“Was he at the wedding reception?” I asked Vic. “I never saw him.”
“No, he came to my after-party.”
“You have after-parties for wedding receptions?”
“Dude, I have after-parties for my after-parties.”
I sighed. “Of course you do.”
“Switching subjects for a second,” Vic said. “I don’t get it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m super glad you’re back in on the IPO – but what made you change your mind?”
“I need to move forward with my life.”
“I’ve been saying that for weeks. What made it finally sink in?”
I sighed. It felt like casting pearls before swine, but…
“I love Katie,” I said.
Vic frowned. “Surfer Girl?”
“Yes.”
“I thought she was the reason you didn’t want to come back.”
“Well, we’re taking it to the next level.”
He sat back in the chair. “Reeeeeally.”
“Yes – really.”
“Like… ‘next level,’ next level?” he asked, and stuck his ring finger up in the air like he was flipping the bird.
“…eventually,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Jeez, dude,” Vic said, shaking his head. “You need to stay away from wedding receptions. You’re highly suggestible.”
“What’s your problem? You wanted me back in, I’m in.”
“Well, I mean, hell, if getting serious with this chick is going to make you take the IPO seriously, then thank God for Surfer Girl.”
“Good. So, there’s things we need to figure out.”
“Like what?”
I lapsed into CEO mode as easily as slipping on a pair of loafers. It felt oddly comforting… and far more pleasant than I’d remembered.
“We need to discuss exactly what I’m going to do after the IPO. I don’t want to be full-time at the company, but I’ll shepherd it through the IPO process. Once we go public, I’ll… I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take some kind of board position. Or I can advise, or consult. Hell, I guess I could telecommute. Which is ironic, since that’s what the company’s basically about.” I paced back and forth as I mulled things over out loud. “We can talk to Connor and get his feedback on who he thinks would make a good CEO, as long as I can work with them and still get to influence the direction of the company. Bryce can handle the coding and development – ”
Bryce burped. “Yeah… yeah, I can do that… totally…” he muttered, eyes closed, like he was talking in his sleep.
Vic looked over at him, then back at me. “I have so much faith in this company,” he said in a deadpan voice.
I gave him the finger – but not the ring finger.
106
Katie
Natasha puffed away on her cigarette. “We started Iodyne right out of Stanford. We worked all the time, side by side… 18, 19-hour days. You know what they say about time and proximity.”
“No, I don’t.”
“They are the best predictors of romantic entanglement.”
I thought back to all the time Ian and I had spent together over the last two weeks.
What would have happened if I’d had a job? Or if he did? What if we’d only seen each other once a week – would our relationship have gone the same way? Or, when faced with the problems and constraints of the real world, would things have slowly faded between us?
No, I told myself. No, we’re meant to be. From the moment he dropped that container on the beach, it all came together exactly the way it was supposed to.
I wanted to believe that. And before Natasha had shown up, I had.
I tried to shake it off, but the doubt was eating me alive.
Natasha kept talking. “We started dating… and went from 18 hours a day together to 24. In six months we were married. It was fine for a couple of years, while we were both obsessed with the same things.”
“Which were…?”
“The company. It was our baby. We spent every waking minute on it.”
Even though I knew she was talking about a corporation, hearing her say ‘our baby’ felt like a pin piercing my heart. “So what went wrong?”
“He burned out, lost interest. It felt like he was abandoning our child. He wanted to sell the company and cash out. I didn’t. It caused problems. We separated, then we divorced. I got half of his stake in the company, and a small percentage of anything he started during the separation. Which he hated me for. He still hates me for it. He wanted to abandon our child, but he despised me for fighting for custody.” She stared into the distance as she spoke, reliving some painful memory. After a few seconds, she came back to the present and looked at me. “I can see you don’t trust me. Have you ever Googled him?”
“…no…”
“Maybe you should.”
I had never even considered it. I knew that women Googling their dates was a thing, but I’d known Rick since I was 19. I’d never had to contend with dating strangers or making sure I was safe when I went to meet someone at a restaurant for the first time. It had never even occurred to me to check on Ian; I’d simply taken him at his word.
When I didn’t produce my phone, she took hers out of her purse, unlocked it with a thumbprint, and offered it on her outstretched palm. She lifted her eyebrows slightly. Take it.
I knew it was a mistake, like taking something from the Devil – but I couldn’t help myself. I had to know.
I pulled up Google and started typing.
“Do you even know his last name?” Natasha asked.
“Yes,” I said, annoyed. “McLaren.”
“Do you know how to spell it?”
I hesitated. “M, C, L, A…I… ?”
“M-C-L-A-R-E-N. Like the sports car.”
I had no idea about the sports car.
A lot of pictures came up, but in all of them Ian was clean-shaven. Still stunningly handsome, though.
