Never Just Friends (Spotlight New Adult Book 2) by Mina V. Esguerra Read Free Book Online Page B

about electric transport, water pollution, and smog, but his attention kept gravitating toward that reforestation project. It meant to revive a portion of Indonesian forest almost completely lost to logging. Surely they hadn’t completely brought it back. Why were they getting cut off from the money?   
    Being on the research side in college, and let’s face it that was college (kid stuff), gave him the impression that this was done for the sake of doing the right thing . And that it had been established previously that one can pour money in doing right things, and it would be worth it. Someone had figured that out already, right? Smarter people than him.
    And then, the list of problems. A suspect consultant list from the winning implementing agency, collusion to embezzle from the grant, successfully draining it, performing the barest minimum on the ground and spending too much on conference trips to Spain, Brazil, Canada. It looked like a mess. He wouldn’t go and give money to these people again.
    Oh wait. He was on the other side, right? Caine Foundation did everything above board, and monitored it as much as they could from New York, but one can only do so much from a distance.

Chapter 13
     
     
    He saw her again as their work day came to an end. She’d been at her desk preparing presentations all day, but she had sandwiches sent up for lunch and placed his in front of him. He couldn’t help it; he reached for her waist and asked if there was a broom closet in their office, anything with solid walls and an actual door.
    “ No ,” she said, slapping his hand away. “You signed up to work. You’ll work. And you won’t interrupt mine, I have lots of shit to do.”
    So he read, and took notes. Jake still knew how to do this.
    And when she went back into the meeting room, a few minutes before six o’clock, he had a work question waiting for her. “Why wasn’t there more monitoring in Borneo?”
    Lindsay was taken aback, but was pleased by it. “What? By us? We visited once a year. Lucien even did the mission visit one time. We appointed a third party from Jakarta to go, in other times of the year.”
    “Obviously a lot of things slipped through the cracks.”
    “Obviously that was one screw-up after another.” Lindsay took a seat across from him, crossed her legs, and swung toward him so he could see it. “We did everything right with that one, we thought. I wasn’t here when it started, but I was at all the evaluations. They chose a stellar firm to do it on the ground. Best recommendations. They had a list of people who might have been a bit shady, but that couldn’t be avoided, and with how small the grant was, relatively, we understood that these were the people they could afford. They always came up with awesome presentations, when we visited. When the third party evaluators visited. It was great, until the finances were tallied.”
    “How much did they manage to steal?”
    She shook her head. “See, that’s a loaded question. Also, technically not true. When you pay for a service and you don’t like how they did it, it doesn’t mean they didn’t do the work. You just wish they did it better. We don’t deal in products here, we’re not purchasing things. We’re paying people to get something done.”
    Like when he started working on Rage Eternal. His manager Cora had not been happy with the first offer he got, and he was glad she had been there to say that because it seemed to him like too much money to say lines for a few hours, and not even the whole year. He was sure, in the beginning, half the people there thought he was overpaid and underperforming. By now he knew better, knew that the pay had to be worth the things he gave up because of the demands of the job on his regular life. (The fact that it had obliterated it.) But when he started, he really thought he would be written off before his third month there. He would always do well at the physical stuff though—running, firing the