God, it was so good. She felt herself cresting and she tugged at her nipples, stiff, probably hard enough to poke holes through a wall, if she were to position them in front of one like drills. She arched her hips and a voice, as loving as it was desirous, said, "Not yet, I haven't had enough of you." Then a hand pressed her hips down, and she was filled and tongued again. It had never been like this; she had never wanted or been wanted like this. She clenched her toes and grabbed for something to cling to, her nipples forgotten. It came flooding out of her, words, tears, and whatever it was her pelvic girdle girdled. Felt like it, anyway. If only she had the strength to lift herself up . . . she grinned as she heard moaning, more alto than her own, subside with hers. "I can never hold out when you come like that," the voice complained. Then a body lowered itself beside her, and a hand passed gently, lightly over her breasts. She rolled onto her side and gazed into one of the two faces she loved most in the world. "Because I'm too much for a mere mortal like you to withstand, Myka Bering."

Helena jerked awake, sweaty and tight with need. Not the face she had been expecting, but the arousal felt too good to give up. It had been a very long time since she wanted to do more in a bed than sleep. All she had to do was touch her clit and she would be gone. She didn't need to worry about seeing Myka's face again. Her hand crept between her thighs. They were wet, and her vulva was so wet her fingers were finding it difficult to take purchase of her flesh. She couldn't remember the last time she had been this wet. She traced her engorged clit, but instead of going diligently to work to bring herself off as soon as possible, her fingers danced over it and skimmed around the opening of her vagina. And Myka's face came back into view, hungry, intent. "I told you I hadn't had enough." Helena couldn't stop herself from imagining Myka's body moving over hers, Myka's lips kissing a path down her chest, sealing themselves over her breasts, Myka's tongue teasing her nipples. Her fingers began to pick up the pace as the scene altered, and she was balancing herself over Myka, Myka's bush dark at the ends with her own wetness, and Myka's hazel eyes bright with desire. Helena let a soft groan escape her. The Helena in her imagination was trembling, wanting to touch the woman under her so badly but drawing the moment out, waiting for Myka to plead with her. And there it was, "Helena, please, I need it so much, please." Something between a moan, a prayer, and a whisper. Helena saw her head bending down, felt her tongue parting Myka's folds, and then her own hand lost direction, volition, as her hips jerked violently, and she crammed her pillow over her face, groaning loudly into it. She rolled onto her stomach, enjoying the slow stilling of her orgasm's aftershocks.

She opened an eye, slewing it to the side until the alarm clock came into view. Fifteen minutes before her alarm rang. She would never get back to sleep after this. At least it hadn't been one of her recurring bad dreams that had woken her. Turning on a lamp, she got up from the bed, seeing a large wet spot on her sheets. Impressive. The only sour note was that Myka apparently had been the cause. Dream Myka, she counseled herself as she padded toward the small bathroom off her bedroom, which didn't qualify to be called an en suite. Fantasy Myka. Not real Myka. In the shower, her skin was tender, sensing the impact of each drop, or so it felt like, and Helena's nipples hardened. Dream Myka, she reminded herself, fantasy Myka. There was no possible way she could find an FBI agent an object of desire. The woman had had Myka's face, her voice, the athletic body, the brown, curly hair that always seemed just barely controlled . . . but, really, Helena told herself, she could have been anybody or nobody.

It was the kiss's fault. It should have been the equivalent of a stage kiss, and maybe, had she had more time to prepare Myka for it, it would have been. Honestly, she shouldn't have kissed her. It was a stunt that had unnecessarily hurt Nate and might have twigged Myka's FBI radar that, possibly, Helena Wells wasn't all she appeared to be. Helena liked to think that she was quick on her feet, but when it came to thinking her way out of a problem involving people, she was anything but smooth or subtle or quick. She couldn't undo it now, the kiss, and though the logical, former-FBI-suspect side of her was insistent that she would undo it, if she had the chance, the side of her that was still reveling in one of her more memorable orgasms, even if she had been by herself, was far more skeptical. For a moment, the kiss had been real. Myka had been startled, but then she had responded, stepping into the kiss, her arm stealing around Helena's waist, pressing her closer. Helena had even begun to intensify the kiss until she realized what she was doing, kissing a woman who was investigating her. If she needed to cool herself down, all she needed to do was recall Nate's dropped-mouth expression of dismay. She had wanted to discourage him, not kick him in the balls.

She was still alternately chastising herself about the kiss and wincing at Nate's subsequent avoidance of her when Christina began calling to her crossly from her bedroom. She had started full-day kindergarten, and the most anxiety-provoking part of the day for her was dressing for school. She wanted to fit in with the other kindergartners . . . but not too much. Fifteen minutes passed before Christina settled on a green jumper and a pink turtleneck. "I look like a tulip, Mommy." Or a piece of Bubble Yum, Helena didn't say. Christina raced out of her room and down the stairs, her mother's stern "Didn't you forget something?" causing her to thunder back up them. She picked up the clothes she had flung on the floor with disdain and folded them on her bed. Helena put them in a small of chest of drawers covered in Disney-themed stickers.

"Come on," she said, taking her daughter by the hand, "let's go make your lunch and have some breakfast."

The school was within walking distance and Christina was young enough to still want to be seen with her mother, so, at least for now, Helena could walk with her. December might be a different matter, but the walk remained a pleasant one, if increasingly crisp in the morning. When school let out at 2:30, Emmie's mother, who conveniently lived two townhomes down, brought Christina home with her daughter. Helena would have enjoyed that walk, too, but she was rarely able to leave Amundson Securities in time. For what Helena thought was a reasonable sum, Christina got a playmate, a snack, and adult supervision for the rest of the afternoon.