I tapped on the first image and went to the web page associated with it.
“Iodyne was spelled I-O-D-Y-N-E, with a ‘Y,’” Natasha said, so not helpfully.
“That’s not what’s coming up,” I said, frowning. “Entangle?”
“Oh, that’s his new company, the one he started when we split up. He didn’t tell you?” She answered her own question: “Of course he didn’t. It’s very cutting edge. They’re going to use quantum physics to do faster-than-light communication. It’s supposed to have an IPO in the next few months – ” She paused, then said in a tone like she was explaining something to a child, “That’s an initial public offering of stock.”
I glared at her. “I know what an IPO is.”
“Mm. Did he tell you he stands to make at least five billion dollars at the company’s present evaluation? Well, that’s what he’d be worth on paper, anyway. It’s not like he’d have five billion in cash.”
I didn’t believe her, so I went back to Google and looked up ‘Entangle IPO.’
There it was, in the first article. “CEO Ian McLaren stands to earn at least $5 billion if Entangle hits $20 billion, which many industry insiders expect will be the lowest possible outcome of the IPO…”
Natasha took in my shocked expression like she was savoring it. “It seems he didn’t tell you a lot of things.”
My hands shook as I handed back the phone. “I don’t believe you.”
She frowned and gestured with the phone. “You read it.”
“I don’t care – I don’t believe you.”
“No? Would you like to see his house?”
“I know where he lives,” I said acidly.
“No, you know where he stays. Would you like to see his real house? The one I didn’t get in the divorce? It’s just down the street a couple miles. We could drive… if you’re curious.”
She let the question hang in the air like a sword… but her smile was even more dangerous.
I felt like I was in freefall, clawing for a sense of certainty and unable to find any.
>
I had to know.
Even if it destroyed me, I had to know the truth.
She could see the answer on my face.
“Go get dressed,” she said quietly.
107
Ian
I was actually excited about the possibilities for the future – but Vic wasn’t. In fact, he seemed entirely zoned out. And it wasn’t just the alcohol from last night, or the woman he’d left behind in his bed.
“What’s wrong?” I asked sharply.
“I… I’m fine,” Bryce mumbled drunkenly, his eyes closed.
I rolled my eyes at him, then looked at Vic. “Well?”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “You were dead-set against this just the other day, and now it’s like you had one of those – what do you call it when you’ve had one of those crazy religious conversions that totally changes you into somebody else?”
“A Damascus Road experience?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Come to Jesus…” Bryce murmured again.
“Or that, too,” Vic agreed. “I don’t get it.”
“I told you, I’m in love with Katie. I want to… potentially get married someday.” I paused, then smiled as I said it: “And I don’t want her living in an RV by the beach raising our kids.”
“Brother, the amount of money you’ve got left over from Iodyne, that’d be one hell of an RV,” Vic said.
“What’s your problem? I’m going to make you a lot of money, so why are you so glum?”
“I just…” Vic struggled to articulate what was bothering him. “I just want to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.”
My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You’ve got a couple hundred million on the line, and you care about my reasons?”
Vic thought for a second.
“…naaaaaah, you’re right… fuck it, let’s make a lot of money,” he said, and broke out into a grin.
108
Katie
I rode with Natasha in the back of a limousine. My stomach churned with fear the entire way.
The limo stopped.
“That’s it on the corner,” Natasha said. “The grey one.”
I looked out and nearly lost my mind.
The place was three stories tall and right on the beach. It was a modernist building with tons of glass and boxy lines. Even though land was probably a kajillion dollars a square foot out here, the house still had a beautiful yard and garden surrounding it, all of it perfectly maintained. Like somebody lived there fulltime.
But still I refused to believe.
“That could be anybody’s house,” I said.
She smiled cruelly. “Well, he happens to be home. Go see for yourself.”
I stared at her.
“Go ahead, knock on the door,” she said. “Or are you afraid?”
I was very afraid.
But I still got out of the car and shuffled forward like a zombie.
I was vaguely aware that the limo drove away behind me.
I thought about running. Natasha had brought me here, but that didn’t mean I had to go through with it.
I could just leave…
But then I wouldn’t know. And I needed to know.
I trudged slowly towards the house like a prison inmate walking the last, long corridor to her death.
109
Ian
We were just finishing up when there was a knock on the door.
I turned, surprised. “What in the world?”
“Maybe some of your other shareholders heard about the meeting and wanted in,” Vic joked, but I didn’t find it funny. My mind immediately leapt to Natasha, and I was worried he might be right.
I walked over and opened the door, expecting something very, very bad.
I got something worse.
There stood Katie, white as a ghost.
I froze in shock. Neither one of us said anything.
“Who is it?” Vic called from the other room.
“Hold on,” I called to him, then asked Katie, “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
I didn’t want to answer that, so I asked, “How did you find this house?”
