Page 91 of A Flighty Fake Boyfriend
I shrugged. “I don’t live here. Let’s shock the neighbors.”
He whipped off his shirt. “First one in gets a shoulder massage.”
I let him win.
Ten minutes later, Epic leaned both arms on the side of the hot tub while I worked the knots out of his back and shoulders. He sighed happily.
“Three o’clock today,” I reminded him.
“Hm?”
“That’s high noon as it were. At three o’clock today, you’re going to have to talk to your parents. Any idea what you plan to say?”
“What can I say?”
“Start from the beginning. Why are they here now?”
He dropped his head to rest on his arms. “We had a big fight after I got my master’s. I wanted to live in St. Nacho’s. Mom and Dad sent a blizzard of my CVs to all their business contacts here and abroad. Several companies would have offered me a job on the spot—midlevel finance stuff with an eye toward moving up in the world of fund management. In this economy, getting a job at all right out of school is huge, but I wanted time. We made a deal.”
“Let me guess the rest. It’s midnight, you’re Cinderella, and now you have to leave the ball.”
“Right. They called it a belated gap year. Gave me twelve months to ‘get it out of my system.’”
“Did you give them your word you’d go home after a year?”
He shrugged. “I gave them my word I’d consider it if I didn’t have a better option.”
I wanted to laugh. It might be entertaining to watch Epic wiggle his way out of his parents’ plans, although they looked pretty formidable. “You’ll need to come up with that ‘better option’ fairly quickly then.”
“Well, I was thinking about that when we were talking about your work this morning.”
“Were you?” A cooling breeze blew across my neck.
“You have a foreign service and security background, but you’re making an unconventional use of it. Just because I have a finance degree, doesn’t mean I have to go into finance.”
“Go on.” I sat back, and he turned and floated to the bench facing mine. The spa jets made it harder to hear him.
“The thing is”—he raised his voice—“I’m a math geek. I’ve interned as an actuary in hospitals. I could pursue that route. But when I was a kid, I always wanted to be Charlie Epps fromNUMB3RS. His character used math to solve crimes.”
“I remember that show. Ican see that being something you’d like.”
“The women you talked about, the missing ones? There’s definitely a way to model disappearances in the same geographical area to see if the cases are part of a larger picture.”
“I know. That’s what I do.”
“But I could help you. Two heads are better than one, right? I could write an algorithm that tracks certain values like criminal associates and excludes others like prior runaway behavior”—he frowned—“although that could falsely exclude a lot of marginalized people, so—”
“So you plan to tell your parents what?”
He glanced up sharply. “That I want a consulting job with your NGO.”
Shit.I blew out a breath. “Okay. Listen. You probably have skills we could use, but you get that it’s a nonprofit, right? Nobody there makes a lot of money. And it’s in Canada. I live and work there on a permit. You might be able to get a job there, but—”
“What I’d want is a consulting job where I could work remotely. I need to stay in St. Nacho’s.”
That got my attention. “You need to?”
“I’d prefer to.” He caught his lip between his teeth. “Strong preference.”