This morning was one of those late September days that looked back to summer, and as the warmth of the sun complemented the chill, no, the tang of the breeze, as if the morning were a flute of champagne that she might let tickle her nose, Helena could almost, almost believe that she had nothing to worry about. Then Agent Myka Bering, the thought of her, intruded upon this champagne brunch of a morning, and Helena felt that a bank of clouds had rolled across the sun, no matter that it shone no less brightly. Not the Myka Bering of her dream but one no less unsettling. Myka and her unreformed frat brother of a partner were expecting her to produce evidence of fraudulent activities at Amundson Securities. Whether it cleared her or implicated her was of little consequence to them. She, on the other hand, had been going into work every day since the agents' Saturday afternoon visit expecting to be blamed for the misleading investment information and then almost immediately fired. In the days that had passed since her late lunch with Myka, the atmosphere in the office had grown increasingly tense. The number of closed-door meetings had skyrocketed, and Helena, unconvincingly chiding herself for her paranoia, thought the portfolio managers and financial planners stared at her when she encountered them in the break room and hallways.

Maybe they were staring at her because she was in the break room and hallways more often. In the slightly more than six months she had been at the firm, she had ventured from her work space only to attend meetings, use the restroom, and spend four minutes at one of the break room's two microwaves to heat up her lunch. Standing around the coffee station exchanging stories about their kids or dawdling in the restroom to complain about their workload wasn't time she wanted to spend getting to know her co-workers. The downside to keeping to herself was that when she needed to know the latest office gossip, she had no guaranteed path to it. The only way to find out how badly the loss on the alternative energy companies was affecting the firm and its clients, other than to snoop online (and that was the last thing she needed to be caught doing now), was to try to engage her co-workers. While she had learned to charm the high fliers that she and Charles identified as prospective clients, it hadn't come easily. The mix of small talk, flattery, and attentiveness that went into those performances had exhausted her. While she could scale back on at least two out of the three when trying to pump, say, a portfolio manager's administrative assistant for information, it remained a performance. So far her efforts had resulted in what could be best described as limited success. Assistants, junior advisors, and the occasional friendly portfolio manager didn't do a double-take when they saw her in the break room, although their eyebrows tended to crawl up their foreheads, and their "Good morning's" and "How are you?'s" were tentative – those who recognized her, anyway. There were a fair number of Amundson Securities staff wandering in for the free coffee who clearly didn't know who she was, although she had probably talked to most of them on the phone or answered their emails about report failures and other tech-related problems.

Sometimes she lucked out and she encountered a chatterer. A junior advisor had told her that Scott Amundson was too busy lately to talk sports. "He's a sports junkie, I mean, that never happens. He always stops by our cubes to talk about last night's game, you know? He's gotta have a lot going on right now." An executive assistant who was assigned to the portfolio manager for whom Helena had produced the reports had shaken her head over a teabag she was dunking in a mug. "He's a walking heart attack. I fear for him." Others weren't as forthcoming. With a sympathy that she thought was warm but not intrusive, she had tried to commiserate with a portfolio manager, who had only looked at her blankly before pulling out his phone to scroll through his messages while his lunch heated in the microwave.

Had things not become so awkward with Nate, she would have turned to him as he often handled the tech issues of the more senior staff at the firm, but, though she couldn't claim that he declined meeting invitations and deleted rather than forgot to respond to her voice mails, he was often conveniently busy. There were meetings they both attended, but she rarely had the opportunity to pull him aside. It wasn't only what he could tell her about the mood of senior staff or whether she came up as a topic of discussion with them; it was what he could tell her about the access to her account, who had it, what had been done to it lately. Helena knew that while the IT department at Amundson Securities was relatively independent of the other Amundson firms, it was ultimately overseen by the CIO and his staff at headquarters. Somebody had to know who had logged on as her and altered the reports. She just had to find the right person to ask.

She barely had time to settle in at her desk and take a tentative sip of her coffee (she preferred tea, especially at home, but she needed the coffee's blunt force) when her office phone rang. It was Scott Amundson's executive assistant. "Do you have a few minutes to come to Scott's office, Helena?"

There was only one answer. "Of course, I'll be right there."

Scott's office was on the floor above, as were those of the other senior officers of the firm. While she had occasion to talk to the vice presidents about the information they wanted to see in their reports and those she prepared for the directors, she had been in Scott's office only once before, shortly after she had started. It took up the end of the floor that overlooked the river, and the back wall of his office was made almost entirely of glass. It was an imposing room, but he wasn't. He had had lunch served for them at a small table set in front of the windows and had done his best to give her the impression that her hiring hadn't been solely a whim of his father. Scott had the wiry, bright-eyed look of a terrier, and Helena didn't have to strain to imagine him wriggling with excitement about a new investment opportunity.

He definitely wasn't wriggling with excitement this morning. Helena hadn't even reached his assistant's desk when Scott was waving her into his office. His smile was warm, but she didn't sense energy from him as much as tension, and his polite questions about whether her daughter was enjoying school and whether they were braced for the state's harsh winters seemed especially muted in the large office. She was surprised to see Nolan sitting on the artfully retro sofa, complete with accent buttons that punctuated its back cushion, which faced two equally retro chairs, the metal spindles serving as their legs seeming unequal to the task of supporting the breadth of upholstery. The space between them was bisected by a long, low coffee table. A coffee service was on the table, and Nolan was holding a cup that looked particularly dainty in his gnarled hand. He gestured toward a second carafe on the serving tray. "Hot water, if you prefer tea."

She couldn't help but send a questioning look toward Scott. He was her boss, not Nolan. "Please, take a seat." He waited until she chose one of the chairs and then sat in the remaining one, nervously tugging at the knees of his pants.

Nolan insisted on serving them, chuckling when she said, "Coffee's what I have at work. I drink tea when I want to relax."

"You're like Cynthia that way." Another chuckle escaped him. "She told me that tea is dignified. You can't rush it."

It must have been decades since Nolan had seen or talked to her parents, and yet that sounded so much like something her mother would say. More curious to see how he would respond than reluctant to disclose something that was remotely personal, she said, with a matter of factness that would keep sympathy at a distance, "One of the very few things my mother and I have in common."

"You see yourself as more like Henry?" Nolan's hand started to shake when he extended a cup to her, and Helena hastily took the cup from him, her hands closing over his. It wasn't an intimate gesture, merely a courtesy, but he looked at her intently from under eyebrows that resembled untrimmed hedges.

Startled by the look, Helena was surprised into being more honest than she had intended. "I've always wanted to think so, but I felt I was the odd man out growing up. My parents and Charles . . . there's almost eight years between me and my brother."

