Ellie really hoped her attraction to Knox was only temporary. The mess she’d walked in on this morning when she entered her office meant she really didn’t need any more complications in her life right now.
And she instinctively knew Knox Wilder would be a huge complication.
CHAPTER FIVE
Once he was back on the ground floor, Knox immediately spoke with the security men on duty.
After explaining who he was, and perhaps fearing they were about to be replaced by Wynter Security if they were anything but compliant, one of them had taken him to the main office in the basement, where their team leader and his deputy were.
Possibly having the same fear, the two men were happy to play the relevant security footage from the previous night.
As Ellie had already told him, two men wearing balaclavas had entered the building, taken the elevator to the third floor, and then entered and wrecked the HERA offices. And no, it didn’t look as if anything had been taken.
Implying the whole purpose had been to cause damage to the property, and autonomy, of HERA.
Personal.
Vindictive.
From the little Knox already knew of the history of HERA, the evidence seemed to point to the culprit being Andrew Day, Ellie’s previous personal and business partner.
The man in charge of the building’s security, assured by Knox that he really was only asking as a friend of Ellie’s, had promised to let Knox know as soon as he’d been able to access exactly what card had been used by the two men to enable them to enter.
Not that Knox held out a lot of hope on that helping to identify them. As he knew only too well, cards could be forged and security systems could be hacked.
Knox immediately sent a text to Linus Wynter, the youngest brother of the Wynter family and also their resident tech genius. Linus was in London at the moment, but he was always available to all of them wherever he was in the world.
Knox asked the other man to check in to the security of Aragon Tower and see if he could find any evidence or glitches in the system that could have enabled this to happen.
If anyone could find any anomalies, it would be Linus.
He also asked the other man to ascertain where Ellie was living now and how they could upgrade the security system in that building.
He then shut off his phone before Linus could come back with the many questions he would no doubt have regarding who Eleanor Hall was and why Knox wanted him to do the things he’d asked him to do.
A personal visit to Andrew Day was also in order—one Knox didn’t intend telling Ellie about—but that could wait until tomorrow. Right now he wanted to concentrate on taking Ellie out to lunch and then on to a visit with Karen, Geoff, and the babies.
Luckily, organizing all those things had taken only a few minutes, so he was waiting in the reception area when Ellie stepped out of the elevator a short time later.
There was no longer dirt on her cheeks, she had brushed fresh gloss on her lips, and her hair was a soft, silky curtain down her back.
But those tinted glasses still hid the expression and full color of her eyes, and there was no mistaking the other physical signs of the stress she was under. Her face was pale, her cheeks hollow, and she somehow looked as if she might be even thinner than she had been when Knox met her earlier in the week.
Ellie Hall was unmistakably under severe emotional and mental stress.
Well, she didn’t know it yet, and probably wouldn’t like it if she did, but she was now under Knox’s protection. He hated bullies, and he had a feeling that was exactly what Ellie was dealing with. The man who had also once been closer to her than any other.
The bastard.
Knox knew exactly what it was like to go through a breakup of this magnitude. It had happened to him years ago, but he still remembered the fierce pain of that betrayal from someone he had thought he could trust implicitly. He could maybe have forgiven Maggie for the pain she had caused him, but he would never, ever forgive her for hurting their daughter.
Looking at Ellie, feeling that instinctive need to protect her from any future harassment, he had a feeling his need to keep up barriers to protect his emotions had been well and truly demolished this past week.
Did he like that feeling?
Absolutely not.
But something he had thought dead had stirred deep inside him when he first looked at her, and that feeling had only deepened in the past four days.