Page 36 of The Money Man
Chapter 9
Alice stood at the bay window of her kitchen, sipping coffee and watching a squirrel outsmart her supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder. Watching but not caring because all she could think about was last night with Derek. Her body hummed with satisfaction even though when she moved, there was an occasional twinge. They’d made love once more in the middle of the night and again when Derek started to slip out of the bed just before dawn. Each intimacy had followed a different rhythm and mood. Derek was an inventive lover, but that didn’t surprise her. She figured he had a lot of experience.
What did surprise her was his consideration for her and what she could only call his tenderness. He’d almost refused to make love to her the third time, not because he didn’t want to—she could feel the physical evidence of his interest pushing against her thigh—but because he was concerned for her well-being. She’d quickly disabused him of any doubts that she could handle it. In the dark, looks didn’t matter so she could banish her insecurities; everything was touch and sound and scent.
She smiled as she remembered the sleepy yet urgent quality of that coupling in the wee hours of the morning. He’d twined his fingers with hers, anchoring their hands to the bed on either side of her head while he moved inside her, pushing her to climax with just the angle and flex of his hips and cock. It had been delicious and intense, her muscles clenching around him while her body wanted to arch up from the bed but was held down by his weight and grip. It forced all her focus on the explosion between her legs.
Her breathing grew shallow at the memory.
Reality intruded when Audley jumped onto the table she stood beside. “Hey, you’re not allowed up here,” Alice said, but she stroked his velvety fur, her mood so glorious that she didn’t have it in her to discipline the cat.
When her cell phone danced across the table and sang the minuet, Audley barely twitched. Her cats had learned to take technology in stride. She grabbed the phone, torn between hoping it was Derek and fearing that he was calling to cancel the dinner date they’d set up for that evening. She knew he was under all kinds of pressure with his new project.
A glance at the screen killed the happy glow suffusing her.
“Holy—!” She stopped before the curse word passed her lips. The caller ID was “unknown” but she recognized the phone number.
It was Myron Barsky.
She stared at the ringing, vibrating phone while her mind raced. If she answered it, what would she say? She and Derek didn’t have their cover story nailed down since they’d gotten distracted by other matters last night.
Better to let it go to voice mail for now.
It seemed to take forever before the phone went quiet. A notification pinged that she had a message. She waited for several seconds, as though Barsky would somehow know that she had picked up his message immediately.
“Ms. Thurber, I hear from Gary Woertz at the Lipton Hotel that you’re looking to buy our BalanceTrakR software. That’s good news! Please call me back and we’ll get you all set up.” A little bit of Texas twang tinged his voice but when she listened closely, there was another accent lurking there. Knowing what she did now, his tone seemed to hold a slightly threatening edge. But she had to be imagining that.
So Woertz had decided he wanted credit for the potential sale to Alice and called Barsky. Derek was not going to be happy. Actually, she wasn’t happy either, now that she knew Barsky was a criminal.
Even that might not have worried her so much except for the fact that her question had been removed from the help forum. She hadn’t used her full name, but a skilled hacker—which someone at BalanceTrakR was—could easily trace her IP address. Barsky might not know she had a problem with the software but someone at his company most likely did. A twinge of fear tightened around her lungs.
Time to call in the big guns. She hit Derek’s number, and he answered as soon as it rang.
“Alice.” His baritone seemed to caress her name, fanning to life all the flames quenched by Barsky’s call. “There’s not a problem with our dinner tonight, is there?”
A short flash of happiness burst inside her because he didn’t want her to cancel dinner. But the pinch of anxiety killed it. “Myron Barsky just called me. I didn’t answer, so he left a voice mail saying he’d heard I wanted to buy the software and to please call him back.”
“Shit!” Derek said the word she’d bitten off. “So your hotel manager wanted to take credit for getting Barsky another sale. You were smart not to answer.”
“We never got to discuss our cover story last night, so I didn’t know what to say.”
“I can’t say I regret that.”
His admission soothed the edge of unease that gripped her. “Did I say anything about regrets? It was just an explanation.”
She had hoped for a chuckle but he clearly wasn’t in a laughing mood. “Don’t call Barsky back. I’ll handle it from here on out. We’ll have to expedite the trip to Texas but we should be able to do it in a long day on a chartered jet. How flexible is your schedule?”
A chartered jet? The expense boggled her mind since KRG would get no compensation for the trip. On the other hand, she’d have six hours in private with Derek. A lot could happen in six hours.
“I’m my own boss so I can go anytime, especially since I don’t like getting phone calls from embezzlers.”
“I like the phone call even less.” His tone was somber but then the timbre changed to something hot. “Tonight we’ll make sure to go over the cover storyfirst.”
Which meant that they’d be doing other things afterward, things that made her knees go weak.
Derek strode into Leland’s office with fear for Alice riding on his shoulder. He was getting bad vibes about this whole situation and he hated having Alice at the center of the storm. “Myron Barsky just called Alice’s cell phone.”
“Shit!” Leland snapped. “That’s not good.”