Nolan seemed almost on the verge of responding, his look no less keen, but after a pause that was the equivalent of a shake of his head, he pointed a finger at Scott, then busied himself with pouring his son a cup of coffee. "Eleven years between him and Perry, fifteen between him and Jay. He complains that Joyce and I had two families."

Scott reached over and took the cup before Nolan could lift it. "And they still treat me like a baby." He cleared his throat. "Before my father can get to the more embarrassing family stories, we probably ought to get to the reason we're meeting."

"The reports I created for Dave Lindholm." Helena's words so rapidly followed that they nearly overtook his, but she wanted this meeting-by-firing squad over with.

"Yes," Scott began, glancing as uneasily at Nolan, Helena realized, as she had earlier glanced at him. She answered to Scott, but Scott, despite the fact that Nolan was only a director on Amundson Securities' board, clearly answered to him. "Yes," he said again, "but please keep in mind, the reports, they're just one part of this . . . thing—"

"Mess," Nolan growled. With a wave that had Scott shutting his mouth with an impatient click, he said, "We're not looking to place blame, Helena, we're trying to gather information, figure out how and where it started going wrong. The reports are just a piece of it."

Where it started going wrong was at the very beginning, she suspected. Investing in start-ups was always risky, but making sure you understood the company's business, believed its management was capable, and recognized the challenges it faced were crucial. Basic research, assisted by interviews with management and onsite visits . . . but it wasn't her place to lecture her bosses on what they should have done. She had taken the same blinkered approach to putting together the reports for Dave Lindholm, not volunteering her opinion, not questioning what he asked her to do. She didn't freelance on the content of the reports – much – unless a portfolio manager asked for her input on trend or performance comparisons. Was it something she did when she didn't feel confident about a situation she found herself in? Maybe it wasn't only work . . . she could think of other times when she had remained silent in the background when she shouldn't have. Stuart, Giselle, Cynthia . . . . But this wasn't the time to think over her life, she had done enough thinking and crying over it to last a lifetime when Stuart was arrested. She wanted to move on, and she had hoped she could work at Amundson Securities long enough to get her feet back under her. After that, she and Christina could go where they wanted and really start fresh. All she had wanted to do when she started at the firm was to do her job as efficiently and with as little interaction as possible. Nolan had said the job wasn't a favor, that he was expecting more from her when she had regained her confidence, but her old confidence remained out of reach. She didn't want to be challenged. She wanted to devote her attention to her daughter. She would do as she was asked, she would make no waves, she would arrive and leave on time. Yet here she was in the middle of another mess.

Helena said carefully, "The managers and planners know what they want in the reports. What isn't in the template, I add. We agree on it before I change the report. Working with the software isn't complicated, but they don't usually have the time for it." She hesitated, wondering if her next words would be too pointed. "They always have the final decision."

Scott nodded. He leaned over to place his coffee cup on the table and then remained bent over his knees, hands hanging loosely between them, his head turned up at her. His posture reminded her of Stuart when he was trying to convince her during the early stages of the investigation that the FBI was blowing some inadvertent misinformation his clients had received out of proportion. She instinctively stiffened and pressed into the chair back. Nolan didn't miss her body language and held out his hand in warning to his son. "Let's dial it down, Scott. This isn't an interrogation."

"Sorry," he said, straightening. He drew one leg over the other, balancing his ankle on his knee. "We're not trying to gang up on you, we're just trying to put all the pieces together. Obviously, a lot went wrong here, but some of the investors," he paused to shoot a look at his father, "have said the reports they got weren't 'truthful.'"

Helena paused in turn, trying to assemble her thoughts. It was likely they had already talked to Dave Lindholm, and she didn't know what he had told them. The version of the reports that she thought had gone out included the comparative and trend analyses that showed the start-ups were struggling as well as information from the lawsuits that had been filed. "The data that went into the reports didn't lie." She bit the inside of her bottom lip to stop herself from saying more. She wasn't going to accuse Dave of manipulating the information in the reports; she didn't know who had, only that someone with more knowledge – and access - than Dave possessed had ensured that her logon ID was associated with the reports that were sent to the clients. It didn't stop with that someone, because he or she had almost certainly been directed by another or others higher up. Releasing her lip from between her teeth, she said reluctantly, "I know what this looks like, particularly given my history."

Before Scott could speak, Nolan said, "I don't know what this looks like yet, Helena." He smiled reassuringly at her. "Don't usher yourself out the door."

It wouldn't be ushering. I would be escorted out . . . in handcuffs. She finished her rapidly cooling coffee. After another look at his father, Scott said, "If you still retain any copies of the reports or could identify the data you used, anything that could give us an idea of how you prepared them that would be really helpful. It's not just electronic copies we're looking for. If you scribbled calculations on the back of an envelope, we're interested in seeing it." His smile wasn't as confident as his father's, but Scott was looking very earnestly at her.

She supposed it was more polite than sending one of her co-workers to her desk to request she turn over her laptop. "Anything you need. Will the end of the day be soon enough?"

"Absolutely." Scott rose. "Sorry to cut things short, but I have a call in about ten minutes."

She didn't propel herself from her chair, but after brief nods at the Amundsons, Helena lost no time rounding the table on her way to the door, nearly sending her coffee cup into a spin as she set it down. Nolan struggled out of his chair. "Helena, wait up. I'm not on this call with Scott." He waved off his son's helping hand and slowly crossed the floor to join her. He seemed less steady than when she had seen him last, more bent, and she wondered how much the failed start-ups had taken out of him. Their walk to the elevator was both slow and halting, but she sensed that it wasn't so much Nolan's age and unsteadiness that were the cause as that he seemed on the verge of saying something only to teeter on the balls of his feet and then veer off, if only verbally, in another direction. He asked her if she and Christina had gone to the fair, reminiscing about taking his sons to the fair when they were boys. Another pause, and then he lurched into a story about tent camping in the summers. She listened, trying to figure out what it was that he wasn't letting himself say and privately reaffirming her intention never to go camping. They rode the elevator to the floor below, but Helena was going to be the only one to get off. Nolan mentioned another meeting he had downtown. She no sooner stepped out of the car than he pressed the button to hold the doors open.

