Lucky Charm by Valerie Douglas Read Free Book Online Page B

moved beneath his. It was so tempting. He could drown in that kiss.
    Instead, deliberately, he stepped away, looking back at her just once before he closed the door behind him.
    She sat cross-legged on the bed, naked, utterly unselfconscious. Her dark hair framed that elfin face, tumbled over her pale shoulders and full breasts.
    Ariel,
    Blue eyes and that soft rosy mouth. He wouldn’t forget her soon, or easily. He owed her his life and one intense and passionate morning.
    Deliberately he shut the door, closing off that vision.
    Now he had to concentrate on Bill, on why he’d died. On who had killed him and why?
    What had happened the previous night had been only more proof Marathon had something they wanted to hide and badly. As had everything else since he’d gotten the phone call from Bill that night.
    Something was going on at Marathon Corp.
    Bill had either found it or stumbled over it somehow. All Matt knew for certain was that Marathon was involved.
    It wasn’t just Bill’s phone call.
    While Matt and Bill’s wife had been arranging for his cremation the house had been robbed. Although the thieves had stolen the television, they’d also ransacked Bill’s office. At the same time Marathon had cleared Bill’s office. The speed with which they’d done it had been revealing.
    They hadn’t started tailing him, though, until after his break-in of their office. Another tell-tale but not something Matt could take to the police.
    The unknown ‘they’ had missed something, though. They hadn’t cleared his trash can.
    They’d missed Bill’s doodles.
    Doodling had been Bill’s way of clarifying his thoughts, clearing his mind.
    On his blotter at home, on scraps of paper and the few items Matt had found in Bill’s trash were circles and arrows. Those doodles linked Marathon and another financial company called Genesis. How they were linked Matt didn’t yet know. It was that knowledge, or something about it, that had caused Bill’s death.
    Matt just couldn’t prove it, couldn’t get into Marathon’s records to find the evidence he knew had to be there.
    That last view he had of Ariel O’Donnell, though, hovered in the back of his mind.
    Clothed only in her black hair she was lovely. A nymph or an elf.

Chapter Four
     
    Fort Lauderdale in the summer was beautiful. The sky was brilliantly blue. Palm trees and palmetto bushes swayed in the ocean breeze. It was also hot and very humid, sticky and close, despite that breeze.
    Ariel wished she could enjoy it more. She didn’t know how it happened but she always traveled to southern states in the summer and northern states in the winter. It would have worked so much better the other way around. It was one of the ironies of life. It was a good thing, too, that the taxi had good air conditioning or she’d have been wilted before she arrived. In fact, it was better than her rental car, lost somewhere in the parking garage.
    The cab dropped her off in front of the glittering steel and glass tower that housed Marathon Corp. She’d already noticed that if you stood by one of those dark tinted windows you could feel the heat radiate from it. Not that she would see any windows or natural light all day. No, she was in sunny Fort Lauderdale with no chance to enjoy it. Instead, she would be locked in a training room all day and resolving software issues for half the night.
    Only day two , she thought with a sigh, as she rode the elevator up, with three more to go in this region before she moved west. Next week, there would be another city. Marathon had offices all over the country and she was going to see almost all of them. Sometimes more than one a week .
    The doors opened on the bottom of the two floors that Marathon occupied in this building. She knew which way to turn here.
    “So,” Steve Parsons asked as she walked into the office, falling in beside her, “how did it go last night?”
    He was the computer technician for Marathon. A whiz at setting up and