“Susan, would you mind taking care of our guest’s clothes, please. She will need them back tomorrow in the morning,” he asked the middle-aged woman stirring a tomato sauce that smelled delicious.
“Of course, Mr. Wells. I’ll take care of them.”
“Thank you, Susan.”
“Dinner will be ready in a few minutes, sir,” the woman informed, smiling at me.
“Perfect.”
He turned around and grasped my arm, dragging me out of the kitchen and back into the living room.
“Problem solved. You can put down your backpack. No one will take it away from you,” he pointed out, signaling the couch behind me.
“Thank you,” I mumbled, doing as told.
After losing all the things I had, running away from Daniel, I always needed to keep the bag near me. I couldn’t afford to lose its contents.
“What’s your name?” he asked, taking a seat in an armchair.
Whenever I reached a new town, the first thing I did was come up with a name easy enough for me to remember. My real name unusual and too easy to track down, and that was the last thing I wanted.
Other than using it at the motel, I hadn't used it before, so it didn’t come out naturally, as it should.
“Anne… Anne Johnson,” I stuttered.
“That’s not your real name,” he stated with a frown.
“It’s the only one I’m willing to give you,” I replied, deciding there was no use in insisting.
He could read me too well, and I knew it was a lost battle. However, I would not share my real name with him. It was too dangerous.
“Your answer makes it harder for me to believe your story,” he pointed out.
“That’s your problem, not mine,” I said with more confidence than I felt.
“Why would you lie on something so basic as your name, if you have nothing to hide?” he asked, piercing her with his gray eyes.
Damn, the man could make me feel as if I was under a microscope.
“I never said I had nothing to hide, but my secrets don’t concern you. I still have no idea who the hell you are,” I replied, doing my best to sound as if I was in control and not the nervous wreck I really was.
“Even if it’s your first time in Seattle, it’s hard to believe you never heard of the Wells Corporation,” he pointed out.
The name did ring a bell, but I wasn’t sure where I had heard it before. “It sounds familiar, but nothing else,” I assured him, with a slight frown.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and typed for a few moments before he handed it to me.
He had googled the name, and the number of hits was astonishing. I tapped the first link that took me to the company’s main website and realized why the name was familiar.
The company was into many things, but the technology was their primary field. Nanotechnology, to be more exact. They had had an enormous breakthrough not long ago, and I had heard about it on the news, in the small restaurant where I last worked.
They had contracts with the government, which explained his suspicions. Industrial espionage was a real thing in his world.
I handed the phone back to him. “I’m guessing you’re one of those Wells,” I said, feeling my legs a bit weaker than before.
I was way over my head, and probably into a bigger problem than I could imagine. My behavior… entering the building… trying to seduce him into letting me stay… could be used as evidence of ill intentions.
“I’m ‘the Wells’,” he corrected her.