"Helena, don't think . . . ." He paused, his mouth thinning into a wince. "I know how it must have looked to you . . . ."

"That I was being not quite accused of falsifying information?" With equal wryness, she said, "I've been down this road before, Nolan."

"It's ridiculous, this thing," he said impatiently. "It'll blow over."

"Is that what you hope or what you know?" That was no way to talk to the man who could snap his fingers and have her fired. Or, more realistically, snap his fingers and have Scott fire her.

Nolan didn't take offense at her sarcasm. "Hope with confidence." The elevator alarm went off, but he said over it, "It's how I feel about you. I've told you this before, you're capable of a lot more than tweaking financial software for brokers or rebooting their systems, a lot more." As she stared at him, he stepped back and allowed the doors to close. "Don't worry."

Don't worry. Easy for him to say. Whatever happened, Nolan Amundson wouldn't be the one punished. He could retreat to his estate outside the city and wear his comfortable flannels and corduroys like the kindly grandfather in a Hallmark movie and review his stock portfolios – no investments in questionable start-ups in them, she was sure – like the tycoon he was. Still, if he were looking for a scapegoat, wasn't she a little too obvious? She slowly walked back to her station. It was easy to tell how important IT was, they sat in one of the few windowless areas on the floor. If the building were to catch on fire, they would all die of smoke inhalation before they made it to an exit. She started to sink into her chair but caught herself. She would give the Amundsons what they had asked for, but first, she was going to get some answers that she needed.

With the unerring sixth sense he had recently developed that warned him when she was near, Nate was just getting up from his desk when she leaned around the end of his office's privacy panel. When he asked with ill-concealed discomfort if he could get back to her, she didn't step back in polite accommodation. She wouldn't remain quietly in the background this time. "It won't take long, I promise." Nate unhappily shrugged and followed her across the narrow corridor, which was created by the office panels of the more senior IT staff and the adjacent wall. There was a room almost directly across from his office that served as half-equipment room and half-conference room. When Nate stood, feet wide apart and arms crossed, Helena knew her time was limited. Awkwardly perching on the edge of the table, she said, "I need to know who has master access to the accounts, besides you, that is."

Scoffing, he said, "You know that already. Sheila and Jon."

Sheila was their manager, and Jon, a pale, thin ghost of a tech, with a reedy voice that tended to trail off, which made him all the more unnerving, was the firm's information security specialist. Helena shook her head. She was looking higher than that. Sheila and Jon had their bosses to answer to; the one she was hunting for would answer only to the top. Myka and Pete hadn't been forthcoming about the information they had suggesting that she was defrauding clients or, more accurately, helping others to defraud them, but that there was more than she knew about indicated planning, and that kind of planning wouldn't be found in the IT department. "I'm not talking about normal administrator access."

"You mean central office."

Central office. When Helena had first started working at Amundson Securities, she made the mistake of thinking that "central office" meant a command center or supply hub or both. For days she had tried to locate where central office was on the two floors of the former warehouse that the company rented, which considering how large the building was hadn't been a laughable error in judgment. Then when she heard references to the "west office" and the "river office" she realized that the employees were referring to the other Amundson businesses by their locations. The west office was in the city's southwest suburbs, and the Amundson shipping business was run out of it. In fact, the west office was comprised of several buildings, or offices, since the Amundson trucking fleet was located there as well. The river office, which, unlike Amundson Securities, wasn't on the river but on River Street, was the office for the Amundson lobbying arm, which regularly traded on Nolan's past service as a lieutenant governor as well as the family's prominence in the state's history, to bend the state's politicians, on both the local and national levels, to his will. The family's mining interests were in the far north of the state and generally referenced as, simply, the "mines" or, the "north plants," and the Amundson farms and dairies, which dotted the state's southern hills and valleys, were the "farms." The downtown office, which was what the other Amundson employees called Amundson Securities, was only across the river and a few short blocks from central office, the Amundson companies' headquarters. Office gossip had it that Nolan's office was a closet of a room while Jay and Perry, the CEO and CCO, occupied executive suites that would make Scott's office look modest. Central office also was the home of corporate IT.

"Yes, central office."

"Then you're talking Tom Wagner and Tom's boss, Perry." Nate's stiffness eased as he let his crossed arms drop, and he looked at her sympathetically, though Helena was even more aware of the pity in his eyes. "I'm not going to pretend that I know everything that's going on, but I know there's an issue with some of the reports you ran for the portfolio managers. Sometimes there's glitches in the software, and we don't realize it until after the data's already been put out. But what you seem to be suggesting, you have to realize it sounds kind of crazy. Seriously, you think Tom directed someone at central office or Sheila or Jon or me to mess with your account?"

Helena realized she was going to sound even crazier to him, but she said, "If you were looking to get away with something, who would make a better scapegoat? Everyone's too 'nice' to act like they know, but there's not a person here, Nate, who doesn't know what I've been accused of."

"I don't think like that. I can't think like that, it's too paranoid for me." He didn't cross his arms over his chest again, but he automatically stepped back, she noticed. The conversation was beginning to make him uncomfortable again, and she couldn't blame him. She had learned the hard way that suspicion was as infectious as a virus and its victims as eagerly shunned. "Some portfolio manager got in over his head with these investments, some bad data got out, and now the clients are in an uproar. It'll blow over, one way or another."

Nolan had said almost exactly the same thing to her, only more authoritatively. "I hope so." She smiled, an additional reassurance that she wasn't too crazy. "But if you notice something strange, something that doesn't make sense, in the audit logs or anything else, you'll let me know?"

He directed his glance at a corner of the room before he met her eyes. Nate really was a terrible liar. "Sure thing."

