Page 47 of Shadowing Her Stalker

He studied her closely, biting the inside of his cheek as he weighed her plan. The morning light streaming through the window brought out hints of gold in dark eyes fringed by unfairly thick, dark lashes. The intensity of his stare should have made her uncomfortable. But it didn’t. She felt safe with him. She could trust him. And, more important, he seemed to trust her.

“What do you plan to tell them?”

“Nothing in particular,” she hedged. “I want to get their thoughts on what’s been happening. They’re far more involved in the tech community. Chris with the investors and entrepreneurs, and Tom with the people on the tech side of things.”

Wyatt raised his arms and laced his fingers behind his head. She could see the temptation to rock her mother’s kitchen chair back on two legs. Watching him wrestle it into submission was amusing and more than a little endearing. She wondered if he got away with tipping his own mother’s chairs back. Something told her he didn’t.

“What’s their response been when you’ve had issues before?”

She shrugged. “Obviously, we’ve never had anything near what’s happening now. Until now all I got was the usual mix of sour grapes and good old-fashioned misogyny.” Thinking back on their cavalier dismissal of the vitriol slung at her day after day made her wonder if she shouldn’t have been slotting them in with the chauvinists.

As if reading her mind, he asked, “Did they take it seriously?”

“No.”

The answer slipped out of her before she could give the question more than a moment’s thought. But it was the truth. They didn’t take the chat room slurs and vaguely threatening messages posted by anonymous commenters to heart.

But now she couldn’t stop shaking all over. Someone had tried to make good on those threats. It was time for Cara to insist her partners take her contribution to the company and the threats to her safety more seriously.

“Which is why I need to talk to them now.”

Chapter Twelve

Cara pulled her phone from the pocket of her hoodie and placed it on the table between them. Wyatt glanced down at the blank screen then up at her, a question in his eyes. “You want me to listen in?”

A lump rose in her throat. Unable to trust her voice, Cara simply nodded.

He eyed the phone askance. “Do they know where you are?”

She shrugged. “Maybe.” When his brows drew down, she knew the time had finally come to explain how complicated her dealings with her business partners had become. “My relationship with Chris and Tom has grown...distant over the past year or so.”

“Distant as in contentious?”

She shook her head, dismissing the notion a smidge too quickly. “No, I wouldn’t say so,” she hedged. Wyatt lowered his arms and crossed them over his chest. He didn’t speak. A tactic which proved more compelling than she cared to admit. “We’ve grown up. Grown apart. There hasn’t been a fight or anything.”

What she didn’t tell him was she was almost one hundred percent certain the lack of friction could be attributed to her unwillingness to engage. The truth of the matter was, she wasn’t as involved in the day-to-day running of LYYF as either Chris or Tom. Until this latest onslaught of abuse, she’d simply considered their arrangement a convenient division of labor. She handled the content. Chris kept them in capital and worked publicity like a pro. And the whole house of cards was built on a platform Tom created. The collaborative efforts of the company’s early days were long gone. Now, instead of pizza, beers and brainstorms, they had conference calls.

“Tell me about them,” he prompted.

She raised a shoulder and let it fall. “You’ve probably already read most of it.”

“Give it to me from your perspective.”

“Chris handles the money matters. Always has. He likes wheeling and dealing. Being in the middle of the action. He bought a place in Palo Alto the minute money started coming in and moved up there to be in the center of it all. Tom stayed down in LA for a while longer, but he hated the congestion. The only things he needs to be happy are surfing, solitude and a keyboard, so he bought himself a multimillion-dollar shack near Big Sur. I stayed put.”

“You never wanted to live anywhere else?”

She gave him a rueful smile. “I was still chasing fame in Hollywood, remember?”

“Then it found you on the web,” Wyatt concluded. “So the three of you live and work in completely separate areas?”

She nodded. “Yes. In both the company and geographically. Which isn’t an issue. We’re a digital company. There’s no need for us to share office space.” She shrugged. “We have operations offices for the tech side of things in Mountain View, and my content team has a small production studio near me in Silver Lake.”

Wyatt took a moment to process the information. His gaze dropped to the phone again, then he asked, “Do you like your partners?”

She should have been startled by his bluntness, but Cara was becoming adept at cop speak. He was trying to catch her off guard. He didn’t realize she had no reason to have her guard up. Not here. And not with him.

“I do.”

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