She'd handled it. I'd thought even better of her when she did it and managed to get a deal on her selections, making my mortgage even more affordable than I'd thought it would be at first glance.

  And she certainly thought better of me as well, if her affections were any indication. Genuine trust in her eyes as we gave away so much of the profit. Clear adoration in her words when we'd talk through all that we were both learning at church and in our small group. Absolute affection when she'd wrap her arms around me and tell me, "You're so hot, Herbert..."

  True that. She was thinking better of me, too.

  "On a personal level, maybe," she said. "But you've been keeping secrets from me on the business end."

  "Busted," I said.

  "Eli," she sighed, obvious frustration in her voice, "that's a really dumb move to make. I'm your accountant. You shouldn't keep these things from me."

  "This is all business angst, though, right?" I asked her. "It's not personal... right?"

  She gave me a look. This had been an issue, of course. On the night I'd professed it all at her grandparents' retirement party, she'd made me promise that our life in the office would be completely separate from our personal lives. Business, like always.

  Except how could it be when my mind was always on how beautiful she was, how happy she made me, how much I wanted her to be my wife --

  "Fine!" she yelled. "It's personal!"

  "Tell me what you know, then," I said, "and I swear to you, Lottie --"

  "Stop calling me --"

  "Charlotte," I said softly, reaching out for her hands. "Trust me."

  And I could see that she did, despite what she had discovered.

  "Okay, fine," she said, letting out an irritated breath. "You told me six months ago that you were taking a substantial chunk of money out of the savings account and moving it to an investment venture."

  "I told you six months ago that I loved you," I said. "I still do love you. You said it, too. And I'm hopeful that you still love me... right?"

  "Stop trying to distract me," she said, pointing to the paper in front of me. "So, I noted that on my ledger. It was a good move. But I never got any kind of report or any information on the investment."

  "I invested it," I said. "Invested it in something that's going to yield so much --"

  "You liar!" she yelled, true pain on her face as she did so. I didn't want to hurt her. I thought she'd figure it out a little earlier, but...

  Patience, Eli. She'll get it in a second.

  "You went and opened another bank account with that money!" she said. "And I wouldn't have known anything about it had I not gotten a call from the bank earlier this morning checking for authorization to pay out for a rather substantial balance on a credit card that I also knew nothing about!"

  Stupid bank policy. I'd known about that. Had requested it for payouts of a certain sum, just for security, just like Charlotte had instructed me to do back when the business first started taking off all those years ago.

  "Did you tell them to go ahead with it?" I asked.

  "I was too shocked to hear about the credit card and the secret account to do much but tell them I'd get back with them," she said. "I mean, it's your own personal business if you want to get yourself a credit card and run up thousands of dollars of debt on it, but --"

  "Treating it like a debit card," I said. "Paying off the entire balance at the end of the month. Once my accountant gives the bank clearance to do so. Which she hasn't. Because she's yelling at me."

  Charlotte ignored this.

  "Why a new credit card, though? Are you hiding something from me?"

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but she interrupted me again.

  "And, yes, that's a personal question, I know, but seeing as how the money for the secret account came from the business, I think I would have at least some right to know, even if I wasn't your girlfriend."

  "You're still my girlfriend, after discovering all this?" I asked, teasing in my voice.

  "Eli," she murmured, looking at me doubtfully, anxiously.

  I couldn't keep this up much longer.

  "Yes, a new credit card. Because I wanted the reward points."

  "I figured that out," she said. "Once I tracked down your new card, I saw that you have a whole lot of reward points banked."

  "How did you find my new card?" I asked.

  "Hello? I have all your passwords for everything," she said. "The next time you want to hide something, you might use a different one, you dunce. The bank gave me the card name, and I used your standard login and password. Easy."

  "My security sucks," I noted, thinking that we'd have to change some things later. "So, you've seen my purchase history."

  "Yes," she sighed.

  Why were we still having this conversation, then?

  "Charlotte," I said. "You saw the purchase history."

  "I did," she said, "and there was just one purchase."

  No kidding. I waited for the smile, the realization...

  "Eli," she said, actual tears in her eyes, "I don't know what's going on with you, but I'm here to stay, to help you through it. Whatever you need." She put her hand on mine and squeezed.

  What?

  "What are you talking about?" I asked.

  She pulled out one of the papers on my desk and pointed to the line item. The vendor's name was an odd series of abbreviations, not easily discernible. But Charlotte's handwriting underneath it had shown that she'd done her work.

