Chapter 15

“What are you smiling at?”

Marc looked up from his phone. Most of the office was dark, though one of the up-and-coming auditors was burning the midnight oil on the other end of the floor. That or he just wanted to be that guy who never left before the boss - not that Marc was the very tip-top boss of the business, but he knew that everyone on the floor saw him that way.

It was part of why he promoted them.

Jillian was also still out at her desk down near the elevators, though it was her job not to leave before Marc did and she was paid well to do it.

That left just Marc and Astrid in the small island of light that was his office.

“Just enjoying une petite victoire,” Marc said.

“Must be fucking nice,” Astrid grunted, turning her attention back to her computers.

Marc would have liked to have called Astrid Kennedy Beauchamp his best investigator, but she was freelance and hated the idea of her being ‘owned’ by anyone. She was a thin woman and would have been conventionally attractive if she had stayed in line with the plans that her parents had likely laid out for her when she was somewhere around the age of two. Top private schools all the way, then an Ivy League post-secondary education where she was supposed to meet the love of her young life, with marriage right after graduation as the new son-in-law joined the family business, or perhaps she would join the other family’s business for a time before starting to pop out wealthy, entitled babies to repeat the cycle.

Astrid looked the part, mostly. She was still cute and dressed herself in the attractive, casual way that only someone who grew up in money could carry off with such a laissez-faire attitude. But her cute, aristocratic look was betrayed by her hair and her demeanour. She wore her hair long and dyed a vibrant green that was almost neon.

“I’ve almost got this bitch, by the way,” Astrid said. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of fuckin’ minutes...”

She also swore like a sailor. Marc had thankfully been able to convince her to tone down the most offensive of her filthy language while she was in the office. The swearing didn’t actually bother him, it just wasn’t appropriate for a workplace setting.

Astrid was a hard-working, highly intelligent woman with an attraction to danger that made Marc feel a bit of a kinship with her, though they chased it in different ways. He went scuba diving and enjoyed exploring wrecks at over 40-meter depths, and had continued to train in karate long after most of the students his age had moved on (though that practice had slowed considerably in the last decade.) She, on the other hand, had found her spark in the grey areas of internet hacker culture. It’s how she’d gotten kicked out of her Ivy League school, though she’d also admitted to him once that it was how she’d gotten in to the school in the first place. It was also how she’d made a stupendous amount of money for herself despite only being twenty-three.

Marc was attracted to her, and she was to him, but they would never work. It wasn’t even the age gap - they were just too similar in the bedroom. They liked the same things. They liked doing the same things. Being in control. Neither of them was interested in being controlled.