Cold anger filled her face, and it was unsettling to see. “Your ex-wife told me about it. Why were you hiding it from me?”
Oh shit.
“…maybe you should come in,” I suggested.
She walked past me, then stopped in her tracks. I guess she was stunned to see the full three stories of the common room – or maybe it was the 40 x 20-foot bay window that looked out at the beach.
Vic turned around. “Hey – Surfer Girl! Welcome to the Secret Clubhouse! Awesome news on the… um…”
Vic saw me slashing my finger across my throat and shaking my head ‘no,’ and gradually let his words trail off.
Bryce just looked confused, like he wasn’t sure if this was reality or part of his drunken haze.
“You guys mind giving us a little privacy?” I asked.
“That’s a good idea… c’mon, Bryce, let’s go find a bar or somethin’. See ya, Surfer Girl.”
Katie forced a tight smile, but it only lasted a second.
The last thing I heard Vic mutter to Bryce before they left the house was, “Jeez, things change so quick between those two. One minute everybody’s happy, the next minute they look like they’re in a horror movie…”
110
Once they were gone, I stupidly tried to play if off like nothing was wrong. “Can I get you anything?”
She looked at me like Cut the crap. “What is this place?”
“This is my parents’ house. I grew up here.”
She stared at me in silence. I couldn’t read her emotions, but I knew it wasn’t good.
“What else did Natasha tell you?” I asked.
“You weren’t just married… you had a company together.”
Okay, that was funny. If by ‘funny’ you meant fucked up.
“I had a company. I started it. She worked for me.” I shook my head angrily. “It figures she’d lie to make herself look better.”
“I don’t think you should be talking about other people lying.”
Ouch.
“Okay – the whole truth? I started a company. I hired her. We got married. Eventually I lost interest in the company. I wanted to do something new. She didn’t. She only cared about money and power. I wanted to change the world, even if it meant that I didn’t make anything for years, and I wanted the money from Iodyne to fund my new business. Iodyne was the name of – ”
“I know,” Katie interrupted coldly. “She told me.”
Okaaaay.
This was not going well, but I forged on. “As I was trying to sell the company, I found out she was undermining me with the board of directors. She was trying to drive me out of my own company. We ended up divorcing, but she got half of my stake in Iodyne. I sold the company for a lot less than it was worth, to investors she lined up to buy it. She stayed on… became the new co-CEO… and got even richer in the process. There you go.”
“And you’ve just been… ‘hanging out’ ever since then?”
The way she said it sounded like she knew more than she was letting on. So I continued with the truth.
Strangely enough, despite the tenseness of the situation between me and Katie, I found myself getting excited telling her about my plans.
“No. I used the money to start my new company, Entangle. It’s based on quantum computing – which, admittedly, we’re still in the very infancy of – but there’s this phenomenon called entanglement that can occur with two subatomic particles. They can get connected so that whatever happens to one happens to the other, no matter how far apart they are, even if they’re on opposite sides of the universe. Einstein predicted entanglement, but even he thought it was weird – he called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Long story short, if you can harness entanglement, you can have faster-than-light communication. You can drive a rover
on Pluto in real time, when it would normally take four-and-a-half hours for radio waves to reach that far out in the solar system. You could take pictures and video from a satellite and beam it back instantaneously. You can direct robotic mining machines ten miles underground, with no other means of communication. And Bryce and I figured out an inexpensive, reliable way to entangle particles. There’s still problems in the real-world application, but we’ve done it in the lab.”
She looked bewildered. I thought it was the science, but it was something a lot more practical.
“So why are you here surfing if you can do all that?”
“…my parents died a year ago. Car crash.”
Her face immediately filled with pain. “I’m sorry.”
I walked past her into the main room. “After it happened, I went through a real bad depression. I’d get up in the morning and wonder why the hell I was even going through the motions. Life sucked. My job as CEO of Entangle sucked. It didn’t help any that I was being pushed into an IPO before I wanted to do it… or that Natasha got 2% of the new company since I started it before the divorce. It’s like no matter what I do, I’m still going to be paying her off forever.
“I tried antidepressants, but they didn’t work. They just made me into even more of a zombie. I drank a lot, did some drugs, tried to feel something again… and then, about five months ago, I left Bryce in charge and started traveling. The Caribbean, Fiji, Australia. That didn’t do it, so I gave up and came back here, to where I grew up… but I couldn’t stay here. Not in this house.
“My dad was like me, in a lot of ways. He was a really driven entrepreneur. Made a lot of money in the tech boom back in the 90’s. But I never saw him much growing up. Or my mom, either – she was a corporate lawyer. They were too busy with their careers. You ever heard that old 70’s song ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’?”
Sex On The Beach: Bad Boys Club Romance #1 Page 23