Page 42 of Indecent Demands

But all the logic in the world didn’t change how I felt. And I felt bad, guilty even, for deceiving Seth.

I had to do this. I wasn’t going to sit around and wait to see if Seth would figure out what was going on. My freedom was on the line here and I wasn’t a person used to waiting for others to save her. Nobody had ever saved me or helped me. It was why I wanted to help others—to give them what I never had. A sense of safety and security, even if it was just monetary.

But while I loved how Seth took care of me in bed, that didn’t mean I could trust him to do it outside of that. I’d taken my destiny into my own hands before. I could do it again.

My first stop was to the college where Harcourt had met his two buddies, one of whom came from a rich family and persuaded his father to give Harcourt the startup cash to take their company from a dream to a reality. It was easy to get the professors and administrative staff to talk to me—I just told them that I was a journalist working on a big piece about Harcourt.

“It’s all right if you don’t have anything to say that’s positive,” I assured them all. “I want to have a full, comprehensive look. People like a bit of scandal and controversy anyway. It makes them feel like they’re getting the full story and they can make up their minds themselves about whether they like the person or not.”

Harcourt’s professors remembered him as an average student who thought he was smarter than he actually was, but was good with people. “He always gave the presentations for group projects,” one of his business professors told me. “I always suspected from student feedback that he hadn’t done any of the actual research work, but he was a great presenter. I think most other students were glad they had someone who liked doing public speaking in their group. Most students get nervous about presenting.”

Most of the people he’d been in a frat with were long since gone from campus, but the administration had a slightly different picture for me than his professors.

“He was trouble,” said one secretary named Mavis who’d been at the college for fifty years. I was pretty sure that you could fire the entire board in charge of the college and you’d be fine as long as Mavis was still around, actually doing the work to run things.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked. A dozen possibilities flew through my mind, from assault to cheating to frat pranks.

Marvis pursed her lips. She could’ve been sixty years old or a hundred, it was impossible to tell. “The subtle kind,” she said. “You won’t find anything in his records here. He kept his nose clean. But he was the president of his fraternity his junior and senior years, so I dealt with him a few times. He was very good at using people. And discarding them.”

“In what way?”

“He had hangers-on in the fraternity. His two closest friends, I don’t remember their names off the top of my head I’m afraid, but if you gave me them that would ring a bell. Those stuck around. But the others… he would be quite friendly with them for some time, and then when he got what he wanted, he’d move on. Quite a lot of girlfriends, obviously. But I would see him making friends with the more quiet, studious types in various classes. And I noticed he always did well on tests even if his class participation was abysmal.”

I grinned. “Mavis, I bet you could tell me so much gossip about this school.”

Mavis gave me a demure smile. “You have no idea.”

So, Damien Harcourt was the type to use someone and then get rid of them, whether that was for grades or sex, or anything else he wanted. It stood to reason that he’d be the same kind of person nowadays. In fact, in my experience he’d be even worse, since enough wealth made you divorced from the reality that most people had to deal with and dulled your sense of empathy.

Had he done something—used someone bad enough—that it was worthy of indictment? A jail sentence? Was he trying to avoid prison?

I decided to go right to the source next and visited his parents with the same story as before. They were in a large house in a respectable upper middle class neighborhood, the kind where everyone was actually kind of rich but didn’t realize that they were and thought they were just ‘comfortable’. No insane sprawling mansions but the kind of house that you could expect to see in an ‘80s film.

This was the level of wealth that everyone should have—the kind of wealth that you could enjoy without it being obscene excess and more than you could possibly spend. The kind of wealth that people who grew up poor like my family could actually possibly achieve in a fair world.

I tried not to let my anger and envy take over as I knocked on their front door. Damien’s parents were the kind of smiling, sweater-wearing benign folk that I’d expected. I was greeted with pleasantries and brought into the living room where I was offered water or coffee.

“I just want to know what kind of person Damien’s like,” I said. “A real intimate picture.”

“He took a while to come into his own,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He wasn’t really great at holding onto friends, growing up.”

“He was very ambitious, but he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with that ambition,” Mrs. Harcourt added.

“Well, he’s good at all of that now,” I replied cheerfully. “He’s kept his close friendship with the two men that founded the company with him, right?”

“Yes, of course.” Mr. Harcourt smiled and he seemed relieved. “It was nice to see that he finally found his people. He had a bit of a revolving door in college but those two were the ones who stuck by him.”

That fit with what Mavis had told me, although it was filtered through the lens of a parent’s love. Damien hadn’t kept friends for long because they’d served their purpose—except for these two men. Brian and Jackson. I’d tried to frame Brian as COO, and Seth had seen through it. But was Brian really squeaky clean? Did he and Jackson stick by Damien because they were truly friends? Or did they continue to serve a purpose for him? Or, did they have something over him, something that made it so Damien couldn’t get rid of them the way he had the others?

Brian and Jackson had helped him start up the company and had been there for his college career. They might very well know something about what Damien had done and held it over him.

I didn’t think I could get to Brian or Jackson but… Jackson’s family had been the ones to fund the company when it was just a startup. Perhaps they might know something? Had Jackson’s father really given them that money because he believed in the cause, or because Damien had forced him to—through blackmail or extortion?

I headed for the office of Jackson’s father back in the city. He was the head of a successful chain of real estate offices, but once I told his secretary I was a journalist, she let me right in and said I could have half an hour before he had to leave for another meeting.

Mr. Conners sat at his desk, going over papers in a lazy manner. He looked up when I entered. “My secretary told me you were a journalist?”

“Yes, and thank you for seeing me so last-minute, Mr. Conners. I was supposed to have more time with this story, but the main story for an upcoming issue fell apart and so we’re replacing it with mine.” I sat down across from him. “We’re doing a piece on Damien Harcourt, now that he’s about to take Smirtech public.”

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