She couldn't have accounted for how the rest of the day passed if she had been asked (at least she remembered to send the working copies of her reports to Scott's assistant), but it didn't seem all that long after her conversation with Nate that she was in her car, driving home for the evening. Christina was bubbling with tales of her day at kindergarten, and Helena was thankful that her daughter expected little more from her than a distracted "That sounds like fun" or "Good for you, sweetie." After dinner, Christina occupied herself with designs for her Halloween costume, which at times was going to be a butterfly, a princess, an astronaut, or a dolphin, while Helena concentrated on finding out everything she could about the Amundson family. She considered her memory foam queen-sized bed a luxury; her top of the line laptop and high-speed internet were necessities, never more so than now. She diligently retrieved information for the portfolio managers and financial planners, but she knew she wasn't the researcher she used to be, which was attributable, but only in part, to the absence of the resources she had had available to her when she worked for Charles. Her curiosity and desire to outsmart rivals real and imaginary had yet to recover; nothing like living in ignorance that the father of your child was a con artist to reveal to you just how stupid you were.

And likely remained. She had been so desperate for a source of income and the means to leave a city grown hateful to her that she had had no interest in who Nolan was beyond being an old family friend. Why did her mother dislike him so intensely? Cynthia had had other contacts of Henry Wells to sweet talk into offering her daughter a job. Why had she turned to Nolan Amundson? More importantly, Helen asked herself, had he betrayed or hurt her father in a way that might have been a warning for her, if she had only cared to open her eyes, about the perils of accepting an offer of help from him? Charles was a night owl, but even so, it was too late tonight to call him. Other than a perfunctory call at Christmas, they didn't speak, but she would rather approach him than their mother. She could email him, but it would be easier for him to ignore. She would try him this weekend -

Her phone buzzed self-importantly. She recognized the number. Myka. Helena felt herself blushing and suppressed the reflex to let the call go to voice mail. Yet once she heard Myka's voice asking her if it was a good time to talk, she felt better, embarrassed but better. How did that voice have the quality of making her think that disaster wasn't going to strike? The FBI brought only disaster with them. "I have about 20 minutes before Christina's bedtime. There's a sortie, which will fail because she's a quick little thing, followed by a siege of her latest hiding place."

Myka chuckled. "My nephew's a year younger, and I've seen the protracted battles at bedtime. My sister Tracy's made of sterner stuff than my brother-in-law, he'll give in and let Tyler stay up another half-hour."

She might have been talking to someone she liked, a friend, possibly even a friend with the potential to become more than that, and Helena squeezed her eyes shut against a recollection of her dream, the lazy smile on Myka's face, the smug knowledge it conveyed that she was, if only temporarily, the master of her lover. "Look, I want to apologize again for the kiss . . . being panicked is no excuse."

"The awkwardness comes with the territory, Helena. Truthfully," Myka hesitated and Helena had the wild thought that she was going to admit that she had enjoyed the kiss, "it gives us some cover. If we're dating, there aren't any questions if I stop by your house or your work." Her inhale was audible. "We should talk about what's been going on at Amundson Securities since Pete and I met with you, what you've been able to discover."

"Not as much as you or I would like."

"Not much is better than nothing. It could provide us with some leads." Another audible inhale and this time it was more nervous- than reluctant-sounding. "I don't want you to feel that I'm invading your home. We're kind of at the end of the season, but I was thinking we could go apple-picking. There are some good orchards close to the city. You could bring Christina, and to make it more date-like, I could bring Tyler."

"You often bring your nephew on dates?" Helena couldn't resist the opening.

Myka laughed. "Um, no. I think what I meant to say was that bringing Tyler with me would help keep things more casual, less like an interview." Or an interrogation, Helena silently added. "Plus Tyler could keep Christina occupied and give us more time to talk."

"Will Pete be joining us?"

"No, he's not an apple-picking kind of guy. Actually I'm killing three birds with one stone. I owe my sister some babysitting, and my mom wants apples for her recipes. We're in this to find the truth, Helena, not to pin something on you because it's convenient. We really want this to be cooperative."

She had heard similar intentions from other agents, and it all seemed sincere until it wasn't. On the other hand, she had nothing to gain from alienating Myka. Not yet. "Sunday would work better for me than Saturday, if you can be flexible."

"Sunday afternoon it is." Myka gave her the name of the orchard and brief directions on how to get there. "One-thirty, would that work for you?"

"One thirty it is." She would have time to call Charles before they met.

Helena continued to stare at the phone after the call ended. She didn't completely dread their orchard "date." In fact, if she were honest with herself, she was looking forward to it, and her anticipation had nothing to do with trying to convince the FBI, yet again, that she was innocent.

#################

She called Charles Sunday morning. It would be mid-afternoon in London, and she thought she might catch him at home. He wasn't an early riser, and it was too early to go out to dinner. He also wasn't one to spend the afternoon watching sports, and the last time he had voluntarily gone to see a movie was . . . never. Nonetheless, she was on the verge of hanging up before he greeted her with a surly "Hello" midway through the last ring. "Helena," he said without enthusiasm.

She hadn't expected delight, but she hadn't expected the mixture of boredom and disdain in his greeting. "I won't take long," she said stiffly.

"Thank you." There was no irony in his response.

The conversation hadn't improved from there. When she asked if he knew what had ended their father's friendship with Nolan Amundson, she could hear the shrug in his tone. He didn't know, barely remembered Nolan, although he allowed that when he had been a boy of five or six, Nolan might have taken him to a football match. "Not sure what he was doing in London back then, but I remember someone tall, who spoke English funny, and who bought me Arsenal souvenirs."

"We lived in London? I thought we lived in Athens at the time."

"Dad was consulting on a project there, but Mum and I lived in London. Dad would come back on the weekends when he could." His impatience began to turn into wariness. "What's going on? Don't tell me that you've managed to soil your nest there, too."

"No, no soiling." She tried to think of a reason for her call that would make sense to him. "He's taken an interest in me. Maybe I started out as a charity case to him, but he's grooming me for something more responsible and more important, I believe. I'd like to know what ended his and Dad's friendship because, just maybe, I can help to bridge the gap. It can only benefit you and the company if he wants to mentor me."

"Amundson Securities isn't worth my notice," Charles said dismissively.

"Maybe not, but Nolan Amundson certainly is. If he could become a friend of the family again . . . ." Helena paused to let Charles's mind fill with scenarios in which he would be the main beneficiary of Nolan's largesse. "Think ahead, Charles."

