Page 75 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

"I love you too," I said, and meant it. "Talk soon."

I hung up before he could hear the tears in my voice.

Tessa was there immediately, wrapping me in a hug. "You okay?"

"No. But I will be." I pulled back, wiping my eyes. "Another week minimum. Maybe longer. While I face a lawsuit that could destroy me and run the busiest week of the year and try not to completely fall apart."

"Then we focus on what you can control. Making beautiful pastries. Serving customers. Getting through Sweetheart Week." She grabbed my shoulders. "And when he comes home—because he will come home—you figure out the rest together."

"What if we can't? What if his life in Seattle and my life here just don't fit together?"

"Then you make them fit. Or you find a compromise. Or you figure out something neither of you has thought of yet." Tessa smiled. "But spiraling about hypothetical problems while you have actual ones to deal with is just borrowing trouble from the future."

She was right. Of course she was right.

So I threw myself into work—baking and decorating and serving customers and pretending my entire world wasn't being held together by hope and legal strategy.

By 6 PM, I was exhausted, flour-covered, and desperately wanting my boyfriend home instead of in Seattle fighting legal battles I could only help with from a distance.

My phone buzzed with a text from Ethan: "Just finished with prosecutor. Criminal charges are happening Monday. This is going to work, Maya. Justice is coming. Hold on a little longer."

I typed back: "I'm holding on. But I miss you. A lot."

"Miss you too. So much it physically hurts. I'll be home as soon as I can. Promise."

I wanted to believe that promise. Wanted to trust that everything would work out and we'd figure out how to build a life together.

But promises were easy to make when you were in Seattle surrounded by lawyers and strategy sessions.

The hard part was keeping them when the world kept demanding you choose between love and survival.

And I was terrified that before this was over, one of us would have to make that choice.

Chapter twenty-three

Building the Case

Ethan

Friday evening, I sat in a conference room at the King County Prosecutor's Office, surrounded by enough paper to deforest a small country. Three years of financial records. Property transactions. Email communications that proved, beyond any doubt, that my former firm was basically running a criminal enterprise with better letterhead.

Assistant Prosecutor Jennifer Walsh sat across from me, looking far too alert for someone who'd been here as long as I had. I'd been living on bad coffee and takeout for forty-eight hours straight. She looked like she'd just finished a spa day.

"So let me make sure I have this right," she said, typing on her laptop. "The investment group identifies vulnerable properties, manufactures legal problems to decrease value, then swoops in with lowball offers framed as rescue packages. And they've done this twenty-three times?"

"Twenty-three times that I can document. Probably more that I haven't found yet." I pulled up the spreadsheet I'd built—my magnum opus of corporate fraud, color-coded for maximum damning effect. "Same playbook every time. Find a struggling family business sitting on valuable real estate. Create permit issues, property disputes, or regulatory complications. Wait for desperation to set in. Make an offer that sounds generous but is actually highway robbery."

Jennifer studied the spreadsheet, her expression shifting from professional interest to barely contained horror. "This isn't just fraud. This is racketeering. This is RICO-level organized crime, except instead of drugs, they're trafficking in stolen family legacies."

"Welcome to the exciting world of corporate law, where we ruin lives with PowerPoints and billable hours." I rubbed my eyes, which felt like they'd been replaced with sandpaper sometime around hour thirty-six. "This is why I've been living in this conference room, eating sad desk salad, and slowly losing my mind. You need documentation proving pattern, intent, and coordination across multiple jurisdictions. I'm giving you the full criminal conspiracy, gift-wrapped with citations."

"And you obtained all this documentation how, exactly?" The question I'd been dreading, asked with the careful neutrality of a prosecutor who knows the answer might be problematic.

"Some came from my firm's files before I was terminated. Some I reconstructed from public records. Some came from other lawyers who've faced this investment group andrecognized the pattern." I met her eyes. "The stuff from my firm—that's the ethical complication we keep dancing around."

"You took confidential documents before you had a client. Before you had legal justification."

"I preserved evidence of ongoing criminal fraud. The crime-fraud exception—"