Caught in the Dark

by Ann Jensen

  A knock at the door interrupted her rambling.

  “Honey. Unlock the door.” Joshua’s concerned voice was slightly muffled.

  Angela had completely forgotten she texted her friend to come get her. From the stunned look on Tek’s face, it might be for the best. Things were awkward enough and her talking was making things worse. She needed time to process and come up with the best solution that didn’t end up with her fired and hopefully led to Tek showing her the other sexual wonders she had been missing out on.

  “One minute, Joshua.” Angela lowered her voice. “He is my ride. I called him before you joined me in here.”

  “Yeah.” Tek ran his hands through his hair. “I need to… we can talk later.”

  Her stomach dropped as the man she was so attracted to spun and left the closet like he was being chased by rabid dogs. Would they ever talk, or was it just polite nonsense? It would be understandable if he avoided her. She had made things awkward. Not that she regretted speaking up. No matter how sexy and talented Tek was, she would regret if they rushed and ruined a memory she would retain for life.

  “You have some explaining to do, sweetheart.” Joshua leaned against the doorway, a mischievous grin on his face that made her smile.

  “Can it wait till we are in the car?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Only if we are leaving right this second.”

  “That works for me.”

  She felt the eyes of the people working near the supply closet boring into her skin. What had they heard? Was she about to become the center of gossip? Fear and frustration swirled in her stomach, and she was unprepared to think about what her moment of passion might have cost her. To her relief Joshua was good to his word, staying silent until they were pulling out of the parking lot.

  “Spill.”

  The single word released the floodgates on her mouth and emotions. She explained about the private dance and the attraction, then the crappy first day ending in seeing her fantasy man up at the front of the employee orientation.

  “So let me get this straight. You unknowingly danced naked for your hot new boss, then the next day ended up alone in a supply closet with him?”

  Angela blushed. “Yeah.”

  “And if I hadn’t interrupted?”

  “You didn’t interrupt anything exactly.”

  “Uh-huh. Honey, I know the look of a man who has been cock-blocked. And that gorgeous piece of candy had sexual frustration written all over his face.”

  Angela crossed her arms. “I wasn’t going to lose my virginity in a supply closet.”

  Joshua’s laughter filled the car. “Did you tell him that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh girl, you are too much. How did he take it?”

  “I think not so well. He was a little shocked.” Probably more than a little. Things had moved so fast and she wasn’t sure. Maybe she could do something nice for him. Hallmark didn’t make ‘Sorry I left you with blue-balls’ cards but it couldn’t be his first time being left wanting.

  Her friend patted her knee, breaking off the odd thoughts. “I know I tease you about getting out there, but Joseph Vallier is heartbreak wrapped up in a gorgeous package. How much do you know about him?”

  “Not much.” Though she would be fixing that the moment she got home.

  “I have worked at Vallier for years and in all that time I’ve never heard of him dating. Rumor is he is married to the mission. He built the company so no one ever has to go through what he did.”

  “What happened?” She remembered reading something about a family tragedy and now regretted not looking deeper. Sometimes her logic overrode her heart when she was in the middle of research.

  “Someone kidnapped his sister from a playground. They never found her or who took her. All the money in the world and there was nothing his parents could do.”

  Angela’s chest tightened as sorrow wrapped around her. That was the ultimate nightmare. Not knowing would be worse than any grief. “That’s horrible, but what does it have to do with now?”

  “They say his life is the company and his motorcycle club. Many women have tried, but his heart doesn’t have room for anything else.”

  She could understand that. Grief at losing her father had overwhelmed almost two years of her life. Not knowing would be so much worse. Maybe she could help him find closure. She had worked on a project three years ago which revolutionized photo aging using genetic markers. If she combined that with a search of obituaries, coroner reports, and driver’s licenses, she might be able to find out his sister’s fate.

  Joshua groaned. “That does not look like the expression of someone taking good advice. “

  Angela shrugged. “I understand what you’re saying.”

  “But you are going to do you.” Joshua sighed. “Well, know this, honey, no matter what happens I’m here for you.”

  If they hadn’t been driving, Angela would have given her friend the hug the statement deserved. She might even take his advice, but something inside her told her what was going on between her and Tek was far from over.

  Chapter 12

  If gossip was chocolate, we’d all be overweight.

  Sitting at the bar, the whisky burned Tek’s throat. He couldn’t corral his thoughts into any sense of order. The sounds of Dark Sons relaxing filled the room as it did around dinner most nights. The Clubhouse was a large building on an isolated property outside of Denver which functioned as a home, party central, and a meeting place for all the Brothers. He had come here trying to escape the problems at work and the complete mess he had made of interrogating Angela. Fuck, he could barely keep his dick from taking over and hunting her down. How could a woman that sexy be a virgin?

  The things he wanted to do to her were not fit for an innocent. She was a stripper, a genius, and a millionaire. Was she really inexperienced or was it another part of her roleplay? Complicated wasn’t supposed to be his thing.

  “Heya, Tek. What has you looking so serious?” A tiny shoulder bumped into his side and he looked over to see Pixie sliding into the barstool to his right.

