Page 29 of Indecent Proposal

I was tempted as hell to go back to the cabin right fucking now and show her the meaning of discipline and obedience, but I knew that I had to focus on this job, too. As much as I wanted to forget about the world and just focus on fucking Claire into a new realm of pleasure, this wasn’t some sex vacation. Her life was in danger, and I had to find out why.

Susan’s information had made me wary of another company that I wasn’t aware of, a company that had been trying to recruit Richard for less-than-legal purposes. But I wasn’t going to stop investigating Hardman Holdings, either.

Who knew what Susan had really heard? She’d interpreted things a certain way, but that might not be the case. I had my gut instincts, and I’d learned to listen to those long ago, to sharpen them from a blunt hammer into a fine blade. And my gut was telling me that I needed to look harder into the company that Richard already worked for.

Usually, infiltration wasn’t my thing. I wasn’t great at pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Especially when that required me to act polite to assholes, like playing a person in a customer service job. Unfortunately sometimes it couldn’t be helped, so I found myself putting on the persona of an IT guy who was there to test the security system.

I didn’t bother going up to the receptionist desk. I just walked in with a clipboard with papers and a bag that was filled with some computer supplies and headed for the elevators.

The receptionist caught me, as I suspected she might.

“Um, sir?” she called out.

I smiled over at her and waved my clipboard. “Hey, just here to check on the system reboot?”

When the woman looked at me in confusion, I just sighed. “The way the system reboots in case of a security breach.”

I turned and walked towards the elevators again, rolling my eyes and making sure she saw me do it. I figured I had a 50/50 shot of security coming down to see what I was up to, but I had no issue with that. I could talk my way out of it just fine.

One of the things that we’d quickly learned when setting up shop was that people were ready to give us just about any information or access we needed so long as we acted like we belonged there and were an authority.

Hell, I’d been asked when we were just starting out to check on the security training of the employees at various companies, and I would perform a simple trick that got ‘em just about every time. I’d come into the office, and say that I was there to do a security inspection.

Usually, the employees would catch this one. They’d say that they didn’t know about this, and they would have to check with their supervisor.

At that point I’d laugh and say, “Great job, you passed the test! Checking with your supervisor about that is the right thing to do. I’m going to start on my inspection now, okay?”

Nine times out of ten,bam, they’d let me in, without realizing that I could’ve been anyone and continuing to lie to them.

Authority, or at least the appearance of authority, made people cave every damn time.

I punched in at the elevators, one eye on the directory on the wall. I needed to get into the offices of the executives. Looked like they were on the top floor. Typical. Of course I couldn’t judge too much. My office was on the top floor, too.

Right now, about noon, they would all be out at lunch. Nobody in their right mind took lunch in their office if you were a top dog. You went out to lunches, even in this relentless grind culture and the death of the one-hour lunch break. It was a status symbol, to showcase how well you were doing and how successful you were.

That meant, with any luck, their offices would be empty.

I wasn’t a computer whiz, never had been, but you didn’t get high up enough in the special forces without learning some level of technobabble because of the fancy tech they gave you access to. And I didn’t even need to really know that. We had a tech team employed at our company so we could stay one step ahead of whoever we were up against. The USB drive that my team had given me would automatically hack into and unlock any computer I inserted it in to.

I reached the top floors and immediately headed for the offices. I clocked the security cameras in the elevator and the hallways, but per usual protocol there weren’t any cameras inside the actual offices—general laws about cameras and security meant that most companies kept cameras to ‘community spaces’ only to avoid any potential lawsuits about privacy violations.

When it came to who would actually know anything that would affect Richard, I’d decided on the CEO, CFO, and three other high-level executives. The actual boards of companies rarely were involved in the day-to-day decision making and convened every so often to make sure things were profitable. They were there to protect the bottom line and make decisions about the overall direction the company took, rather than overseeing the implementation of policies.

With how high up Richard had been in the company, and who would be in charge of things if there was something shady going on… the C-level execs would be the ones to look at.

I let myself into their offices—not locked, of course, God forbid—and those were the ones that had doors. All these damn fancy offices nowadays were full of glass walls and open doorways, trying to make the space seem airy and welcoming.

Yeah, all it did was make you a sitting duck if someone wanted to come after you, and it destroyed your privacy,but okay, architects.

I let myself into the first office and sat down at the desk, turning on the computer and inserting the USB into the port.

The screen flashed a couple of times, and then the desktop unlocked for me and a window automatically opened, asking me if I’d like to download the computer’s hard drive contents.

Well, don’t mind if I do.

While the hard drive downloaded, I took a quick look through the company emails and the unlocked files on the desktop. Some files were still locked and I’d have to get one of our tech guys to hack into those individual files once he had them in hand, but there was enough open here for me to skim through.

There was, frankly, a lot of information. There was no way I could look through everything or make sense of the financial data off just a few glances. I switched back to the emails and typed in “Richard” to see what came up.

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