Unfinished Seductions

by Raleigh Davis

  But when she came back from talking with her mom, wearing a small frown, I could imagine what they’d been discussing. The separation, the divorce, and what her mom considers to be my fault in all this.

  If Callie wants a partner, then I have to try to be one. So we’ll confront Fuchs together.

  And I want Fuchs to know that he cannot fuck with my wife. She’s mine, and his little games with his website have failed.

  Fuchs looks Callie up and down in a way that makes my fist clench. I can’t punch him in the face though. At least not in front of half of Silicon Valley.

  “Are you here to discuss the offer I made?” he says to Callie.

  He’s ignoring me on purpose, trying to piss me off. It’s working, but I’ve got to hold my anger back if I’m going to hit at him like I want to.

  “No, she’s not. And your offer was—”

  “I can speak for myself, Logan.” Her voice is steady, but her pulse flutters at the base of her throat. “I’m not afraid of Mr. Fuchs.”

  “Why would you be afraid of me? I offered you a great deal of money for something you have no need of. Divorced women often fall into poverty. You’d never suffer that fate if you took my offer.”

  His words are practiced, too even, like he’s reciting something he’s read and not something he believes.

  “I would never allow that to happen to her, no matter what.”

  His attention finally shifts to me. “She left you. I of course assumed she had a very good reason for doing so.”

  “You manufactured those reasons.”

  Minerva leans forward then. “Mr. Fuchs, we need to continue with our meeting.”

  Irritation flickers across his face. He doesn’t like the interruption.

  It’s odd, because Minerva doesn’t seem the type to annoy him. If anything, she’s his too-perfect sidekick.

  And then I notice that his fingers are moving on the tabletop, almost close to something rhythmic.

  Fuchs is rattled. He didn’t expect us to know about TidBytes, and Minerva is trying to steer him away from it.

  I almost smile. We’ve got this asshole scared now.

  “Arne will take this time to talk with us, won’t you?” I ask.

  Fuchs says nothing. His fingers keep moving.

  “You planted all those pictures of Logan.” Callie doesn’t make that a question. “You wanted to destroy our marriage. And when it worked, you swooped in with your offer.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Fuchs’s jaw barely moves as he pushes that out.

  “You think I’m stupid, that I can’t compete at your level,” Callie says, anger sizzling through her voice. “I may not know how to code, but I know when I’m being played.”

  “Our offer was in good faith,” Minerva says.

  “And all those pictures on TidBytes? Were those in good faith?”

  “We had nothing to do with that.” Minerva isn’t rattled, unlike her boss.

  I don’t care if she’s upset or not—she’s not my target here. “You’re using TidBytes to manipulate your enemies. You hid it well, but we know you’re behind the site.”

  Fuchs spreads his fingers flat on the table, his expression going blank. Damn, he’s getting control of himself. “If you continue with these assertions, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer. This is slander.”

  “I don’t think you’d come out of pretrial discovery looking too innocent,” Callie says. “But we’re not interested in a legal battle.”

  She’s so cool and calm I have to take a moment to admire her. I’m not going to let her fight this battle alone, but I see now that she could have.

  “We?” Fuchs’s gaze flicks from her to me then back. “I thought you were separated.”

  “We’ve reconciled,” I say before Callie can answer.

  That isn’t what he wants to hear. His mouth goes tight and thin. “Congratulations. Now, if you’re done wasting my time—”

  “But we’re not,” Callie says. “We’re not done, and we’re not wasting your time, because you’ll definitely want to know that we’re on to you. We’re not going to let you get away with it.”

  The jut of her chin, the defiance in her eyes… Goddamn, but she looks gorgeous. When we get home, I’m going to tell her exactly how gorgeous. And show her too.

  “Right.” Fuchs has completely reassumed his bored demeanor. But his fingers have started twitching again. “Well, thank you.”

