ANTONIO PAUSED OUT of view of the office lobby, taking a few seconds to steel himself for the day ahead. They had a plan. Whoever this woman was, she’d be shown what she needed in order to do her job, and he and Justin could carry on as necessary, to do theirs.
He didn’t need to ask Reception who the retainer was. She was the only other person in the room. The redhead in a pinstriped suit, perched on the edge of her seat as if getting comfortable was the last thing she wanted. She was gorgeous, and exactly Justin’s type.
Lust surged through him, catching Antonio off-guard. Even with her mouth pinched in a flat line and her eyes dull and cast at nothing in particular, she was attractive. Cute in that deceptive way that probably fooled people into thinking there was nothing under the surface. Something told him she took advantage of that assumption. She must have some defense in place, to be in a position like hers.
“Ms. Lowry.” Antonio stopped in front of her and extended his hand.
She stood and smoothed her skirt, before returning the greeting. “Emily, please. Mr. Conroy?” Her voice was lilting and pleasant, but didn’t hold any traces of hesitation. That was sexy.
Which was completely inappropriate for Antonio to think. Don’t hit on the employees. Usually he didn’t need reminders like that. “His schedule is packed this morning, though he’ll try to stop by later and introduce himself. I’m Antonio Bianchi. Co-founder and development manager. Antonio is fine. I’ll be your primary contact while you’re here.” He gestured toward the elevator banks. “This way.”
They crossed the room, her heels not echoing on the tile as loudly as they should. Was she walking with a light step on purpose?
“How much do you know about our business?” His question came out gruffer than he expected. He needed to find a balance between being polite and stowing his attraction. He took a deep breath and counted to three as they waited for the lift, forcing his racing thoughts to calm.
She pursed her lips and stood a little straighter. She was only a few inches shorter than him and met his gaze, unwavering. “Grant gave me an overview of your specialties and what he’d like to see accomplished while I’m here, and I spent several hours on your website.”
“In other words, not much of anything.” Christ, he was being an asshole. They stepped into the waiting car, and he hit the button for the third floor, where his programmers sat.
Her scowl said she agreed with his assessment. “I’d like to hear the details from you. Someone in your position is more familiar with everything I need to know.”
Justin would give her most of those details. He excelled at selling people on the dream that built this company. He had a vision and a compelling way of sharing it. Besides, they agreed Antonio’s job was to give her enough to keep her busy and cut her out of everything else.
“I’m pressed for time this morning as well. I hope you understand. Things like company vision and real orientation will have to wait.” At least until he could still his racing pulse enough to deal with her professionally. The doors slid open, and they stepped onto the office floor, rows of cubicles spanning in front of them.
“That’s fine.” Her voice was low but firm. She stepped in his path, forcing him to look her in the eye. “I’m not here to take work from you or take away this vast thing the two of you have built. My job is to make yours easier. To do whatever grunt work is related to the project.”
He raised his brows at what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech. “That’s good. How long did it take you to refine it?”
She looked away for a brief moment, before looking at him again. “This is my fourth attempt.” Some of the formality vanished from her voice. “I close with offering to treat you and Mr. Conroy to dinner—on Grant’s dime—so you see I’m like any other developer you’d hire.”
“With the exception that we don’t typically give our programmers that kind of expense account.”
Her shoulders slumped, and her expression softened. “I don’t want to argue with you, but I will. I’d prefer you give me a task, and I’ll do it.”
That was the opening he needed to put her to work, and out of his distraction range. “How familiar are you with Source Secure?”
“Intimately.”
The single word triggered the last kind of thing he should be thinking. Whispers of how he’d approach her differently if she weren’t working for him. If he’d met her at a bar, like Justin met his redhead Saturday night. The stunning woman with the light walk and the tempting hips that begged to be grasped, while he pushed her back and kissed away her shy smile and turned it into something mischievous.
That needs to stop now. “That’s where we do source control. I flagged a series of files in there. Some are documentation. Others, the code that goes with it. Read through them, to familiarize yourself with the system.”
The creases in her brow deepened.
“Do you have any questions or concerns?” he asked. A voice in the back of his mind screamed that he was being unreasonably harsh, but he wasn’t in the mood to listen.
“I don’t have a problem learning, but I may absorb more if you sit me with someone, rather than give me a series of notes without a point of reference.”
“Did my accent make me difficult to understand? You’re here to do whatever we need, are you not?” Antonio asked.
“I am.”
“That’s what we need. Your desk is right there.” He led her to a cubicle set up with its screen facing his door, that allowed zero privacy, and she followed his gaze. “Your Active Directory login and temporary password are on a sticky note, and there’s a number to call if you need helpdesk support.”
She looked back at him, face pinched. “And if I have questions about what I’m reading?”
“Make a list. I’ll see if I can find a resource for you later. Anything else?”
“No. I’m on it.” She walked the short distance to her new work home.
