Dark Nights by Kitti Bernetti Page B

waiting for her. ‘Comin’ back to the office to work late again? You put in far too much time for this company, you know. You should be out enjoying yourself instead of hunchin’ yourself over that desk until the early hours.’
    ‘You still haven’t told anyone I come back at night have you, Ronald? If they thought I couldn’t complete my work in an ordinary day, they’d think I was incompetent. It’s our little secret, isn’t it?’ 
    ‘No way, Miss M, I haven’t told a soul.’ 
    She’d loved Ronald’s cheery smile. If only she could say goodbye properly but then that would give the game away. Thieves, like beggars, couldn’t be choosers.
    The lift doors swished open. The offices were best when they were like this: empty; still; safe. Her heels were silent on the plush carpet. She was perfectly in control. Until she passed the spot where Seb Dark had stood today and regarded her with that inscrutable stare. She shuddered. You never did know what that man was thinking. If he wasn’t such a threat, she might have found that sharp taunting jaw intriguing, the wavy sun-kissed hair attractive, the broad shoulders worth fantasising over. She slapped the idea down; she had work to do, work that demanded all her powers of concentration.
    Breeze sat down at her desk and flicked the computer into life. It had taken her ages to hack into the protected full accounting system. After that it had been a painstaking matter to find all the dormant accounts and start programming them to divert their funds to the suspense account she had set up. Bit by bit over the months her plan had been executed. Finance companies like this which dealt daily in millions always had hidden cash that had slipped through the net. A clever accountant like her had only to look for those little pockets of wealth and grab them. The secret was not to be too greedy. To take what had been forgotten and make it yours. Tonight she would siphon off the money she had ring-fenced, direct it to her secret offshore account and close down all evidence of her wrongdoing. She was pleased with her plan; it was a thing of genius. Virtually undetectable.
    It took her two hours to garner every last penny, to check and double check that all her tracks had been covered. And finally to insert a worm into the accounting system that would eat all the evidence of her crime from the firm’s hard disk, hiding her treachery as surely as if she had turned back time and it had never happened. Her shoulders were sore, her back stiff from tensing up. Then, she heard the opening of a door down the passage. Who the hell was that? She hadn’t heard footsteps, no one else had ever been here at this time, it was the middle of the night. Whoever had opened that door must have been there all along. Bile rose in her throat fit to make her vomit. In an instant she had shut down the computer, grabbed her bag and shot up from her desk when suddenly the handle on her office door clicked and turned. Like a gunshot it tore through the night’s silence. 
    Sebastian Dark filled the doorway, shutting out the light with six foot four of six-packed male. His voice as menacing as a fisted hand struck her like a blow to the chest. ‘It seems you suffer from a great deal of insomnia, Ms Monaghan.’
    ‘I ...’ thoughts flailed about in her head as she struggled for composure. ‘I had to finish the quarterly report. It’s all done now, I was just going.’ She shot him one of her devastating smiles and watched it land on stony ground.
    ‘I don’t think so, Ms Monaghan.’ He raised one eyebrow and squared up to her. She tried to breathe but it felt as though all oxygen had been sucked from the room. There was no escape. She glared at him.
    ‘Let me out. I want to go.’
    ‘You’re going nowhere. Unless you want to go to jail, that is.’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ She spat the words out, like a cornered rattlesnake ready to strike. Attack she’d always found to be the best