  Pixie was a tiny, blonde, pregnant bundle of joy. You would never guess she had seen more horrors in her life than most combat hardened military men. His Brother Sharp had saved her and claimed her as his Old Lady, which was more sacred than marriage among bikers. The two lovebirds were soon to be parents if the size of Pixie’s belly was any indication. She had quickly worked her way into all the Brothers’ hearts by making sure every weeknight there was a fantastic home cooked meal waiting for anyone who wanted to join.

  Tek felt a connection to her that had never been sexual but was strong. He smiled at her. “Work crap. How is the munchkin treating you?”

  “He is fond of kicking at all hours. Six more weeks to go.” She rubbed her belly.

  “Sharp treating you right?”

  “You know he is. No distracting me. That is the look of someone worrying about more than quarterly statements. I’ll back off if you want, but I worry about you.”

  The concerned expression on her face surprised him. His Brothers looked out for him but they didn’t worry. The last woman who had cared enough to poke at him was his mother before his sister disappeared, tearing the family apart.

  “Thanks for caring, Pixie, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  “You hitting on my woman?” Sharp walked up and wrapped an arm around his woman, placing a kiss on top of her head. He gave Tek a chin lift in greeting.

  Tek smiled, winking at Pixie. “Of course I am. Need to make sure she makes my favorite cookies.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I was just trying to figure out what had your grumpy Brother sulking. All work and no play makes Tek a miserable man.”

  Was that how people saw him? It was true he hadn’t been around much the last few months except for official club business. Even now he knew he should be back at work figuring out what was going on with the possible security breaches or digging deeper into Angela. Instead, he w
as fighting off fantasies of what he wanted to do to her. Her revelation and lack of experience was both a temptation and a hindrance. A primal part of him wanted nothing more than to claim that innocence for himself. Wanted to be her one and only.

  Fuck, was he really thinking he might want her for more than a few fun nights?

  “I hear he has his eye on one of the Darklights’ girls.” Sharp smirked.

  Tek flipped his friend off. “We a bunch of gossiping grannies now?”

  “Oh, who is it?” Pixie giggled, and the sound was too innocent. Tek and all the Brothers knew that under her pixie-like appearance was a wild woman. Maybe his Angela would be the same.

  His Angela? He needed to stop thinking about her in that way. Tek gave Sharp a harsh look that didn’t even dim the man’s smile.

  “Hawk said it’s one of the new girls. Tammy or Amy.”

  “Cami,” Tek growled.

  Pixie clapped. “So you do like her?”

  He realized his mistake too late as Sharp chuckled. Coming here had been such a mistake. Instead of getting her off his mind, he was talking about her. If gossip spread like fire between the Brothers, it would go nuclear once their Old Ladies got a hold of it.

  “I’m not in high-school, short-stuff. Don’t you have dinner to be finishing up?”

  “Oh, he’s defensive, must be something special.”

  His phone rang and with an annoyed glare at Pixie, he answered without looking at who was calling. “Yeah?”

  Pixie held her hands up in surrender, sliding out of her chair. The two troublemakers backed away with grins. He knew it meant he had plenty more shit coming his way later.

  “You sound pleasant. How you make the big bucks with that attitude is beyond me.” Lisen’s chiding tone did nothing to settle his nerves.

  “Yeah, well, unless you want me to stop paying you the big bucks, tell me why you’re calling.”

  “Someone needs to get laid, stat.”

  “Lisen,” Tek growled, letting all his frustration out in one word.

  “If this wasn’t important, I’d tell you to go fuck yourself, but it is.” The sound of her taking a deep breath had his stomach dropping. “It’s confirmed. Someone hacked Tribeca conglomerates and leaked internal proposal numbers to their competitors. We need you in the office now.”

  Chapter 13

  Character is like pregnancy; it cannot be hidden forever. -African Proverb

  Going to work the next day was an exercise in determination. She had stayed up most of the night researching Tek’s missing sister and creating the different age mock-ups from age four to twenty-one. Her data mining programs were set to match photos on all the accessible legal databases. She estimated the search would take three days. If nothing came back, she would try less legal ways of looking.

  The upside of being so tired was she didn’t care about first impressions anymore. Her job was doomed, so who cared what her co-workers thought. She still wore a professional suit, but her purple hair was swept up into a simple ponytail. Joshua had texted to say he was called in early so she had to drive in by herself.

  The atmosphere in the office was completely different from her first day. Instead of calm and friendly, there was tension everywhere. When she made it to her desk, there was a muffin and a sticky note was on her monitor which said ‘Don’t forget: You Rock!’. She laughed and pulled it off. The note was so Joshua.

  The work area was practically deserted, only one person was at their desk.

  “Hey Charles, where is everyone?”

  He laughed, then raised his eyebrows as he took her in. “Nice hair.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Looks better on you than the black.” He looked up at the clock on the wall. “It’s eight o’clock. Most of the programmers flex and work later in the day. Rick is schmoozing the management types as he does every day. You going to be an early bird like me?”

  “I don’t think flextime is something interns are allowed to do. So should I email Rick for work?”