He wouldn’t watch her ass in that skirt. He had his own work to do. He headed to his office and settled in front of his computer. Sitting in a spreadsheet in front of him was his actual backlog of work. It started with bug fixes—things that could introduce her to the code much more effectively. Tasks that needed to be done but kept getting put off. This was what he and Justin agreed on, though.
Jackass. The word echoed in Antonio’s head, taunting him. Not only did he shove real help aside, he also ogled her in the process. She was knowingly a contractor for a man who took some sort of perverse joy in making his investments jump through hoops. Antonio was surprised she didn’t call him on the menial labor. Was she really that amicable, or was she keeping track of every slight and misstep she could report back to Grant?
It didn’t matter how many directions Antonio tried to drive his thoughts in, he kept coming back to the fact he hadn’t given Emily a chance. He really was being an asshole. A horny, spiteful—
A knock drew his attention, and he looked up, to see Emily standing in the doorway. She didn’t look any happier than when he shooed her away, nearly an hour ago.
He forced a blanket over his mind, to at least be civil. “Yes?”
“Is this what you have all your developers do when they start working for you?” The quaver in her words vanished by the end of her question.
“No.”
“Do you think I’m not qualified for the job?” She crossed her arms.
There was no reason to make this worse, but he struggled to find an apology. “I assume you’re quite qualified.”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Then give me something to do that will teach me and will actually help you meet your deadline.”
“How do you know this won’t?”
“It doesn’t matter how anal a company is when it comes to documentation—and few even bother to make it a priority—unless they’re about to be audited, they don’t care about shi— things like this. And if you are about to be audited, you don’t expect someone to code from your document
ation; it only has to be readable.”
“What is it you expect of me, Ms. Lowry?”
Several seconds passed before she replied. “Give me a real task list, and if I need orientation before I dig into your code, hand me over to someone who can provide that.”
He glanced at his screens, and his project timeline mocked him. He dragged the spreadsheet over to his primary monitor, then turned the second screen to face her. “Grab your laptop, and you can follow along.”
She relaxed her shoulders, and a smile ghosted across her lips. “Be back in two seconds.” When she returned, she set up her machine so she could see both it and his screen, and looked at him. “Whatever you do, don’t go easy on me.”
His helpful mind summoned a new interpretation for her statement, of pushing her onto the desk, shoving her skirt to her waist, and sliding between her legs. What the fuck is wrong with me today?
She didn’t know what she was asking, and he needed to stop letting his mind wander. He’d give her the same orientation all new developers received. He tended to be the one who did that first-day training, because the system was his. He’d done this enough times to have an idea of when to pause, when to nudge for questions, and when to plow forward.
He gave her a brief rundown of how the AI worked, and she nodded through the entire thing. That was a good sign. He pulled up the data structure. “We have a fourteen-layer normalization.” He paused and waited for her eyes to glaze over.
“Why?” she asked.
The simplicity of her query caught him off guard. Everyone else came back with an argument about how that was stupid or didn’t make sense, or they simply stared at him blankly. He laid out the answer, complete with all the technical details.
“That makes sense. But typically, when I see a system that’s created for flexibility, even the programmers struggle to extract information. How do you get around meaningless naming conventions and still keep things open ended?”
As the overview continued, she snapped back several more questions that implied she not only understood everything he was saying, but she also didn’t have a desire to argue. Despite not wanting to like her, knowing one misstep while she was around could cost them financing, and telling himself she was nothing more than another cog, he liked how quickly she caught on. This kind of intelligence was sexier than the peek of lace from her thigh-high stockings each time she shifted in her seat.
Antonio hated to admit it, but so far she was impressive.
He didn’t realize how much time had passed, until his messenger chimed through his speakers. It was the daily roundup, to see who wanted lunch. “I didn’t mean to work you this hard. It’s noon. We should take a break.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay at my desk and work through what we’ve gone over so far. I won’t bill it back to Grant; I want to make sure I have a good grasp of what you’re telling me.”
Anyone else, and he’d wonder if the statement was either a way to kiss ass or some sort of passive-aggressive attempt at guilt. Nothing but sincerity shone in her eyes, and given how plainly she wore her emotions earlier, he believed she was genuine.
A sliver of regret wormed its way in, that he treated her poorly less than four hours ago. “Would you like company? We’ll have something brought in and go over what we covered.”
“Don’t you need to catch up on work?”
“I do. But an hour’s not enough time to find my focus. Let’s get you taken care of, and then I’ll get work done.”
He asked one of the guys to pick something up for them, then continued to review with Emily until the food arrived. He stepped out of the room long enough to grab their lunch. When he returned, he was surprised at what he saw.
“Didn’t expect that,” Antonio said. He set her sandwich, chips, and drink in front of her, and took his to the other side of the desk.
“Expect what?”
“You still reviewing.” He grabbed a fork. “You have five minutes free of the boss’s watchful eye, and I figured you’d be checking your email.”
“I wouldn’t do that. We’re working.”
