Page 69 of Cocky Tech God

I answered the call with my typical type of greeting. “What color panties are you wearing?”

She narrowed her dark gaze, but her face was flushed with my innuendo. She loved my dirty mouth. “You already forgot?”

I laughed. No, I hadn’t forgotten. After I’d ripped off her white thong this morning, because I literally couldn’t contain myself, she’d put on a pair of gray briefs under her navy dress before we were both out the door to our respective offices.

I shrugged. “You got me.”

She glanced to the side, off screen, then she leaned in. “I’ll let you rip them off me later tonight.”

Fuck. I was turned on. No surprise. Lucia could push my buttons without saying or doing a damn thing. “I plan to.”

“So…” She leaned back in her chair. “I have good news.”

“Did Brett Doran accept the offer to lead up our joint project?” After a year of building a relationship with Brett, Lucia and I presented him with an opportunity to be the lead developer on a multi-secure cloud storage for HIPAA data. It was a project we’d started to collaborate on after the World Tech Conference last summer.

“Yes, that is the first good news. So, he should be here in Manhattan in about thirty days. Mia has offered to let him stay in her guest bedroom until he can find his own place.”

“That’s nice of her. I know renting here can be a challenge.”

“Poor Brett, though. Mia is so particular.” She laughed.

“Okay, what’s the second thing?” I asked.

She bit her lip, her eyes growing wide. “I finally closed on NuvaTech! Calista gave us a five-year contract.”

“Holy shit!” My pride for Lucia waved through me. “I knew you would get it.”

“That’s a quarter of a million a year, Hansen!”

With this newest client, Lucia officially had four major clients, and LMS would be a multi-million-dollar company by next quarter. It was all working out for her, and it was because she was good at her job. She was one of, if not, the best developers I’d ever met—including myself.

“You’re there, baby.”

“And I’m coming for you.”

I laughed. “I can’t hide now.”

She shook her head. “Nope. I know where you sleep.”

Then a silence grew between us, and her grin faded. Through the screen, she met my gaze. Her eyes were glossy, and the emotion that she couldn’t hide filled me with concern. Every worst-case scenario that could possibly be threatening to us flashed through my mind. She was sick. Her ex-fiancé had come back to make trouble for us. Someone from my past confronted her about a secret baby. The options were endless, and all irrational.

“What is it?” I leaned in, making the space between me and the phone screen very small.

Lucia sighed, her struggle to get the words out was obvious and painful. My protective mode kicked in, and I was ready to go to her office and hold her and kick whoever’s ass I needed to.

“Luci?”

“The adoption agent called me…”

My heart thrummed a beat too fast for my breathing to keep up with, and I was holding on for dear life for the next words out of her mouth. “Okay…”

After our surrogate fell through, Lucia wanted to try adoption.

She lifted her hands to her eyes, her cheeks bloomed with red. “A young woman in Cayman Brac has given her newborn baby girl up for adoption, and we are the first couple she requested.”

Air emptied out of my lungs in rapid succession, and I was totally winded. And speechless. My whole world was in my chest, heavy and ready to burst.

“A Caymanian baby, Hans.”

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