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his head as he kept staring at the screen. “Bullshit.”
    “Excuse me?” I asked, shocked.
    He looked at me as though trying to make a decision. “Can I trust you with something, Lily?”
    “Uh… I guess…?”
    “Yes or no. I don’t want this getting back to Klaus,” he said, very seriously.
    Ohhhh man…
    I was too curious to say ‘no,’ though.
    And Klaus was too big of a jackass for me to pretend I had some kind of loyalty to him.
    “Yes.”
    Connor ran his hand through his hair. “LMGK already did their own appraisal of Teramore. I told – uh, we convinced Teramore to let you guys make a pass at it, too, to see your numbers and compare how Everton would evaluate the situation.”
    “Wait – you mean, this is a test for Everton Consulting?” I asked as I pointed at the monitor.
    He nodded.
    “It’s not an actual job – it’s just a test? ”
    “Well, Klaus thinks it’s a job, and Teramore will actually pay the bill as though it were an actual job. But yeah, it’s a test.”
    “One we didn’t know we were taking.”
    “We didn’t want you to go to more ‘trouble than usual.’ Like how the food critic doesn’t want the restaurant to know when he’s visiting or who he really is.”
    “But why – ”
    And then all the pieces fell into place.
    LMGK was considering purchasing Everton.
    And this report was part of their due diligence.
    “Oh,” I gasped.
    Connor saw that I’d figured it out. “Yup.”
    Wow. Just… wow.
    Klaus didn’t know he was being evaluated. And that evaluation could potentially influence the entire buyout.
    I winced. “I guess we didn’t do so well.”
    “No, you didn’t. Your appraisal of the market is waaay off.” He glanced over at me hastily. “Not you, of course – Klaus’s.”
    “Well, he always does that,” I said in an off-handed way.
    Connor frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “I’ve proofed all his reports over the last six months. I have to double-check everything, and, well… he tends to tell the client what they want to hear. Not necessarily reality.”
    “Wait – wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Do you know about – ”
    And for the next five minutes it was like I was defending a doctoral dissertation.
    He asked tons of questions about previous business deals Klaus had done. The thing was, Connor knew details that he shouldn’t have been able to know, and he kept throwing out numbers left and right off the top of his head.
    I did my best to keep up. I did okay – when you spend as much time as I do babysitting for Klaus, you have to clean up a lot of messes. I remembered some of them particularly well.
    At the end, he shook his head. “Incredible.”
    “What?”
    “That you’re an assistant and not a junior executive, at the very least.”
    He looked serious.
    I blushed. “Well… it’s nothing really, just what I’ve picked up in the last six – ”
    “Stop,” he said, almost angry. “Don’t do that. Don’t be modest; don’t lessen your worth like that. You’re an assistant, but you just showed a better grasp of the big picture than a couple of Harvard MBA’s I’ve hired in the last month. Don’t play it off. It’s damn impressive. You’re damn impressive. Don’t ever make yourself out to be any less than what you really are.”
    I was about to swoon.
    He was looking deep into my eyes as he said all these things… and that scent, that masculine, intoxicating cologne, was making my head swim…
    “It’s also a little sad,” he finished up, which jolted me out of my reverie.
    “What is?” I asked, taken aback.
    “That a woman like you is working for an idiot like Klaus. The situation should be reversed – and if it were, I would hope you’d fire his ass.”
    I grinned. “In a New York second.”
    He leaned in a little bit. My grin faded as my vision went woozy again.
    “I see so much potential in you, Lily… a huge future. Somebody who could really go out there and kick some ass. Smart, capable, funny,