He raised his brows. “Every person I’ve met, no matter how dedicated they are to their job—and that includes me—checks their phone the moment they have a breather. I don’t need a predictive algorithm to tell me that. It’s just the way things are.”
“Apparently you do need one. Unless you’re blowing smoke about what yours is capable of, it would have told you, based on my previous behavior, that I wouldn’t be looking at email when you got back. Or texts. Or anything like that.”
“Don’t pull that I’m not addicted to my electronics bullshit with me.”
She laughed and grabbed a potato chip. “I never said I didn’t check.”
He ran the conversation through his head. “But you implied it pretty heavily.”
“All right. I did do that. I looked when you left the room. From there, reality gets boring though. No new messages. No notifications on social media. I ran out of things to look at before you got back.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“I’m not. My life is that dull.” She didn’t look bothered by the conversation. Instead, amusement danced behind her eyes.
“Are you kidding? That sounds wonderful. I love the idea of not having a queue of pending notes because I kept my head down for an hour.”
“You’re full of crap.” There was no malice in her words. “You’d go nuts if you found yourself without something to do. I mean, I’m guessing, but a guy like you in a high-profile job like this drives hard because you don’t like to slow down.”
Good point. Not that he was giving her the satisfaction of conceding. “I might; I might not. It’s been a while since that was an option, and some days I do miss not being tethered. Back to it?”
“Doritos and education. Sounds perfect.”
“I would have aced school if they offered that kind of reward,” he said.
Her shoulders relaxed, and some of the stress seemed to drain from her neck, so she didn’t sit as stiffly. “Takeout as incentive for pop quizzes? Pizza for exams?”
“Not pizza. Not the way they make it here, anyway. I’m thinking a shot of Nyquil and an afternoon nap, for acing the final.”
“Nyquil? Isn’t that a bit...” She bit her bottom lip.
“A bit what?”
“Nothing.”
He took a sip of his drink. “You were going to say a bit high school, weren’t you? Poking fun at getting drunk off cough syrup?” This was nice. He was surprised but pleased with how easily the banter flowed.
“I was, but I realized that if you didn’t grow up in the States, the joke might not mean the same thing culturally.”
As pleasant as the teasing was, they did have work to do. “Dad and Mom did let us indulge a bit younger than is common here. Review time. Tell me the kinds of data sits at the tertiary level.”
“Nice try. We didn’t cover that. I’ll make you a deal—you give me that information, and you can have my cookie.”
“A bribe. Smart woman.”
She shrugged. “I know the way to a man’s heart. Pry open the ribcage.”
“Ouch. Brutal.” He expected her to say through his stomach, but that wasn’t right either. The answer was definitely his brain. She was almost more invested in this conversation that Justin was.
Antonio hated the thought the moment he had it. Justin was burned out and answering to someone else’s whim, but he wouldn’t throw everything away. They were all trapped in this situation, and the only way out was through it.
Chapter Five
Justin itched to check in with Antonio, to make sure things were running smoothly. He trusted Antonio to have a handle on it. That was one of the biggest reasons APPropiate Designs ran smoothly. But this retainer was an unknown variable, and Justin didn’t like being without that information.
Appointments took him through lunch. A little after twelve thirty, Rebecca interrupted long enough to set a
sandwich on his desk and tell him Antonio ordered out. That made Justin smile.
When his cellphone rang, he frowned at the familiar Italian country code on the screen and Antonio Sr.’s name. He answered. “Buon pomeriggio.” More than a year in the country, and all this time with Antonio afterward, was enough to teach Justin basic words and greetings.
“No need for anything that formal.” Tony chuckled. “I simply called to make sure you were doing all right.”
“Everything’s great, unless you know something I don’t.” He kept light laughter in his voice. It wasn’t unusual for Justin to talk to the older man. Tony was like a mentor to Justin in many ways, and when Justin worked for him, they established a friendly relationship. Something about the tone and out-of-the-blue call still crawled over Justin’s nerves. It might be he was on edge with the retainer in the office, but it felt more specific than that.
“It's late here, and you're busy. I won't take much of your time.” Tony Sr.'s tone was clipped but pleasant. “I tried to get a hold of Antonio, but he's not answering.”
“He's in new employee orientation. What can I do for you?” Justin suspected the answer was nothing, if this was a family thing.
“Has Antonio given you a firm resignation date, or is that still up in the air?”
Shock bled through Justin. At some point he’d known this day was coming, but over the years he pushed it to the back of his mind, until it held the same weight as an ancient curse no one actually believed but they still shared around the campfire to scare each other.
He grabbed his composure. He wouldn’t commit to anything until he ran it by Antonio and they were on the same page. “We're negotiating. A transition like this takes time.”
“Keep in mind none of us is getting younger. Tell Antonio I called?”
“I will. You have a good evening, sir.”
Justin hung up and sent Antonio an instant message. Can you break away? Now seemed like the perfect time for a debrief.
Their Nerd: An MMF Ménage Romance (Two Plus One Book 1) Page 4