The Money Talks

by Cherry Kay

  “How the hell am I ever supposed to believe anything you ever say?” she asked. “All I get from you is lies on top of lies. You only ever tell me the truth after you’ve been caught.”

  “Tiffany, please let me—”

  “No,” she said, cutting him off. “I’m tired of explanations, Thomas. I’m tired of having to second guess everything that you tell me, and I’m sick from always having to hear the truth from other people. I don’t know why this person is using me to get to you, but I suppose I should be thankful that they showed me the truth about what sort of psychopathic asshole I was dating in the first place.”

  Tiffany ended the call and then turned her phone off completely. She didn’t want to hear from him again, and she knew he’d try to call back. She told herself she’d look into blocking his number so he couldn’t call her again, but for now she’d just ignore every incoming call until she felt ready to deal with life again.

  Tearing the foil off the bottle of wine, Tiffany sniffed back tears. She grabbed a glass and filled it almost to the brim, drinking a big gulp of it immediately in order to calm herself. The wine tasted bitter in her mouth, but the alcoholic buzz felt warm and comforting amidst the turmoil in her head. She didn’t want to think about Thomas or the whoever was following her any longer, and if it took a bottle of wine to block it out, then she intended to finish it sooner rather than later.

  Tiffany tossed and turned. She was a sweaty mess, and the sheet had wrapped around her in a ridiculous knot of twists that made it impossible for her to get comfortable. She felt dizzy and sick to her stomach, and she regretted everything about the last two glasses of wine she’d finished hours ago. Rather than drinking herself into a mellow mood that made it easy to sleep, she found she drifted halfway between conscious and not, unsure of whether she dreamt or hallucinated the strange events that haunted her thoughts.

  Drifting a little deeper into sleep, her body twitched as she ran from someone chasing her down a dark alleyway. The person was nothing more than a blurry shape, but in her dream mind she knew it to be the woman who’d followed her and forced her way into Tiffany’s apartment. For what felt like hours, they ran through the city until Tiffany finally reached the front door of her apartment.

  Tiffany fumbled through her key ring, trying key after key, but none of them would even fit in the lock. She yanked on the door handle and pounded on the glass, but she couldn’t get in. The woman was closing in on her, and Tiffany knew that she’d be in serious trouble if she didn’t get to safety, but nothing seemed to work. She was trapped on the street in the middle of the night with no one around to help her.

  A hand latched onto her shoulder and yanked her backwards. She screamed in terror as another hand gripped her arm and pulled her into a hard embrace. The hands slid around her chest and grabbed her breasts, squeezing them in a sensual way.

  Tiffany looked down to see male hands on her body, and she spun around in her captive’s arms to see Thomas’s face where the woman’s had been only seconds before. Thomas leaned in and kissed her, his tongue pushing hungrily into her mouth while he held her tight against him. She could feel his erection pressing into her body, and she felt a painful need to take him inside of herself.

  Despite the fact that they were still outside on the street, Thomas began to undress her without care for her clothing. He tore away her shirt and ripped her skirt open until it fell away. He unhooked her bra with a quick snap of his fingers, and threw it onto the sidewalk. When she was nearly naked, he hoisted her up onto a nearby car and lifted her legs up in order to strip off her panties.

  Thomas left her sitting there naked and exposed to the world while he hurried to rid himself of his own clothing. Night had become day, and Tiffany was dimly aware of people walking by in the background, but she didn’t care who saw them. She wanted only to feel the heat of Thomas’s skin against her own, and she was soon rewarded with just that.

  Stepping in between her legs, Thomas grabbed his cock and thrust himself into her. Her pussy was wet and ready for him, and she gasped with pleasure when he grabbed her by the back of the neck and began to fuck her with reckless abandon. Her breasts bounced up and down from his vigorous movements, and she felt her bum squeaking against the hood of the car with each driving thrust of his hips. His cock felt incredibly good inside her and she freely cried out her happiness.

  Surprising her with the quickness of it all, Thomas pulled out of her and crouched down between her knees. He ran his tongue up her groove and played with her clit, his tongue making soft lapping sounds as he worked her towards climax. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, enjoying the feeling of his mouth on her sex.

  Tiffany entwined her fingers in Thomas’s hair and was caught off guard by how soft and long it seemed. She could never have grabbed as much of his short hair as she had in her hand now, and she opened her eyes and tilted her head up to see the woman who’d stalked her licking away at her pussy.

  They were no longer on the hood of a car, but now on the rooftop pool deck where Thomas had taken her on their first date. She was lying on one of the deck chairs, and the woman was completely naked and bent over between her legs. Confused by the sudden change, Tiffany’s first instinct was to push the woman’s head away, but something else overrode that and she instead pulled the woman’s face into her pussy, bucking her hips up to increase the pleasure.