  I almost laugh, because that won’t be his reaction once we’ve launched our site. The poor dumb bastard can’t say we didn’t warn him though.

  Callie turns to walk away, tall and graceful and splendid among all these bland engineers. But after two steps, she turns back. “Oh, and I’d suggest you check how happy your writers at TidBytes are. It would be a shame if they were poached by a rival site.”

  Fuchs isn’t dumb. He’s evil and awful and completely immoral, but he’s not dumb. When he realizes exactly what Callie is implying, his mouth drops open so far I’m worried his tongue will fall out.

  Which makes Callie and me laugh all the way home.

  Chapter 25

  After a steady week of work, my to-do list is finally shrinking. The assistant Anjie sent over has been amazing, and we’ve already hired a bunch of people for the site.

  We’ve also signed on a managing editor, and she’s taken a huge load off my shoulders. It turns out that I don’t have to worry about every single little detail; that can be her job.

  My job is the graphic design, and I’m perfectly happy doing that. I’m trying to work out the type for our logo. My efforts before now have all been unsatisfying, but I feel like I’m getting close with this latest one. The letters taking shape on my graphics tablet are finally getting close to what is in my head.

  My fingers sketch as gentle as feather strokes, filling out the lines of text. There’s a tall but sassy T, a smaller, almost winking e, and…

  I pinch my lower lip between my forefinger and thumb and tug. Typography has been described as painting with text, and like any painter, I’m waiting for some inspiration.

  My husband is sitting in the office with me, and while he’s very, very beautiful, typographically he’s not very interesting. Still, I can’t help but stare at him. He’s been working from home for a week now, and he seems… content. We eat dinner together every night and spend time together. Real time, where we’re talking and not simply passing each other in the halls.

  It’s exactly how I imagined our marriage would be at the beginning, and I’m terrified that it won’t last.

  “This is how we met.” Logan’s voice is low, hushed. But it still rumbles through me. “Remember?”

  I laugh softly, because how could I ever forget? “Yes. You stood over me just like this.”

  “Did it bother you?”

  I shake my head. “No. Some people that hover, they think they’re the graphic designer, offering criticism. But you just were… interested.”

  Intensely interested, both in me and the work. Men in tech can be crushingly dismissive of graphic design or user interface design or anything that wasn’t plain code or numbers on a screen. But it takes skill and work and talent to do what I do.

  Logan understands that.

  He reaches across the desk to brush my hair back over my shoulder. I really need to get a haircut, but I keep making excuses to put it off.

  “I’m more than interested.” He tucks my hair behind my ear, then makes a face.

  “What?” I keep sketching. I can almost see what was in my mind, the letters strong but playful… Almost there…

  “Why did you keep this sweater? It’s got holes. We can get you a new one.”

  Without thinking, I put on my old sweater this morning. If we’re not going out, it’s the first thing I reach for. I have an entire closet full of sweaters—cashmere, lamb’s wool, angora—soft and warm as a kitten. I don’t need this ratty acrylic thing.

  I pull the cowl up, covering my chin. “I like it.”r />
  His gaze drops, his mouth tightening. “I can turn up the heat. You don’t have to sit here shivering.”

  I take stock of my posture. Knees tucked up tight on the chair, sleeves gathered up over my knuckles, and my cowl pulled up to my ears. But I’m not cold.

  I force my body to unroll. My marriage is becoming everything I wanted it to be. Holding myself like a frightened animal isn’t going to help things even if it is instinctual.

  “I’m fine. What do you think of this?” I hold out the tablet to him, although he could simply look on the main screen.

  He doesn’t take it from me, instead coming around and curving over my shoulder to look. His arm brushes mine when he points to one of the letters. “That one doesn’t quite fit.”

  He’s right—that g is too squat. I fiddle with it, stretching it, then tweaking the tail until it looks like it belongs.

  “Better?” I ask.

  Logan has been watching the entire time, close enough to make my heart stutter. “Yes. But you should sleep on it. Look at it on some other screens.”