The rebuke, mild as it was, irked him, just as she knew it would. "I have no problem doing that. You're the one who suffers from a failure of imagination and, more worryingly, common sense." He sighed. "If you want to know the reason that Nolan Amundson became persona non grata, you're going to have to ask the source."

Helena couldn't stop herself from the gibe. "And here I thought Cynthia told you everything."

"Make it worth my while to ask her. Otherwise you're the one who's going to have to beard the lion in her den." With that, Charles ended the call.

That would be a call she would need to prepare for, which meant it wasn't going to happen today. She had to get Christina out of her pajamas and into clothes suitable for an afternoon spent in an apple orchard. Helena looked down at her ratty robe and realized that she also needed to get into clothes suitable for an apple orchard. But that didn't mean apple-picking clothes couldn't be attractive.

They got on the road late, both she and Christina each having gone through a few changes of wardrobe, but traffic was light and Myka's directions were clear. They arrived at the orchard on time, although Helena spied a woman in the parking lot with wavy brown hair spilling over her shoulders holding the hand of a little boy and gesturing toward the entrance of a long, low shed-like structure, which had a sign above the doors, River Valley Orchard. Of course Myka would have arrived early. Christina jumped from her car seat as soon as she was freed and tugged at Helena's cardigan to hurry her along. "Mommy! I see the cookie lady."

"That's Myka, honey. She's going to help us pick apples." Helena leaned across her seat for her Christina bag, a necessity for an outdoors trip of any length. Sunscreen, sunglasses, Wet Wipes, Kleenex, bottled water, a foil package of Honey Grahams, her credit card wallet with an emergency $20 bill, and last, but not least, an extra pair of pants and underwear for Christina. Accidents were increasingly rare, but they still happened. Oh, for the days when her phone, her license, and a credit card had been all she needed. With Christina pulling at her like a tug boat trying to lead a cargo ship into port, Helena walked toward Myka and her nephew. She wished she had taken a minute to check her hair and make-up in the rear-view mirror and then she scolded herself for the thought. There was the desire to look your best, and then there was the desire to impress your date. This was not a date. She couldn't stop herself, however, from looking down at her outfit. The cardigan was a necessity given the breeze, but the jeans hugged her ass nicely. Helena slowed. What was she doing wondering whether Myka would notice her ass?

"Hey, you two." Myka's greeting interrupted Helena in the middle of her silent self-rebuke. The smile lifted one side of her mouth higher than the other, as if she were saying "I know that it's not really a date, but we can pretend, can't we?" However, all that Myka said was "Ready to pick apples?"

Helena couldn't help herself from smiling back. She pointed to her Christina bag. "I brought my reusable bags."

"In a carry-on." Myka's grin blossomed into laughter. She was wearing a navy v-neck sweater over faded jeans, and her running shoes had the comfortably worn look that suggested they had sprinted through more than a few orchards. She had no Tyler bag slung over her shoulder.

"You joke now, but wait a few hours." She skeptically hooked an eyebrow as she looked from Myka to Tyler to Myka again. "You have 'novice' written all over you."

"I've watched Tyler before."

"Inside? Where there are distractions? Snacks? Washrooms?"

"He's a Bering on his mother's side. We tough things out."

The toughness lasted until they entered the River Valley General Store, which had been cleverly designed to provide the only entrance to the orchard. Ignoring his aunt's warning to slow down, Tyler ran down the main aisle, heading toward the evenly spaced rows of trees outside the shed, when he stumbled over a slight rise in the concrete floor and fell, arms and legs splaying wide. For a moment, Helena's heart seized as she thought his head might have hit the floor, and, after a moment of shocked silence, Tyler's wail climbed like a siren. Myka rushed to him and cradled his head as she searched his face. "You're okay, baby. We're here. Did you hurt your head?"

"N-n-no," he said, tears streaking his face.

"He didn't," Christina announced authoritatively, bending over to give Tyler her own inspection. "One time Emmie fell when we were playing hopscotch, and her head bounced –"

Helena hastily placed her hand over her daughter's mouth. "And she was just fine." Leading Christina away, she positioned her in front of a display of caramel candies. "I know you were trying to be helpful, but what I think he would really like is for you to pick out a caramel for him. Why don't you choose some caramels for all of us while I go make sure everything is okay?"

Tyler's wailing had dwindled to a series of hiccupping sobs, and Helena opened her Christina bag to fish out some Kleenex. With a grateful look, Myka took them and wiped Tyler's face. "Have you had enough already? Do you want to go home?" He shook his head and then just as vehemently nodded when Myka asked, "Do you still want to pick apples?" Helena envied how gracefully she rose from the floor. Taking Tyler's hand, Myka helped him up and straightened his tear-dampened rugby shirt. "Good boy." Pushing her hands away, he walked with increasing confidence to the caramel candies over which Christina was hovering with rapt interest.

"Thanks," Myka said gratefully. "All I could imagine was Tracy shrieking 'You've murdered my son!'" She took a deep breath. "Let's hope we're already past the worst."

"You're an optimist, aren't you?" Helena said, her voice wry.

"I try to keep an open mind," Myka responded, equally wry. "Sometimes it as close as I can get to positive thinking in my job."

She should want to keep Myka miles away from her, but Helena recognized that her struggle between being drawn to the woman and suspicious of the FBI agent was resolving itself in favor of the former. Damn that kiss and double damn that dream. She needed to remember that she was here with Myka, strolling between trees barely taller than she was yet laden with fruit, because the FBI wanted to know what she had learned about potential fraud at Amundson Securities. She repeated to herself, "This is just an information session for her." Trying to focus more on where they were rather than the woman she was with and that woman's expectations, Helena pointed to a couple of apples within Christina's reach. There were different apple varieties in the orchard, and Myka had indicated which variety was growing on the trees they were walking between now, but Helena's apple recognition stopped at Red Delicious. Christina, her mouth working on the last of her caramels, obediently gave the apples a twist and placed them into one of the reusable bags. Tyler, his fall in the general store a distant memory, hopped restlessly next to her. Myka had cleaned his face of caramel with one of the Wet Wipes from what had become the Christina and Tyler bag, but he had pushed his hands into his hair, forming sticky clumps that would ensure he got a bath before he was put to bed.