  Gasping with an impending orgasm, Tiffany closed her eyes and opened them again a moment later to see Thomas smiling at her from behind the strange woman. He was completely naked and sweating with effort of fucking the woman while she licked Tiffany’s pussy. Caught in the middle of the two of them, the woman moaned loudly while still trying to work her tongue around Tiffany’s clit despite being bumped forward with each thrust of Thomas’s hips.

  Jealousy fired up inside of Tiffany, but it had to compete with the raw pleasure of having her pussy licked so well. Being able to watch Thomas fuck someone was surprisingly erotic, and she felt herself getting more and more excited as she watched.

  Thomas was working hard and grunting from the effort, and she felt a thrill run through her body when Thomas pulled out of the woman and came over to Tiffany. He stood above her then, his manhood standing out at attention, and he guided her mouth towards his shining wet cock.

  He tasted the way he did when she sucked him right after he’d been fucking her, only this time, she knew the musky sex she detected had come from the strange woman. Twisting to suck him off, she kept her legs open and luxuriated in the feeling of a warm tongue licking her pussy at the same time as she had a cock in her mouth.

  The feeling of arousal reached its pinnacle and Tiffany felt an orgasm grab hold of her. The woman grabbed firmly onto Tiffany’s thighs in order to keep her face from being bucked away from Tiffany’s writing hips, and she had to moan her climax around the tip of Thomas’s cock while he gripped her head and began jerking himself off until he grunted and sent an ropy jet of cum into her mouth. Shaking from the intensity of the orgasm coursing through her body, she whimpered and swallowed several more blasts of hot cum from Thomas’s pulsing cock before he pulled away and faded into a distant nothingness.

  Tiffany looked down between her legs and saw nothing but a damp sheet that had become twisted in the night. She was in her own bed again, and she thought she was awake, although there was a distinct feeling of electric warmth coming from between her legs. Tiffany touched herself and her fingers came away wet and sticky, as though she’d had an orgasm in her sleep.

  Feeling more exhausted than she had when she’d first gotten into bed, Tiffany got up and yanked the sheets of the bed, tossed them into the laundry hamper and went to take a shower. It was still dark outside and a good hour earlier than she would normally have woken up, but at this point, she wanted to clean herself up so she could focus on the day ahead instead of all the garbage she hoped to leave behind.

  Chapter10

  Thomas put down the phone after Tiffany hung up on him.
He didn’t know how she’d learned what she had, but something from the call kept echoing in his mind. She’d told him that she’d heard a recording of him talking to the person who had installed the backdoors, but that was impossible.

  He’d employed gh0st to write and install the programs that gave him access to sites like Matchr, and there was no way gh0st would betray him like that. As much as the hacker was someone who dealt with the darker side of the law every day, he was too dependent on his reputation to double cross a client as wealthy as Thomas.

  There was one way to straighten this out. Thomas unlocked his phone and called gh0st.

  “I’ve just heard some disturbing news,” said Thomas, keeping his voice cool and level. “Tell me you didn’t sell a recording of me asking you to install a backdoor into a certain website.”

  “Are you serious?” said the modified voice on the other end of the line. “I’d never do that. You know who I am. You know my rep. I wouldn’t sabotage myself by doing something so stupid.”

  “Then how did someone else get a hold of it?” he asked. He did his best to avoid using any obvious identifiers in case someone was listening in on the call as he spoke. “Someone played a recording for that person I asked you to look into. That recording could only have been made by you or I, and I sure has hell didn’t do it.”

  “That you know of.” said gh0st.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Thomas.

  “It means this line is compromised,” said gh0st. “It means that someone has access to your private communication and is able to listen in on every call you make. It means some rat fuck is listening in on this call, and it means that I’m hanging up right now. Stick to the other method of communicating me if you need anything. No more phones for a while.”

  The line went dead as Thomas was hung up on for the second time that day.

  He cursed and threw his phone against the glass wall of his apartment where it splintered and shattered into fragments of glass and plastic. He looked down at the pieces in disgust, wondering how someone had gotten to him. It was inconceivable that someone could track his audio remotely, and that meant they’d compromised his phone.

  Thomas crouched next to the broken pieces of his phone and picked through the various electronic circuits and components. He couldn’t tell what belonged and what didn’t, but he knew people who could figure such things out. He picked up each of the pieces he could find and carried them to the small kitchenette where he dumped them on the counter. The only thing he could find to put them in was a ceramic cereal bowl, and so he swept them off the counter and into it so he could deliver them to one of his trusted technicians.

  He’d have them identify the components and hopefully track the transmitter back to a receiver of some sort if that was the case, but he had little confidence that they’d be able to find anything. Having heard the conversation that had transpired before Thomas had smashed his phone, anyone surveying him would likely have shut down that receiver and moved over to a new frequency to avoid being detected by any sort of scanner looking for it.

  Thomas returned to his window and looked down on the street. From what he knew of that kind of technology, someone had to be relatively nearby. Somewhere out there would be a nondescript van or truck with a full suite of surveillance equipment. He scanned the windows of nearby buildings, wondering if they’d gone as far as renting a unit somewhere in order to have a more permanent base from which to monitor him and his company.