  That’s exactly my process. I probably said that to him when we were working on the Bastards logo, and he remembered.

  “I’ll do that.” I set the tablet down along with my stylus. He’s so close I’ll never be able to work like this. But I don’t want to reach for him, to distract him, because then he might—

  His lips touch my neck, and every part of me goes to liquid heat. I don’t want to distract him, but I never considered that he might want to be distracted.

  He takes his time kissing me, tracing every square inch of exposed skin like he’s mapping it. Like he has all the time in the world to do it, as long and leisurely as he wants.

  In the entire week he’s been working from home, he hasn’t done this. Intimacy, at least the physical kind, only happens once he’s off the clock. It was driving me crazy, being so close to him and not being able to touch.

  It looks like it was driving him crazy too.

  “Should we take a break?” he murmurs.

  Yes. Yes, we should. In fact, I’m going to suggest that we take the rest of the day off so he can keep kissing me like—

  His email pings. He goes still.

  My muscles knot, waiting for him to leave me and rush over to his laptop, to deal with whatever work needs.

  He straightens and takes his seat across from me but doesn’t open his laptop. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  I grab the arms of my chair, trying to bring myself back from where his kisses have sent me. “Really?”

  That comes out high and squeaky. Even though he’s stopped—and I wish he hadn’t—the fact that he even started is amazing. Maybe next time I can get him to go further. And eventually have him never jumping when his email calls.

  That’ll have to be when I have less work myself. Whose bright idea was it to start a website anyway?

  I pull up my web browser and navigate to TidBytes. I’m stuck on some of the user interface stuff, and I remember they had that Breaking News header that I hated—

  “That asshole.” I hiss when the page opens. “That horrible, awful…”

  I can’t think of a name bad enough, and I’m so angry that my voice stops working.

  “What?” Logan is back by my side in half a second. “Son of a bitch.”

  There on the front page of TidBytes is a picture of us, looking completely miserable. The headline says Bastards Divorce Battle Heats Up.

  In the photo, we’re leaving a steakhouse downtown, and we look miserable because it was freaking freezing that night, the wind in the Financial District even colder and meaner than usual. Logan has his hand on my elbow, guiding me to the car, but with our expressions, it looks like he’s manhandling me.

  I’m suddenly sympathetic to all the celebrities who get awful pictures plastered across the Enquirer. We were actually enjoying ourselves that night, but they picked the one picture that made us look bad.

  “Who took that?” I ask.

  “Anybody within twenty feet with a cell phone,” Logan says grimly. “Which means everyone.”

  “I guess confronting him didn’t work.” As I stare at the picture, the old familiar ache starts in my stomach. I know this picture is fake, that of course our divorce isn’t heating up—we’re not even divorcing—but it still hurts. Some corner of my mind thinks it’s real, like when you have a nightmare so vivid it follows you through the day.

  Logan reaches over and closes the browser window. “It did work, which is why he’s trying to rattle us. If he wanted those shares from you, he wouldn’t be trying to piss us off like this. No, he’s angry and he’s hitting back blindly just to prove he can.”

  I pull my sleeves over my hands and wrap my arms around myself. It makes sense, and Logan knows Fuchs better than I do… but my uneasiness lingers. “I still wish I hadn’t seen that.”

  I keep my eyes on my keyboard because if my gaze wanders, it might land on him. I need some psychic space between us after seeing that.

  But Logan isn’t letting that happen. He puts a gentle hand to my cheek and turns me toward him. The vulnerability in his gaze, the pleading, hits me right in the chest. “I’ll call Elliot, get him to write a takedown notice. The threat of legal action will make them pull the story.”

  For a moment I consider it. I’m definitely going to be hearing from my friends about this story, wanting to know if I’m okay, if our reconciliation didn’t work out.

  But I realize I’m not afraid of those calls. And I’m not afraid of Fuchs.