  “Nah. He already passed off all his actual work to me. If you think you’re up to it, I have some fascinating GUI bugs you can dig into.” He wiggled his eyebrows as if he was offering her something interesting rather than the nightmare it probably was.

  Playing along, she clasped her hands over her heart. “Oh, tell me more!”

  “Oh you are going to love this the beta team says that the GUI is and I’m quoting here,” Charles paused dramatically, “buggy and slow.”

  Angela chuckled. “Of course it is.”

  Five hours later, she was ready to strangle whoever had created the nightmare that was the Log-in GUI. They hadn’t used any of the built in JAVA modules, and instead coded their own Frankenstein version of each button. Trace-backs had her rolling her eyes in disbelief. Rather than make things more secure, they had created massive holes in the encryption and bypassed it completely in others.

  GUIs were supposed to be an interface with the underlying code, but whoever had made this crap had embedded functions that shouldn’t be available to anyone who didn’t have the correct encryption keys. If this went live, any data it protected was as good as public knowledge. Hell, she had run some of the code and found herself in databases she probably shouldn’t be able to access.

  “Team meeting!” Rick’s voice cut through her thoughts like a knife.

  As Angela followed behind the rest of the team, her stomach growled and reminded her she probably should have stopped for lunch. Rick didn’t bother to wait for everyone to sit down before he started in on them.

  “Our productivity numbers are down this month. I expect each and every one of you to be putting in extra time to make sure we reach our goals.” The collective groan from the team had him scowling. “I don’t want to hear it. We have an extra body this month, so I expect us to exceed projections for lines of code.”

  “You expect an intern who hasn’t even been on the system a day to help us catch up in the next week?”

  Angela hadn’t met the person who spoke yet, so she let her pride settle and kept her mouth shut. She didn’t know what their goals were or how far behind they were. If the code she had been looking at all morning was any indication in her mind, it would be faster to start over than fix some of that crap.

  Rick’s gaze bored into her as if he had heard her thoughts. “How many lines of code have you done this morning, Angie?”

  She ground her teeth at the unwanted nickname. This guy was an idiot if his only metric was lined off code produced. It often took hours of debugging and research to produce a few lines to fix existing code. If she was starting something new, it would be different.

  “None, I’ve been trying to make sense of the GUI interface before I try to fix it.”

  “Who told you to work on the GUI? That is my section of the code.”

  Well, that definitely explained the nightmare of spaghetti code she had been peeling through.

  “I did.” Charles spoke up. “You said to handle the trouble tickets. One came in and she knows Java, so I thought it would be a good place for her to start.”

  Angela snorted.

  Rick whirled on Charles. “I’ve made it clear any work on the GUI was mine. It is my custom code that will make this thing a success. I won’t have some intern screwing with it.”

  Charles put his hands up in surrender. “Sorry. Figured anything she would do would go through inspection so no harm.”

  Angela took a deep breath, knowing she was probably stepping into something deep but knowing it had to be said. “Rick, I spent the morning studying the code. It is full of inefficiencies, holes, and just plain bad practices.”

  “Shut up!” He barked at her and she flinched backward. “I don’t expect some purple haired wanna-be software intern to understand the complexities of what I created. You may want to wait till you’ve worked in one place for more than six months and not gotten fired for incompetence before saying you know better than the experts.”

  The whi
plash of anger made no sense. She wanted to scream at him, but all the words froze in her throat. She had never been fired, and she sure as hell had never been accused of incompetence. From the smug, condescending looks on everyone’s faces, she figured they believed the lies this guy was spouting.

  “I-I h-have n-ne-never-” Damn her stutter.

  “Go home, Angie.” Rick practically sneered her name. “Come back tomorrow with a better attitude or it won’t take me six months to fire you no matter who you are friends with.”

  His words were like a punch to the gut. Talking was pointless and hitting him with her chair would probably get her arrested, Angela stood grabbed her purse from her desk and with all the dignity she could muster walked towards the elevators.

  It was tempting to quit, let the crap code go into production, but she knew it wouldn’t be Rick paying for the lapse. If they didn’t fix the code, whoever used the program would suffer for his ego.

  She texted Joshua.

  Me: Hey need to talk, about to have a meltdown.

  JoJo: Sorry sweetie stuck in meetings. Big emergency. May not be home tonight. Promise to let you vent for hours about your dick boss when this is over.

  Crap. She really needed to tell someone.

  Me: NP

  JoJo: ***HUGS***

  She stepped onto the elevator and had what she knew was a bad idea. She hit the up arrow before she could change her mind.

  As she stepped out onto the executive floor, she twisted her hands with nerves. Calm. Cool. Professional. This was a matter that could affect the whole company. Sure she was jumping several levels of escalation but she knew Tek, he would listen. Maybe.

  She reached the secretary in front of his closed office doors.

  “How may I help you?” The polite and professional blonde smiled at her.

  “I n-need to speak to Mr. Vallier.”

  “I’m sorry he canceled all meetings for today. Were you not contacted?” She gave a sad smile, as if she really was sorry.