  It wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that someone was actively watching him in the hopes that he’d do something they could use against him. Thomas’s company owned tech that would revolutionize certain industries once it was released to the marketplace, and there were a lot of people who either wanted to beat him to the punch, or to stop him in his tracks completely.

  Either way, it meant competition, and competition at this level had been known to get as serious as life or death. He didn’t want to believe that anyone would ever harm Tiffany just to gain a business advantage over him, but the emotional trauma they’d already inflicted on her was enough to seriously piss him off.

  Thomas took the pieces of his broken phone down to his public office and called the tech from his desk phone. Once the technician had come up to collect the fragments in order to analyze the components, Thomas called Vanessa and asked her to arrange a new phone for him. She knocked on his door a few minutes later and came in holding a brand new phone and charging cable.

  “It’s not fully charged, but it has a backup SIM and is ready to go.” She placed it on the desk in front of him. “What happened to your old phone? Did I see a technician walking out of here with pieces of it in a bowl?”

  “I had an accident,” he growled. “My hand slipped and I threw it against the wall.”

  “Whoa, bad day, boss?” She asked with a little laugh.

  “I’d really rather not talk about it.” He leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair. “Can you do me a favor and have the helicopter readied? I think I’m going to head to the house for a couple of days. You can route any important business calls through to me there, but otherwise I’d like you to hand off as much as possible to the other execs.”

  “Is everything okay, Thomas?” she asked.

  Genuine concern showed on the girl’s face, and Thomas was glad to have her by his side. Her not so subtle romantic advances could be difficult at times, but she was by far the sharpest and most efficient assistant he’d ever had, and he didn’t know what he’d do without her.

  “I’m under a lot of pressure right now.” He said.

  Thomas looked at her and thought of all the long hours he’d spent poring over contracts or preparing for major buyouts with her. She’d been steady and solid throughout everything, and he knew he did her a disservice by keeping her at arm’s length. Deciding he needed to start trusting more people to help him with things, he broke down and told her everything about what had happened between him and Tiffany, not even skipping over the details of his hacking Matchr in order to bring them together.

  “Wow,” she said. Vanessa sat in the chair opposite his desk. “That’s a crazy story.”

  “I have to find out who’s targeting me,” said Thomas. “I won’t let anyone bully me around like this, and it’s reprehensible that they’d drag Tiffany into it as well. She’s just a bystander that some asshole is trying to use in order to get to me somehow. I just can’t seem to figure out the why of it.”

  “How can I help?” asked Vanessa, leaning forward in her chair. “You shouldn’t have to go through this alone.” She paused and picked at her fingernail in a surprisingly nervous gesture. She’d always been the picture of confidence around Thomas, and he’d never seen her look so hesitant before. “I could come with you,” she ventured. “It doesn’t have to mean anything romantic. I think I could help you, though. You can’t figure this out by yourself, and I worry about you being alone in that big house of yours.”

  Thomas stood up and walked around his desk. He squeezed Vanessa’s shoulder and kissed the top of her head.

  “That’s incredibly sweet of you,” he said, “but I need some time to figure things out right now. I need to understand who is after me, and I need you here to hold things down and to keep this company from falling apart without me. You’re the only one I trust to do this, Vanessa.”

  She nodded her head silently and rose to her feet. Smiling through obvious hurt and rejection, she muttered something about having filing to do and left him standing there alone wondering if he’d made the right decision. Vanessa was a great girl, and she seemed to still hold a high opinion of him despite everything he’d told her about his lying and cheating in order to sleep with women from the dating sites.

  That didn’t change the fact that he was still hung up on Tiffany. Packing a few notes into a briefcase, he went to the elevator and took it up to the rooftop helipad. He boarded the helicopter and watched the city fly by as he soared away towa
rds his mansion. He’d find a way to fix things, he vowed, even if it meant not winning Tiffany back. She didn’t deserve the trouble being thrown at her because of him, and he swore he wouldn’t rest until she was happy again, even if it meant being free of him forever.

  Chapter11

  “I’m sorry Mrs. Norman, but we’re just not hiring right now,” said the human resources man who’d been kind enough to come down to talk to her.

  Tiffany felt like she’d been to every single ad agency and marketing firm in the city. She’d sent off countless resumés, called in favors, and branched out into looking for freelance options to even bring in a bit of money. The problem was that no one had anything to offer her.

  “I understand,” she said, trying not to let the news get her down. She’d asked a personal favor of a friend in order to get even this meeting, but it seemed to have been for nothing.

  “The last time we posted a position, we had over eight thousand applications come in,” the man said, frowning. “It’s crazy out there, and I don’t envy your position. With budgets being cut left, right, and center while everyone sources as much free artwork and labor as possible, we’re having a hard time staying competitive. Our firm has more unpaid interns than ever before, and to be honest, they’re doing work that’s well above what they should be doing.”