The Adventures of Natalie Bloom by Brooke Stanton

Author:Brooke Stanton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780996851428
Publisher: Coco and Bee

“So this is the infamous Luke.” Max drops his duffel inside the large, shared tent we’ve been waiting in to escape the hot sun. “We’ve come a long way looking for you.”

Luke looks up from the book he’s been reading for the past hour, Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, nonplussed. Appropriate reading.

“What’s he doing here?” Luke asks.

“He’s researching a story—” I start to tell him.

But Max interrupts me. “None of your business.”

Max shoots me a look, but I ignore it, asking, “Did you get the info you needed?”

“I’ll talk to you about it later.” Max looks around the canvas walls and heavy wood flooring and takes in the luggage on various beds. “Are we staying the night?” Max asks.

“No. We’ve been waiting for you. Sonja posted again. She’s about an hour north of here. Leo’s going to drive us there.”

“Why? You already found Luke.”

“Apparently, she stole the rest of the money Luke stole from me,” I explain.

“I didn’t steal it.” Luke puts the book down on the bed he’s sitting on. “I was trying to make more money. For you.”

Max pulls a face that suggests he thinks Luke is full of shit. “What lies has he been telling you?”

I explain Luke’s not-so-brilliant plan to come down here and double our money. As I explain it, I still find it hard to believe, but at the same time, it doesn’t make sense that Luke would invest all that money just to run off with it six months later. It’s not like we’d opened the restaurant and made a ton of money, and he’d stolen the profits. There was less money in the bank account than there was when he invested in the business originally. Still, it seems like such a naïve strategy to come all the way down to a foreign country to try to make a quick buck. Especially when Luke’s job was to take other people’s money, assess the market, and then invest it. If he wanted to gamble with my money, why not go to what he knows? He was very successful at his job, and by the time he was thirty, he’d made enough money to retire early and invest in passion projects, like mine.

At least, that’s what he told me.

“Can I borrow your phone?” I ask Max.

Max hands it over without question. I quickly log on to my e-mail account and shoot Catie a message asking if she can look into Luke’s background. They have fact-checkers and pseudo-investigators at the magazine. Catie should be able to find something useful. It’s what I should have done months ago, before I went into business with him. But I didn’t feel I needed to. We were friends by then.

Handing the phone back to Max, I can see a look of distrust on his face as he watches Luke. “So this girl conveniently ran off with the rest of the money. How much was left?”

Luke swings his legs off the bed and stands, his head brushing the top of the tent. He’s several inches taller than Max and much broader, but Max doesn’t move back.

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