Page 9 of Indecent Demands

“Good to know,” I said, trying to make my tone sultry. I wasn’t sure how well I succeeded. I was pretty sure I sounded more like a schoolgirl who’d never gone on a date before.

I made my escape before I could make more of an idiot of myself. He probably had women throwing themselves at him all the time, with his gorgeous, good looks and muscles like that. How was I supposed to make his head spin and earn his trust if I couldn’t keep up with him in the flirting department? I doubted he wanted a blushing moron who was easily tripped up.

I went back to my desk and made myself busy until I saw Seth close his laptop and head out. Then I got to work.

I had to erase my automated system before he could get deep enough in the software to find it.

Setting up my network had taken time alone in the room where we stored all the computers and hardware—I had to get back down there to disable it all quickly. I packed up my things like I was leaving and logged out of my account, then headed down to the computer room, waving goodbye to Tony as I went.

Once I got there, I plugged into the computer directly and connected the system to my personal laptop. All right. Time to erase it all.

I worked carefully. I didn’t want to rush things and risk doing a hack job. I had to eliminate every trace of myself from the system. I kept an eye on the clock while I did it. Seth would be interviewing people, but I didn’t know how long that would take. An hour? Two hours?

He couldn’t see me leave the building. Thank God we didn’t need to use our keycards to leave the building so there was no way that Seth could tell I hadn’t left the building when Tony thought I did.

I stayed sitting on the floor with my back to the servers, working diligently on my laptop. I hated deleting all of my hard work. So many people were being helped with this, and now… what about the dozens or even hundreds of people I could’ve freed from medical debt, or actual death, who now wouldn’t get what they needed?

There was no way I could stop completely. What I did wasn’t about me. This was about helping other people in desperate need the way my family hadn’t been able to get help. I would still do my work. I’d just limit it to manual withdrawals for now. But I had to be careful—if I went to jail then there went any chance of helping anymore people. However, I wasn’t going to let one security guy, no matter how nice or handsome or sexy, stand in my way.

This wasn’t for me. This was for everyone the system had failed. The people who suffered while men like Damien Harcourt received political and corporate handouts and made billions while doing absolutely nothing to truly earn it. Harcourt was the real criminal, the kind of guy who professed to doing things “legally” but through a broken system that supported the rich and left the rest of us struggling.

Nobody was going to get in the way of my justice.

Nobody.

Chapter5

Seth

There was definitely thievery going on.

The accounting department’s numbers were the same as the individual entries in the computer system, but in the accounting department some of them were lumped together. Still, all the numbers checked out.

It wasn’t until I spoke to the actual people who handled the numbers that I saw what the problem was.

“There is no way that it cost this much for the office supplies,” one of the managers told me. “When you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you start to learn the cost of things like paper and staplers and how much you get when you buy in bulk. This is definitely too much, if someone tried to charge us this price for that stuff I’d say we were being robbed blind and I’d tell them to take a hike. We’d pick a different supplier.”

When I spoke to the different department heads, it was the same thing. Yes, those were the numbers entered into the system and that had been tallied up by accounting for the reports, but those were not the individual prices they themselves had paid when handling their business for the company.

Whoever this thief was, they were good. They had set things up in such a way that unless you actually talked to each manager you wouldn’t realize there was a theft happening. I was surprised—and a little impressed—that Damien Harcourt had caught it.

Howhadhe caught it?

That was a question that tugged at my gut, and I resolved to look into him, too. It could be that he’d hired us to catch his accomplice, if he had one, because he knew the game was about to be up and he wanted to get ahead of it.

I took statements from all of the managers, then compiled that all together and put the information in the file I was assembling and headed down to the server room. I wanted to get a look at the hardware for myself, to see if anyone had been tampering with it. I was more certain than ever that someone higher-up had been fucking around with the network, but in my experience few C-level executives knew how to do it on their own, and in order for someone to go in and mess with the individual entries in the computer system, they had to know their way around coding.

They’d probably plugged directly into the hardware. That would make things easier.

When I got down there, I didn’t expect there to be anyone around. It was almost the end of the afternoon and I’d already seen a few employees heading home. But when I arrived, just as the door opened, I thought I heard something.

I paused. My ears strained to pick up on the noise. It was faint, but it sounded like movement.

I stepped silently into the room, closing the door slowly behind me. I stood still, listening intently. There was no noise.

The rows of computer servers in front of me filled the entire space, creating rows high up to the ceiling that turned the space into almost a maze. Someone could be hiding behind any of the rows.

I crept forward. I didn’t have any weapons on me, but I was no slouch in the hand-to-hand department and I was usually stronger than most of the people I went up against, so unless this person had a gun I wasn’t too worried. And who would have a gun on them at this stage?

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