation instead of working herself to the bone and bunking in her office night after night. He grabbed his suit from the counter and tiptoed out of the kitchen.
He showered and changed with mechanical indifference, his mind a swirling stew of questions and ideas on how to go about his search for answers.
When he passed the door to the kitchen again, his steps faltered at the sight of her office lights on, the door open. He swallowed hard. Talking to her now would be a mistake. He couldn’t take the chance of letting on to her about his concerns, not when he wasn’t even sure there was something to be concerned about.
He kept walking and didn’t stop until he was in his office with the door closed. Emily’s personnel file was easy to find in the company’s human resources database. He typed her address into an internet search engine.
The address came up as a business, not a residence. Murph’s, a boxing gym in a dead-end town forty-five minutes from the resort. He clicked the street view on the map and stared at the two-story building, a banner splashed over a window advertising that it was open twenty-four hours, seven days a week. The ground floor was dominated by a boxing ring surrounded by free weights and pulley machines, while the floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor revealed empty fitness classrooms with walls of mirrors.
It didn’t make sense.
On a whim, he started a new search, this time for her name. There were several Emily Fords in Texas, and it only took a few clicks for him to decide that wading through the Facebook pages and high school photos of random Emilys was a poor use of his time. Instead, he navigated to a private investigation database he’d once seen Shayla use to research a potential employee for the firm.
The first mention of an Emily Ford with her birthday and social security number happened thirteen years earlier, the year she’d started culinary school when she was eighteen. She’d never owned property, never purchased or leased a car. She had a credit card, with a credit history also beginning at age eighteen, as well as a bank account. Before that, there was no record of her in Texas or otherwise—not even a birth certificate or a high school transcript. It was as though she’d materialized from thin air when she turned eighteen. That’s when he noticed that the social security number on record had also belonged to another Emily Ford, one who’d died more than fifty years ago.
After nearly an hour of digging and crosschecking the information he found, he could no longer deny what his findings were telling him. Whoever the woman who fixed his meals each day was, her real name wasn’t Emily Ford.
He thought back to their first encounter when he’d cut her down with questions about why she was holding herself back, why she hadn’t made a name for herself, if she was such an extraordinary chef. Now it made sense. Whoever she really was, she must have had a good reason to forge all identifying information about herself and disappear into the hills of Texas to toil away anonymously at a resort as a catering chef, careful not to draw too much attention to herself.
It didn’t take him long to connect the rest of the dots. He could think of only one reason that a woman would forge her identity as Emily had. Escaping an abuser. No wonder she’d sounded so intimately familiar with the domestic abuse her friend was suffering.
He stood, his instincts urging him to immediate action. He scribbled Emily’s address of record onto a sticky note, then stuffed it into his pocket. He strode from the room, summoning a Cab’d driver using the app on his phone as he walked. Of all the days to have left his truck at his house.
Ty stood in the doorway to his office across the hall as though he’d been waiting for Knox to emerge. Ever since they’d clashed after the meeting with the structural engineers and their mentor/ingénue illusion had fallen away, Ty had watched Knox like a hawk, all day, every day. Knox wouldn’t be surprised if Ty were rifling through Knox’s desk drawers every chance he got. Knox tried to take Ty’s overbearingness for what it was, the last, gasping power play of a defeated man. Soon enough, Ty would be gone, and Knox would have free rein of the place.
Ty nodded to Haylie’s empty desk. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Haylie. You’ve got to rein her in. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but yesterday was her third late arrival since you hired her, and that’s not even mentioning how many days she’s taken an extended lunch. I love that girl to death, but I told you she’s the type to take advantage of a situation if you let out too much leash.”
Given Ty’s imperious ways and the all-consuming distraction that Emily had become, Knox had forgotten all about his often-absent secretary. Though he chafed at Ty comparing his own daughter to a dog on a leash, that didn’t mean Ty wasn’t right about Knox needing to hold Haylie accountable as he would any other employee. As soon as possible, he’d sit her down and lay out some ground rules. But not today. Not when Emily’s possible danger crowded his every thought.
“Where ya headed?”
Knox closed his office door and kept moving. “I’m going to lunch.”
“It’s nine in the morning.”
That late already?