Reaching for an apple higher on a neighboring tree, Myka asked, "How has your sleuthing gone?"

"Fitfully. I haven't figured out who altered the reports using my account, but from what I know has happened and from what I suspect has, based on what you won't tell me," she darted an accusing look at Myka, "it had to have been directed, if not done, by corporate IT. If someone's going to wreak havoc using my account, they're going to want to alter or destroy the audit logs, and they would have more coverage to do it if they were part of corporate IT." Helena shooed the children ahead of her like ducklings and walked beside Myka. "Scott called me into his office this past week. I'd been expecting it for days, but Nolan was there, and that surprised me." She hesitated, feeling, ridiculously, that she was about to confess something as intimate and personal as her fear that her three and a half years with Stuart would consume the rest of her life. "It'll sound strange, but I think he was there to protect me."

Myka's expression didn't change; she was still intent on what would come next, ready to absorb it. Not a flicker of disbelief had crossed her face. "Tell me."

"Nolan kept trying to reassure me, and at one point, he told Scott that I wasn't there to be 'interrogated.' I might've thought it was a ploy to get me to confess something, with Nolan playing the good cop, except that, after the meeting, he continued to reassure me." Flinging her arms up, she knocked her hands against the tree branches, sending an apple bouncing to the ground. "It's like he's seeking a response from me, but I don't know what it is he wants," Helena said in a rush.

"Do you think he's . . . interested . . . in you?" Myka frowned.

"You mean sexually?" Instinctively Helena lowered her voice, although Christina and Tyler were two trees ahead of them. "No, not at all. If it were that, I'd know how to deal with it." Helena leveled a look at Myka, daring her to disagree. "It's only nice people my own age that I'm a mess with. When it comes to men old enough to be my father or grandfather, I'm used to fending off dinner invitations and being oblivious to . . . ." She trailed off. Her laugh was sour. "I'm very, very good at being oblivious."

"Then look at me and Pete as your wake-up call." Myka's mouth was crookedly curling up. "What did the Amundsons want in that meeting?"

"They asked for my notes, drafts, anything and everything that went into the reports on the start-ups' performance. No accusations, just a lot of 'We're trying to get to the bottom of things.' That was mainly Nolan's doing, although Scott . . . he just seemed beleaguered. It was clear they had talked to Dave Lindholm, the portfolio manager who had asked me for the reports, and it was clear he had indicated that he had no idea who would have changed the reports after he approved them, other than, of course, me." Helena felt that her smile was as crooked as Myka's looked. "It should come as no surprise that I maintained Dave always had final approval and that I made no significant changes unless he wanted them."

"How well do you know Dave Lindholm?"

"Mommy!" Christina shouted. "You're a slowpoke. Look at all the apples I got." There was a little pile of them next to her . . . six trees down the row.

"Shit . . . where is he?" Myka muttered. Her voice growing louder, she called, "Tyler! Ty –." He flung himself from under the tree they were passing and hugged his aunt around her knees.

"Got you!" He crowed.

Myka stooped and pried his arms open. Lifting him to her hip, she said, "You were saying about Dave Lindholm?"

"I don't know him well. I don't . . . ah . . .chit-chat, although," Helena admitted, "that's changing out of necessity. From what little I know of him, Dave's worked at a lot of investment firms. He's experienced, probably not in alternative energy, but you don't have to be for what he's doing. You have to be able to read financial information and understand trends. We get along well enough."

They traveled no more than a few steps when Tyler squirmed to be let down. "Don't go where I can't see you," Myka warned as his legs churned with more effort than speed. Helena chuckled, and Myka said, "Okay, yes, you're right, being an aunt is not the same as being a parent."

"You've got the basic skillset. I saw you with Christina the day of the fair. You just need experience." Helena wasn't as surprised that she said it as she was that she meant it. Myka was . . . balanced, or at least she tried to keep a balanced perspective. What child wouldn't respond to that steadiness? She was no child, and she did. Yet that steadiness was far from boring, it had her wondering what would rock Myka back on her heels.

"Someday, maybe." Myka's lips firmly pressed down on the ending "be," and Helena didn't hear uncertainty as much as the desire not to talk about it. Back on track, back to the investigation. "He must know who you are. No sense that he thinks you got off scot-free? No resentment at the soft landing the Amundsons provided you?"

"Are you speaking for Dave or yourself?" Helena asked just as skeptically. She knew it was Myka's job to probe, to take nothing at face value, but she had learned to jab back at the agents when she saw an opportunity. It kept them honest. As honest as the FBI got.

"Hard to believe that there aren't some hard feelings at Amundson Securities."

"The times we met, which weren't many, he was always professional." Helena stopped. She tilted her face toward the sky. The afternoon was one of those fall days when the colors were as tactile as they were visual, the browns and golds as warm and fuzzy as a sweater, the blues and reds as sharp as a knife's edge or a good gin. She had appreciated days like these when the FBI were conducting their endless interviews and then, later, when she was jousting with the U.S. Attorney's office and Stuart's attorneys, sometimes even with her own attorneys. The confusion and rage and anxiety burned off like fog under the sun, and though the respite would be only temporary, she could see everything with clarity. She felt the same way now. Stray thoughts and vague impressions that she had had long before Myka and her partner showed up at her door knit together in her mind, and she could see an outline forming. "It's bigger than trying to hide poor performance. They're not investments gone bad. They were bad investments in the first place." Myka's expression didn't change. "It was a scam from the beginning."

"What makes you think that?" Helena had been interrogated by FBI agents who had come in every shape and size, but they all had perfected the art of the uninflected question. Myka, who was unlike her counterparts in many ways, could also be an expert at asking a question that hovered somewhere between an observation and a challenge.

"If you're expecting a well-reasoned argument, I don't have one. It's not something I've tried to fully articulate before. It's a mixture of suspicions and my own experience, pre- and post-Stuart." She shifted her bag of apples to her other hand. It was surprisingly heavy. She hadn't anticipated picking so many. She and Christina would be eating apples until Christmas. "Their financial statements weren't professional, their management ran surprisingly thin on expertise, and their boards of directors weren't a value-add in terms of business or financial or legal experience. But you could say that about a lot of badly run businesses." Christina and Tyler were chasing each other around a tree when they caught up to them.

