Craig looked up. His gaze met hers with a flicker of recognition and a question, keen but unhurried. Moura shifted her weight into her core. She was nearly delirious with apprehension; the pain could encroach on her again with its catty whispers. Not to speak of the dread of having to endure that attack beside the man who had decapitated her life in its youth.

She felt a surge of gleeful power as she noticed Craig's hesitation— she might unleash the hidden weapons of headquarters and pulverize him, out of sight. Moura could make that threat real.

He closed his notebook and slipped it into his blazer pocket.

"It's been a while," he said quietly, just loud enough for his voice to drift up to the third floor. "We need to talk."

...

"Mr. Chataway, do you mind if we speak?" Craig's calm voice carried like a gladiator's challenge spoken in the emperor's arena.

...

"Am I correct in detecting an equilateral triangle, dear?" Craig began. Moura's eyes dropped onto his hands, wondering at how carefully they extracted the notepad from his pocket. "A very tall tree on the high cliffs in the deep jungle interior occupies the apex. The hotel that burned down eighteen months ago marks the southeastern vertex. And one of your production facilities—the northwestern vertex."

"Wrong positioning - Craig knows neither math nor geometry," Moura hissed under her breath, gaze flashing, then drooping closer to home. She could find the man beside her attractive, especially when she was caught in a snare. 'But Craig is fearless with an attitude. And connections,' she lamented silently.

"Your math doesn't hold, Mr. Malcault," Patrick said smoothly, his tone silk. Moura wanted to deceive herself, to avoid sinking into the ground mortified - could that suddenly calm tone be reciprocal desire?

...

"Such as pulling two vertices back from the original triangle and drawing two intersecting lines?" Craig fired this disclosure at two faces that would never budge a millimeter, never betray emotion. "That intersection marks an important point—the precise spot equidistant from all three vertices, the Fermat Point, and the exact location for which you worked so hard."

...

"There's a third vertex also," Craig weighed his words carefully, "traveling far ahead, northwest. That's the one I'm going to see."

Moura gasped inaudibly. 'How so? His return flight is in a few hours.' The sky grew in magnitude, threatening to swallow her, but her spirit expanded...

"Do you know anything else about triangles, Mr. Malcault?" Moura continued to pout, tears of humiliation trembling in her fiercely determined eyes.

"I do," Craig began, looking at her wide-eyed with that eternally patient Craig Malcault expression that would never withdraw or complain. "I know that if you orient a triangle with the apex pointing upward, you can create the image of a mountain with at least one cathedral spire."

"Incorrect calculations, correct result," Moura noted without scruple, nudging Patrick's side. "We really must go."

...

But Craig preempted her, "Good day!" 'Oh!' Moura screamed, disillusioned inside, 'we'll meet again at the third vertex northwest, he means?'