  Mineral Alliance Corporation Subsidiaries and Pharmaceutical Products.

  Well, that was odd. What did that even mean?

  "Are you into something... illegal?" she asked, tentatively.

  "What?" I said. "No! Why would you even think that?!"

  "You hid the account from me!" she cried. "You hid the credit card! You paid thousands of dollars to a pharmaceutical distributor for a product shipped from Africa, from a region known for heroin growth --"

  "Oh, good grief," I said, sighing. "Do I look like a heroin dealer?"

  "No," she whispered. "But numbers don't lie!"

  "Maybe we don't know one another as well as I thought we did," I murmured.

  "No, we do," she said. "Which is why I'm talking to you about this, knowing that there's some really great explanation, willfully implicating myself if I'm wrong about you --"

  "Implicating yourself?"

  "By not calling the police!" she yelled. "By sitting here in this office when there's a whole lot of heroin somewhere!"

  "Okay," I said, quite done with this. "I'm not a heroin dealer. There is no heroin."

  "Oh, praise God," she sighed. "I didn't really think there was, but... pharmaceutical products?!"

  "How is heroin a --"

  This wasn't going to help anything.

  "Never mind, Charlotte. Forget about the drugs. Or lack of drugs. Whatever. What's in the other half of the name?"

  "Mineral," she murmured.

  "And you tracked a shipment... from Africa?"

  She nodded.

  "Wow, you're smart," I said. "I had no idea the product was coming from Africa. I went through a company here in the city!"

  "What kind of company?" she asked. "What is it?"

  And here it was.

  "A diamond, Charlotte," I said, spelling it out for her at last. "I went to a diamond wholesaler, looking for a flawless, colorless diamond."

  She looked even more puzzled. "But why would..."

  Then, it hit her. Finally.

  "A diamond!" she gasped.

  "It doesn't look much like a mineral now," I said. "They put it in a platinum setting with a bunch of other smaller minerals and a whole lot of antique looking engraving and hoo-haas and what not with something called a cushion cut, and who even knows what else. But it's pretty."

  "Eli," she said softly. "I didn't even think..."

  "It's all those criminology classes you took," I said, waving this away. "You should have been a private investigator."

  "Wouldn't have worked for you if I had been," she said, wiping at her eyes. "Where is it?"

  "Where is what?" I asked. "The heroin?"

  "Eli," she chided, smiling, coming around the desk and climbing into my lap, her hands on my shoulders. "Give it to me."

  "Wow, this is really blurring the lines between professional business behavior and our personal relationship," I said, moving so that she settled in closer, so that I could kiss her more easily. "I feel harassed. Sexually harassed."

  "There is nothing sexual about this," she said, putting her hands around my neck.

  "Boundaries, I know," I said.

  "Where is it?"

  "Not here," I laughed at her, even as she grinned down at me. "And why do you care? You're not into jewelry."

  "I'm into what it represents," she said, loosening her grip.

  "It's not here," I said. "I've got it hidden away. Wanted to wait until the perfect moment, but you're totally awesome with your mad skills and found me out."

  "This is a perfect moment, though," she said, lowering her mouth to mine.

  And it was.

  "Wish I had it here," I said, pulling away a while later.

  "Me, too," she said. "But I'll wait. You can create another perfect moment."

  I could. I would.

  "And the credit card? The reward points?" she said, kissing the corner of my mouth now. "Such a great plan."

  "Enough points to take you somewhere awesome for the honeymoon," I said, thinking that even though we were going to be poorer than I would have liked so many months ago... well, we could still manage something amazing if we were just smart and looked for deals.

  My accountant taught me that.

  "Work smarter, not harder," she said, grinning. "And you have a lot of points after buying that ring."

  "Plus the welcome points for opening the account," I said. "Where can we go?"

  "Anywhere with you is going to be awesome," she said, kissing me again. "But we could go to Egypt if we wanted to."

  Anywhere. I don't care, just as long as she's there with me.

  "We're getting ahead of ourselves, though," I told her.

  "How so?" she asked, her hands on my face, her smile for me, everything perfect, just exactly everything I'd ever wanted.

  Praise God for ruining all my plans.

  "You rushed ahead with the plan," I said. "And I haven't even asked you yet."

  She pulled back and grinned wider, the memory of that long sought and never delivered proposal a better memory now, now that it's led us to this.

