Page 74 of Fierce- Royce

They watched the woman leave and he and Chloe took a seat. It wasn’t even five minutes later that his high school buddy came out, jeans and a flannel shirt on over a T-shirt. The two of them were dressed pretty much the same.

“Royce,” Zander said. “Good to see you again.” Zander moved over to his girlfriend. At least in his mind that is what Chloe was, but it’s not like he could say it to anyone else yet. “Chloe, nice to meet you. Royce told me a bit of what you’re looking for. Come into my office and I can get some more information.”

They stood up and moved into Zander’s office and took a seat. “I appreciate the short notice meeting.” She handed over the letter with the information on it. “This is a copy of what I received. I know Emily is a nurse and not much more. She gave me up for adoption when I was a few days old. I haven’t thought of her for years and didn’t care all that much. I just want to know something about her before I decide if I want to reach out.”

“Should be easy enough,” Zander said. “A few hours of work at most. You just want to know the basics, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s start with that. There is part of me that wants to know what I might be getting into if I decide to reach out more.”

“My secretary got your information from you the other day,” Zander said. “Give me a week or so and I’ll get you something.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “I’m not in a huge hurry. It’s waited this long and can continue to for now.”

Royce looked at Chloe. She seemed calm and fine with this, but he wondered how much of it was a front.

“Chloe, do you mind waiting for me in the truck? I just want to talk to Zander for a minute,” he said.

“Sure,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him.

“Just a friend, huh?” Zander asked him.

“Something like that,” he said.

“How did you two meet?” Zander asked. “I don’t know that I’ve ever known you to have women friends. And the way she just looked at you was that of an annoyed girlfriend.”

He laughed. “We met through work. She’s an engineer at Fierce. We’ve been doing a lot of work together for years but more so in the past year.”

“Ahh,” Zander said. “Close quarters.”

“If it’s something bad you find out, can you let me know first?” he asked. “I just want to be with her when she gets the information.”

“She’s the client, Royce,” Zander said. “You know that.”

“I want you to bill me, but I know if I say that and she finds out I’m going to have a bigger headache than the fact I just asked her to give us a few minutes.”

Zander laughed. “How long have you been pretending you don’t have a thing for her?”

Since Chloe was in the car there was no reason to really hide this. “We are seeing each other but keeping it quiet. It’s a long complicated story. I know I can trust you.”

“Always,” Zander said. “And so she doesn’t rip you apart or want to know what we were talking about, how is your father doing? You can say we talked about family.”

He grinned. “He’s good and annoying at the same time. Part of the reason we are keeping this all quiet. Work is busy. Or keeping us all busy.”

“I heard about that big building of yours.” Zander looked around his old office. “Don’t suppose there are any small spaces for rent? I’ve got to imagine it’s filling up with big companies.”

“I can find out for you,” he said. “Most of that is done by Olson’s. That’s the law firm that we are partnered with.”

“Thanks,” Zander said. “This place is falling down around me. Betsy can’t stand it and I don’t want to lose her because she doesn’t want to come into this place daily.”

He knew Betsy was the secretary that just left. She seemed older than them but not old enough to be their parent. Probably ten years or so, but he knew how hard it was to find good staff too. Which seemed to be the crux of his problems. Or the fact they just had too much work going on at once.

“This was a good topic to have without Chloe around too. Maybe she’ll cut me some slack,” he said, laughing.

“I don’t think that will happen, but that’s on you. It’s easy to not be dragged down and do my own thing.”

“I used to think the same way,” he said. “Chloe too. It gets old after a while.”

Zander laughed and shook his hand. “If you say so.”