Read Online LUKE: Complete Series by Cassia Leo - Free Book Online

you’re staying the night,” I insisted, holding the bottle behind my back.
    “Yeah, yeah. Just fill her up and fill me in. I want to know everything.”
    I told her everything from the day my boss at NeoSys, Kip Singer, gave me the assignment to earlier today at the office with Luke when I got a strong suspicion he was on to me.
    “What am I going to do? If I come clean to him, I’ll lose my job at NeoSys and my job at Maxwell Computers.”
    “And you could lose him. I mean, that’s what’s really at stake here, right? Fuck the job. You can get another one.”
    “If I screw this up, I’ll be blacklisted.”
    “Brina, you’re gorgeous and you have a degree from Cornell. You will find another job, even if it’s not in the same industry.”
    “And in the meantime, what about my parents? They need my help now . They can’t afford to support me while I look for a job. My dad’s pension barely covers their mortgage.”
    “Your parents might have to sign up for Meals on Wheels for a while, but they’ll survive, Brina. But if you keep lying to Luke, you can kiss him goodbye. The real question isn’t if you should come clean. The real question is can you survive another broken heart?”
    The silence that followed this question told us both everything we needed to know.

    I strolled into the lobby at Maxwell Computers, not at all in the mood to be ignored by the receptionist or to make the trek up the stairs all the way to the twelfth floor, but there was no way I would ever get into that glass-bottomed elevator again. The entire way up, I kept trying to think of what I was going to say to Luke. I tried to imagine what he would say in return, but these things never went as planned. I’d been through enough breakups to know that.
    Is that what this was? A breakup?
    I finally reached the twelfth floor and I burst through the door into the corridor outside the executive offices. I entered the lobby where my desk was positioned perpendicular to the wall not far from the elevator. My eyes kept darting back and forth from my desk to Luke’s office door about ten yards further along the wall. I set my purse on my desk and took a deep breath, trying to steal as much courage from the woman who once sat here. Janice had to have balls the size of the moon to betray Luke the way she had after working for him for nine years.
    Just as I was about to walk to Luke’s office, the elevator doors slid open and Janice stepped out holding a small cardboard box in her hands. She smiled at me and I tried not to appear totally surprised as I smiled back.
    “Special delivery for Miss Brina Kingston,” Janice cooed, her Barbie doll makeup still doing a poor job of hiding the fact that she was nearly sixty years old.
    “Thank you, Janice,” I said, taking the package from her hands.
    I glanced at the return address and saw the location of Maxwell Computers’ distribution center in Arizona. This was the new phone I had ordered to replace the phone lost by one of Luke’s lead programmers, Josh Ramos—the phone I’d actually stolen after Josh left it in the restroom of Luke’s sailboat.
    “Did someone lose a phone?” she asked, but something in the way she asked told me she already knew the answer to this question.
    “Yes. Josh lost his phone the other night. I ordered him a new one. Thanks for carrying it up.”
    “That’s a pretty important item to lose for someone like Josh.” She stared at me with her hands tucked in the pockets of her tan, knee-length coat and an inquisitive smirk on her plastic face. “Did Luke reset all the passwords that were stored on there? That’s what he always did when I worked here and someone lost one of their comm devices.”
    I was beginning to think Kip sent Janice here to check up on me. “I don’t know what sort of protocol there is when a programmer loses their phone. Luke didn’t share that with me. And speaking of Luke, are you here to see him?”
    “Yes, I’ll just go right