Sinful Love (Sinful Nights #4)(78)

She nodded, recalling this part of the tale.

She picked up her fork and dug into her eggs, taking a bite.

“And as soon as T.J. was there in the cigar lounge at White Box—”

She choked. Grabbing a napkin, she brought it to her mouth, coughing up the bit of egg she’d inhaled.

“Are you okay?” he asked, knitting his brow and thrusting a glass of water in her direction. She waved him off. Her blood had gone cold, and all her senses warned of danger. This was the same feeling she’d had as a photojournalist when situations in war zones became too dicey.

“What did you just say?” she whispered. The hair on her arms stood on end.

“About the cigar lounge?”

She nodded, fear racing over her skin. “The cigar lounge. Where was it?”

“White Box,” he said slowly, his brow furrowed. “Why are you asking?”

Her palms turned clammy. “That name,” she whispered, her voice sounding haunted even to her own ears. “Your father said something the last day I saw him, something about White Box.”

Michael blinked, confusion in his blue eyes. “What did he say?”

Like a diver rising up in the sea, the memory broke through to the surface. “We were talking about work. His company. The missing rides. When you’d gone to the car to get an umbrella, I asked him how everything was going, and if he’d learned anything.”

“And what did he say?” Michael asked, gripping the table, his jaw tight, his eyes wide with concern.

Something so simple. So offhand. So nothing. It had never seemed like more than a needle in the haystack. Until now.

Until it wasn’t.

She hurtled back in time to that last conversation.

“But it didn’t help you get the job?” she asked Michael’s father as they chatted at the diner, having finished their eggs.

Thomas Paige shook his head. “Nope. But there will be others, I’m sure. I’m thinking of maybe switching to another limo company. Once I tried to move up, it became like a white box of information.”

She arched an eyebrow. She’d never heard those words used that way. Perhaps it was an American saying she wasn’t familiar with. “What does that mean?”

“Stuff was just erased. Rides disappeared. That’s what I heard some of the guys there calling it. They called it a white box, and then one of them said it was the white box of information. I guess the guy who ran the place used that term. I was going to ask Sanders about it, since he drove him around, but I’ve decided it doesn’t matter in the end. I’m just going to let it go.”

“What a funny little saying,” she said with a small laugh.

Thomas chuckled too. “Yeah, don’t worry about that one. It’s not a common phrase you need to know.”

The check arrived, and so did Michael. “Got the umbrella,” he declared, joining them as the conversation shifted back to the future, to their plans.

*

The ground began to sway. The whole diner seemed unsteady. “Did he say who ran the company? I always thought it was a guy named Paul, but someone else owned it. West was his name,” Michael said in a barren voice, while his world seemed to spin off its axis.

Annalise shook her head.

He wanted to believe it was a coincidence. He wanted to reassure her that those were just two words. White box. But when his phone buzzed again in his pocket, and the name flashing across the screen registered, all he could think was that it wasn’t over.

He answered the call from Morris in a split second. “What’s going on?”

“Hey, Michael. Need to give you a heads up. I’ve been hacked, and some of the online research I did into Luke Carlton was accessed. Someone put two and two together and figured out I was working for you. I got an anonymous call last night to keep my nose out of the case. Which is weird, since the case is over.”

His blood chilled to sub-zero temperatures, and instinct kicked in. Get the hell out of here.

“Any idea who it was?” he asked as he fished in his wallet, tossed a twenty on the table, and reached for Annalise’s hand. He pulled her up and walked away as he talked to Morris, scanning the diner from the booths to the foyer to the exit as they left.

“No clue,” Morris said, as Michael raced with Annalise to his car. “But I think I was followed as I looked into the piano shop. I think that tipped someone off. I’m sorry.”

“I gotta go,” Michael said, ending the call as he put Annalise safely in his car. He ran to the driver’s side, slid inside, locked the doors, and reversed out of his parking spot. In his rearview mirror, he spotted a bearded man in a silver sedan pulling out, too.

“Michael, what’s going on?” Annalise asked, her voice quaking as he drove.

“Nothing good.”

He placed his phone in the holder, clicked on missed calls, and his heart sank when he saw John Winston had rung him twice.

As he turned onto the highway, he returned the call, but Winston didn’t answer.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

He gripped the steering wheel, trying to drive and connect the dots, but he couldn’t f*cking figure out how they were all tied together. The thing that kept nagging at him was why Sanders had been so goddamn evasive, and what, if anything, that man had to do with White Box.