Page 104 of Dangerous Temptation
‘Did you look at these?’ he asked, tackling the subject head on.
She wanted to cry. ‘Yes. I was curious, but I didn’t understand them – and I felt so guilty about spying I was sick.’
His chin dipped. ‘I didn’t feel right looking through your computer files, either.’
Her wet eyes snapped up to meet his gaze.
‘There were too many files,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I didn’t put it together until you did it for me at your dissertation.’
He opened the blue notebook and held it so she could see. ‘This is the last year and a half of my life.’
She hesitantly touched the narrow-ruled paper. It still made zero sense to her. The pages were filled with gobbledygook. His lips curled when she scrunched her nose, so he pulled out another notebook. At least she could read some of what was in it. The green notebook had comments in what she recognised as his tight, cropped handwriting.
Something about architecture and action scripts … ‘Were you coding in prison?’ she asked.
‘They wouldn’t give me access to a computer, so I had to do it all by hand.’
She grimaced. There were pages upon pages of chicken scratching. Reams of them. Some lines had been crossed out while others had been circled for emphasis. Were all the notebooks like this? ‘You’ve been transcribing all this?’
‘Using it as more of a guide, really. I’ve been refactoring as I go and fixing things as the quality testers send them back.’
‘Wolfe Pack is working on this.’ She remembered the meeting in the conference room with all the department heads. And Professor Walters. ‘This is Project Alpha Wolfe.’
He closed the notebook with care. ‘I should have named it The Siren Project.’
She frowned. Her brain could only take in so much, and it had already done its work for the day.
For the month, actually.
Taking a deep breath, he spread his arm over the sofa behind her. Something twirled in Elena’s chest when he began to play with her hair.
‘We’re a lot alike, you know,’ he said.
Really? She’d never thought that. He was driven and aggressive. She was motivated, but quiet. Studious. But they’d meshed well.
She locked her ankles together. Very well.
The muscle in his jaw twitched. ‘That Ponzi scheme that my grandfather and your father developed was an evil concoction. It nearly cut me off at the knees when I found out about it, but there was nothing I could do to protect anyone. The damage had already been done to the investors … to the Wolfe family … to you.’
His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his fingers tangled in her hair.
‘There was no avoiding it. No explaining it. No stopping it or turning it around. That nearly drove me crazy.’
She heard the rasp in his voice, and she laid her hand on his thigh. His muscles bunched, but she didn’t pull back. His gaze met hers, and she could see right to his soul.
‘When they put me in that cell, I knew I had to find a way to fill my time or Iwouldlose it.’
She stroked his leg, hating to think of him being held down that way. The vision of those scratches on the closet door still made her want to howl.
He shook his head. ‘I realised that the only way to settle matters in my own mind was to find a way to turn everything around. Power needed to be given back to investors. They needed financial software that could protect them. It’s always been an elusive thing in the industry. Companies self-report. The SEC has become much more powerful, but not even it has the tools to detect the kind of activity our family members conducted. So I started building that tool – useless as it was at the time. There was only one problem.’
‘No computer?’
‘Noyou.’
She smiled gently. ‘Alex, I’m glad I inspire you, but –’
He gave a short laugh. ‘You inspire me in other ways, Siren.’ His gaze touched on the necklace nestled between her breasts. ‘What I needed at the time was your beautiful brain.’
