Page 14 of Indecent Demands

Seth’s gaze searched mine. I felt like he was stripping me down, layer by layer, until he reached my raw, beating heart.

He hummed and sat back once again. “All right. If you say so.”

I lifted my chin. “I do say so.”

The corner of his mouth twitched again. “You’re a very opinionated woman.”

“I have to be.” I knew that it wasn’t something that most men liked, at least not in my field and in my experience. They didn’t like it when I knew more than they did, or when I had strong principles and argued about the unethical or immoral implications of new technology, or didn’t care about making money.

“I like it,” Seth assured me.

He sounded genuine. I didn’t know what to do with this man who could be my undoing—and yet was so damn attractive to me.

“I’m going to follow up on some leads,” Seth continued. “But if you’re free this evening, I’d like to take you to dinner.”

I swallowed, not wanting to appear too eager. “You shouldn’t mix business and pleasure, or so I’ve been told.”

Seth immediately put his hands up. “Of course. It would just be a friendly dinner.” Then, he grinned a little wickedly. “At least until I’m finished with this job and there’s no longer a conflict of interest.”

My stomach did that flip-flop thing. Would there even be anything for us after this job was finished? Either he’d catch me, or I’d have to flee in some way and he’d never see me again, or I would go uncaught and I’d have to keep this massive lie from him for as long as we were dating (or hooking up or whatever we ended up doing).

It wasn’t a fun situation, no matter how you sliced it.

But I couldn’t reveal all that to him. Instead I just let myself give in, just for the moment, to the feeling of being wanted. And desired. I felt my face get warm. “Good to know. Friendly dinner it is, then.”

Seth inclined his head towards the door. “I’ll see you later, then.”

I nodded. I knew a dismissal when it was given, even if the way it was delivered was friendly and charming. “See you later.”

I left the room, my stomach swirling and my heart pounding. I was turned on, and I was also terrified, and I had no idea which one would win out or how I could get out of this mess I’d made for myself.

Chapter7

Seth

It was wildly stupid of me to try and go on a date with Ariana while I was still working with this company, but it wasn’t an official date—or at least that’s what I was telling myself to feel better. I could hear my friends laughing at me already.

She was pretty, she was smart, I liked her—and there was this way she reacted to me that had heat spiraling up my spine. It could just be wishful thinking, but I had a hunch that maybe, just maybe, she was into the same things in the bedroom that I was.

That high kept me going as I plunged back into research… until I found the emails.

I’d gotten into the Cloud accounts of the C-level executives and was looking through their emails and paperwork. It was pretty much the same as what I’d seen in the computer system, although there were deleted drafts and emails that the Cloud had saved, all small things that weren’t a big deal.

Until I got to this one email exchange.

It was between Brian, the COO, and someone only going by the name of X. The emails discussed the setup of the system using the hard drive, my arrival, and how to use the hard drive with the program on it to delete that program from the computer system so I couldn’t find it.

The timestamps matched up with my arrival and when the thefts had started. But would Brian really be stupid enough to communicate with this person on his company email account? True, I had seen plenty of stupid people in my time, but the program I had found traces of in the system had been wildly sophisticated. Why wouldn’t the paid hacker insist on a more analogue mode of communication given that they had to know the Cloud would log and save all emails from the company account?

No, this smelled like a setup. I worked on decrypting the email address that Brian had communicated with. It was a good job and it took me a while, but I was able to find out it was a dummy account that had been set up—and was now deleted.

Was it Brian, trying to pull a double-bluff and exonerate himself by accusing himself in a way that would fall apart and prove to be fake? I didn’t think he was that smart. Was it Damien or another of the four remaining executives trying to blow smoke up my ass? Or…

I hadn’t spoken to the rest of the tech team. Ariana had insisted that they were all in the clear and trustworthy, but on top of her conviction—which could be misplaced—there was the fact that I hadn’t actually talked to any of them. I’d talked to the managers of the departments. That meant one of those managers had to be involved in this and had told their tech person after speaking with me, or…

Or it was the very tech person I’d been handed as an ally.

I didn’t like the idea, but I subscribed to the principle of: the simplest solution was usually the correct one. Who had I spoken to from the beginning? Ariana. Who had clearly suspected I was doing more than just beefing up security? Ariana. Who was an expert with computers? Ariana.

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