  "You haven't," she said, still smiling at me. "That's like me, you know. Always rushing forward like that, agreeing to what you haven't even asked."

  "I love that about you."

  Truth. Along with everything else about her.

  Honestly.

  So, there was nothing more to say. Nothing but...

  "Charlotte, will you marry me?"

  And of all that hadn't gone according to the plan, I knew that everything had ended up just exactly right because Charlotte smiled again with tears in her eyes and said...

  "That's been the plan all along, Eli."

  bonus material from

  Taking chances

  Due out spring 2016

  The New Job

  It was the first time she'd been in church since... well, she couldn't remember.

  Rational, thinking people didn't go to church. They didn't believe a book full of made up stories, and they didn't honestly think that there was a god of any kind. Faith was a poor substitute for accepting the truth -- that you lived, that things just happened, and then, you were gone. The good you did didn't count for much in the end, so what was the point of trying to hold to some system of beliefs that were fairy tales anyway?

  And what was the point of adhering to a cultural set of moral absolutes, right?

  Anything would go. And anything did go for Jill.

  When you didn't believe in anything apart from the present and what you could do to get ahead, like she did, you weren't ill at ease about working in a place like this. River Fellowship, a church so big that it looked more like a shopping mall from a distance, then even more so on closer inspection with its bookstore, its coffee shop, its school, and its myriad of rooms and theater style auditoriums, all places that set the scene for perpetuating myths about a legitimate historical figure named Jesus who was delusional, quite frankly.

  Jill had appraised it all on her way in, thinking little of the spiritual side of what went on here and thinking of it all from a business perspective.

  That's why she was there, of course.

  Her last job had ended when the company laid off nearly every employee. Downsizing. Closures. A bad economy. She'd been inconsolable about it at first, but there had been another accountant there, one who was being transferred, who had passed her name along with his recommendation.

  Thank you, Jacob Morales.

  She'd said it and meant it at the time, even when he'd explained that it wasn't a traditional accounting job but rather a position as a church treasurer with office manager and payroll dispensation responsibilities, a little of this and a little of that.

  A busy job to be sure.

  The personnel committee had handled most of the process. They'd interviewed her, they'd hired her, they'd briefed her on the particulars, and they'd set her up for a meeting with the senior pastor, who would fill in the rest of the details.

  So, she found herself, on her first real day on the job waiting in the reception area of the senior pastor's office, admiring the new shoes she'd bought to celebrate. When she'd been laid off, she worried about making her mortgage payment, her car payment, and her payment on her student loans, but things had worked out so quickly that there wasn't even a hiccup. The severance pay from her last job actually had her coming out ahead.

  Hence the adorable shoes.

  A religious woman would have counted it all as the provision of God, but Jill chalked it up to just how things work out sometimes. She glanced at her watch, wondering at the way she was being kept waiting, and pulled her mirror and her lipstick out of her purse to do a touchup to fight off the boredom.

  She admired herself for just a moment. Not a gray hair. Not even the hint of any wrinkles. Still a youthful glow to her complexion, even now that she was in her late twenties. She let her mirror dip down a little lower as she put up her lipstick, admiring the curves there and the tone that came with long hours in the gym and were always appreciated by younger men, men her own age, and much, much older men.

  She had a thing for older men, actually.

  Her rational mind knew that her preference was probably because she had daddy issues. Her father was unfeeling, cold, distant... just like her, actually. Her mother was long gone, her dad was still around, had always been around, but he wasn't really there, didn't really see her, and certainly didn't care.

  Until the first time she'd brought around an older man, of course. An older, married man, at that.

  No moral absolutes left the door open for a whole world of possibilities.

  Her father nearly lost his cool over that and over the next one, too. But by the time he'd grown accustomed to her very active social life, she found herself enjoying older men less for the shock value and more because she appreciated them.

  She appreciated that they were stable. That they knew what they wanted. That they didn't play games like younger men. That they wanted her even more because they thought she was too young to have.

  Her mind was on this when the senior pastor finally made his way into the office, which was likely part of the reason why her thoughts drifted the direction they did.

  The other part of the reason, though, was because he was gorgeous.

  "Hey, sorry about the wait," he said by way of introduction, coming into the reception area and extending his hand to her as he stood before her, as she stood to greet him as well. "Stephen Hayes."

  Tall, dark, handsome. All those clichés fit, along with several others. He was older, probably old enough to be her father, but he wore his age well. Fit, well-groomed, and confident.