  “Leave it up,” I say. “That way the tech world will be even more shocked when we launch our site.”

  Logan’s smile is so pleased I want to wrap it around me. “Elliot would love doing it though.”

  “I’m sure Elliot can find something else to do with his time.” My own email pings then. I sigh, then call up the mail program. And then I start to mutter curses.

  “What happened?” Logan asks.

  “Another TidBytes writer has asked me to stop bothering them.” I stare at the email, reading between the lines. “That’s the third one I’ve reached out to, and all of them have said they can’t even speak to me about other job opportunities.”

  There’s real fear in all the emails, beyond the annoyed tone. Almost like they think their boss is spying on them.

  “Fuchs is notorious for his noncompetes,” Logan says.

  “But they don’t even know Fuchs is their real boss.” I gesture futilely to the email. “They have no idea, but they’re still afraid.” I frown as a sudden thought occurs to me. “You never did figure out how Fuchs is passing his instructions on to the management at TidBytes, did you?”

  “No,” Logan says slowly. “What are you planning?”

  Man, he can read me too well. “You said something about Minerva maybe meeting with the editors. She’s not on social media… but the editor-in-chief is.”

  “And you think he’s going to blab about meeting Minerva there?”

  “No,” I say, annoyed at his skepticism. “The editor-in-chief isn’t that stupid, and she’s a she. But she does post pictures of her lunches and coffee breaks. What if… what if we followed her to one of those places, maybe watched to see if Minerva appears?”

  Logan’s mouth is hanging open. He ought to look ridiculous, but he’s too beautiful for that. “That… that would never work. And if Minerva did appear, what are we supposed to do with that? We already know Fuchs owns the site.”

  “But the public doesn’t.” I run my hands down my wool skirt. “We could publish those pictures on our site. Ask why Fuchs’s assistant is meeting with someone from TidBytes. Turn Fuchs’s own weapons against him. Directly.”

  Logan runs a hand over his jaw. It’s late afternoon, and already some stubble has sprouted there, a shadow on his skin. He doesn’t say anything, just thinks.

  “You hate it,” I say flatly.

  “No.” He rubs his jaw once more, then lets his hand drop. “I jus
t don’t think it will work.” He rises from the chair and grabs his jacket.

  “Wait, where are you going?”

  He points to my laptop screen, where a picture of the editor’s lunch is prominently displayed on her PopPix account. “To that sandwich shop. She just now posted that.”

  “But…” My mouth opens and closes like a fish’s. “You don’t think it will work.”

  He shuts my laptop and hands me my sweater. “I don’t. But we’re going anyway.”

  My lips curve into a smile. “Are you just humoring me?”

  He bends over to kiss my forehead. “Yep. And playing hooky to do it. Are you happy?”

  “Yes.” I know my eyes are glowing, but I can’t help myself. And I don’t want to.

  Chapter 26

  Playing spy with Callie is probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done.

  We’re sitting at a bar across the street from the café the editor is at, the two of us crouched behind a plant on the patio. The bar is pretty much deserted since it’s way too early to be drinking. Which doesn’t make us look conspicuous at all.

  “Do you think she can see us?” Callie whispers. She’s wearing oversized sunglasses even though it’s completely overcast today.

  “She definitely can’t hear us,” I say in a normal tone. “There’s an entire intersection between us.”

  Callie makes a face at me, keeping her voice low. “We can’t get caught.”

  “We won’t, because Minerva isn’t coming.”

  She puts her chin in her hand. “Yet you still left work for a wild-goose chase.”

  I did, and it was all for the pleased look on her face. “I’ll have to work late tonight instead,” I warn her.

  “I know.” Her tone is unconcerned. “I will too.”

  “We’ll have to make sure we take some breaks then.” I raise an eyebrow. “You know, so we stay sharp.”

  Callie licks her bottom lip, slowly. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” Suddenly she sits up like she’s been shocked. “Oh my God.”