"When are we going home, Mommy?" Christina snatched Helena's hand and swung it.

"Are you tired of picking apples?"

Christina nodded. "I can take a hint," Myka said, "but let me run over to where they have the Haralsons and Cortlands. I promised I would get some of them for my mom." Helena watched her sprint around the end of the row, hair glinting in the sun, the ground-eating stride looking easy and relaxed.

"Mommy." Christina was tugging at her hand again. "Mommy, watch me!" She twirled around, holding her arms out. Helena dutifully clapped, her eyes straying to where Myka had disappeared.

When Myka returned only a few minutes later, her breathing hardly altered but her bag considerably fuller, Helena didn't know whether to be admiring, frightened, or intrigued by what else she could accomplish in record time. "I believe you were about to tell me why the start-ups aren't just badly run businesses." There was no lack of expression in her voice now. It was warm with amusement, and Helena wondered if Myka realized that Agent Bering had retreated. If they were only the Helena and Myka who had met at the fair, Helena wouldn't have any difficulty in believing that Myka was flirting with her. Since they weren't, Helena chalked it up to the perfect fall afternoon, the chance to get in a brief run, anything but Myka forgetting herself and why they were together in this orchard in the first place.

"Because I'm beginning to think that Nolan's been expecting something like this."

"Because you think he's protecting you?"

"Or one of his sons," Helena replied dryly. "Nolan's helmed a Fortune 500 company for decades. He was also friends with my father, who traveled the world brokering mega-mergers and acquisitions. Henry Wells would not have invested in those start-ups." She felt Christina's head press against her thigh, an unmistakable sign that her daughter was tiring, and she passed her hand over Christina's hair. "I'm sorry I can't make a better case for it." A thought occurred to her and, although she was tempted to let it creep back to the cellar it had crawled out of, she decided to voice it instead. "You can chalk it up to experience." Myka looked swiftly at her. "It didn't seem so at the time because I was shell-shocked when they started investigating Stuart, but sometimes you can believe that everything's great and yet never get rid of this feeling in the pit of your stomach that's something's just . . . not . . . right." Her laughter was harsh enough that Christina anxiously craned her head up at her. "It had to be because I didn't love him as he deserved to be loved, not because there was something wrong about our life together, about him. That's what I sense with Nolan. He acts as though the failed investments aren't important, but he doesn't completely believe his own act."

Feeling that she had managed only to expose her own blindness and willed ignorance rather than convince Myka of her insight into Nolan, Helena resisted the impulse to disguise her embarrassment by changing the subject or, worse, by tacking on a qualification to what she had just said. She steadily held Myka's gaze.

"You hear that a lot in my job," Myka said, "and you wonder 'How could they not know?'" She hesitated and then admitted, "I thought that about you, but someone I respect reminded me that we can all be guilty of not being honest with ourselves." With that half-rueful, half-self-deprecating lopsided smile that Helena was quickly growing fond of, Myka said, "I mean, some people some can stay in a relationship for five years knowing it wasn't going to work out and pretending otherwise."

Helena had wanted to wince at Myka's "I thought that about you," but then in what appeared to be Myka-fashion and unlike most other FBI agents Helena had encountered, she had removed the sting by sharing an obviously personal example of her own blindness. It was hard to hold a grudge against a person like that. "I don't blame you. There's not a day I don't wake up when I'm not ashamed of being so stupid about Stuart." Except for the one day I woke up after dreaming about you. "You wouldn't be speaking from experience, would you?"

"Didn't want you to feel like you were out on that limb by yourself."

"What's her name?"

"Andi." Myka grinned. "But that's a future date story."

Future date. Helena gave her a sardonic look, but her heart had started beating faster. "You haven't forgotten what we are to each other, Agent?" She murmured. They entered the general store, and she was surprised to realize they would have to wait in line at the cash registers. She had seen families in the orchards but they had been distant figures far ahead or she had glimpsed them between rows of trees and their voices had carried thinly over the distance like bird calls.

"It sounds nicer than 'the next interview' or 'your next grilling,'" Myka said huskily in an attempt to keep her voice lower, which, Helena was chagrined to notice, had her skin prickling, not unpleasantly. Nudging a tired Tyler ahead of her, Myka coaxed him to keep moving. "Just a little bit longer, Ty. You'll get to take a nap in the car on the way home, and then we'll tell everyone what a brave boy you were." He nodded before turning around and hugging her leg. Myka eyed the display of caramel apples wrapped in wax paper and put several of them on the belt.

"Aw," the cashier said she weighed Myka's bag. "He's cute. Actually, both your kids are cute." Myka followed the direction of her look and gave Helena a small, helpless shrug.

"They take after me," Helena said archly. As the cashier obligingly chuckled, Helena added, "I'm just joking. Tyler is adorable, but he owes that to his parents."

The cashier scanned the caramel apples. "You guys look like a family. Sure you don't want to reconsider?"

In the parking lot, Myka handed Helena two of the caramel apples. She stooped and lifted Tyler, and he immediately slung his arms around her neck, resting his head on her shoulder. "Thanks for agreeing to come out here today. I know the reason for it wasn't great, but I enjoyed it, all the same."

Christina was yanking violently at her arm in her desire to get to the car, and Helena had to juggle the caramel apples to keep them from dropping to the ground. "Why don't you go ahead to the car?" Helena suggested. "I want to say good-bye to Myka and thank her for the apples." Christina ran down the sidewalk, arms flapping. Arriving at the car, she dramatically pulled at the door handle. Rolling her eyes at her daughter's performance, Helena tucked the apples into her Christina bag. "I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy myself, but I did. It was a beautiful day." Thankfully the "I couldn't take my eyes off you" that ran through her mind remained unsaid. It was no less true and far more appropriate to say "I'm not sure if what I've provided is helpful, but if I've managed to persuade you in the slightest that I'm not behind what's going on at Amundson Securities, I'll consider it time well spent."

Something very much like wistfulness appeared in Myka's eyes. "You don't know how much I'm hoping that's true, Helena."