Kissed My Rival, Hear His Mind novel · Chapter 9 of 32
Chapter 9: Craig's Price
Craig found Eli in the stairwell at noon, which was where the whole studio went to scream.
He leaned on the rail between the sixth and seventh floors with his hands in his pockets, perfectly at home.
"You watched it," he said.
"I watched it."
"Good. Then we can skip the part where you say it's nothing."
"It's a man ringing a buzzer."
"It's a man who works for a firm with a rule, going into the apartment of the other man in the competition, at midnight. The cab driver will say so. The building super will say so. And Godfrey said 'discovery.'"
He smiled.
His teeth were very straight, and Eli would have given a month's salary to knock one of them crooked.
"What do you want?"
"Your atrium."
Eli had been waiting for it.
For four weeks he'd been drawing the central atrium in the margins of the Fairmount program, late at night, on the backs of old section sheets.
It was a stair that turned and let the daylight fall straight through four floors into the children's reading room.
It was the best idea he'd had in six years, and he hadn't shown anyone but Declan, and he hadn't even shown him.
"How do you know about it?"
"I read your trash, Eli. Everybody reads your trash. You draw on napkins." Craig shrugged. "I want the full set, drawn up and clean, on my desk by Tuesday morning. I'll present it to Godfrey as the lead scheme."
"Under your name."
"Under the team's name, with me in the middle."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I forward this to Godfrey Tuesday at nine, and you and Corcoran are on the street by Wednesday, and I'm the senior associate who happens to be standing in the room." He pulled his hand out of his pocket and checked his watch. "Tuesday. Don't be dramatic about it."
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