Lying in Shadows

by Sofia Grey

  “Hurrah.” Sylvie grinned at him.

  “What? What’s so funny?” He was frantically playing the opening bars over and over again, as though trying to cement the riff in his brain.

  “The irony that I, a mere novice, just showed Rock God AJ how to find the fingering for a song. YouTube rocks.”

  He snorted with laughter, his good humour restored. “Nice one, Sizzle. Let’s try it in the studio and see if your bass line is as hot as you think it is.”

  “On my way...”

  After an hour playing “Aurora”, and almost note-perfect now, Alex announced he was happy with it and put his PRS away. “I need some fresh air. D’you fancy a walk on the beach?”

  “What beach?”

  “The one at the bottom of my garden. Grab a coat. It gets cold out there.”

  Alex was like a kid on the sand, charging back and forth, skimming stones into the sea, and poking about in rock pools. Sylvie watched from a distance, highly amused and wearing a borrowed coat many sizes too big for her.

  Hang on—wasn’t something happening today? She racked her brains. Yes. Alex said the bedroom furniture for his spare rooms was being delivered. He probably forgot.

  She hurried closer and shouted to him over the wind. He raced up the sand towards her, scooped her up, and carried her for a few yards while she screeched at him to put her down.

  “What time is your furniture due to arrive today?” she asked when he let go.

  “Fuck.” He glanced at his watch and pulled a face. “Any time now. We’d better head back.”

  As they walked up the sand towards the dune, Sylvie looked back at the curving bay. “It’s beautiful here. I can see why you like it. Deserted too. Well, almost.”

  Alex followed her gaze. At the far end of the beach, someone sat with a telescope. “I don’t know who that is, but they were here the other day. Probably a birdwatcher.” With a wicked grin, Alex dragged her up the dunes, hauling her by the hand over the softest sand, then releasing her at the top, to slither down the other side. She laughed so hard at his antics, her sides hurt.

  Could this be real? Rock God AJ was sharing his house and his musical gear, and was in danger of becoming a friend. She’d miss all this when she went back to her real life.

  * * * *

  When Marianne emerged from the shower, it was to find Marcus still snoring in bed. “Come on, lover.” She shook his arm. “We have the briefing in an hour. I need to get back to my place, to get changed. I’ve a taxi on the way.”

  He grunted and tugged her back down beside him. “Let’s go in late. Boss’s privilege.” He stunk of booze

  “Let’s not. We’re trying to be discreet, remember?”

  It was with much grumbling that he disappeared into the bathroom, as Marianne left. She thought about this latest encounter as she sat in the taxi. While it was fun and quite possibly the best sex ever, she needed to cool things with him. If there was the slightest chance of picking up a relationship with AJ next weekend, she didn’t want to put it at risk by continuing her fling with Marcus.

  Having an affair with a married man was a never-to-be-repeated first for her. She had no intention of juggling two men at once.

  She was at her desk by seven, smartly suited and businesslike again. Aiden greeted her with a friendly smile and coffee, and they chatted for a few minutes about the film they saw last night. They were about to head upstairs to the Exec Suite, when Rico took a call from Marcus, who was running late.

  Marianne hid a smile. She bet Marcus wasn’t dressed yet.

  She tried to log into her email while they waited, but it was offline.

  “Aiden, the Exchange server seems down. Is this part of your virus checking?”

  He frowned, tried to open Outlook, and failed. “No. Any work we’ve done has been overnight. I’ll check with I.T.”

  While he phoned the helpdesk, she went to make a fresh pot of coffee. It was probably a glitch on the network. They happened.

  Marcus called her cell phone while she waited for the coffee to brew. “Hey, you. Is the email down? I want to pick up my mail while I wait for this damned cab.”

  “Yes. Aiden’s looking into it.” Marianne moved further out of earshot, so Rico couldn’t hear her. “How are you? You looked rough when I left.”

  “Not my best.” His voice was like gravel. Sexy. “Last night was good, Marianne. Thanks for coming.”

  She giggled at the double-entendre. “Yeah. I did that a few times. Were you counting?”

  He snorted, and she laughed again. It amused her how they behaved like a pair of hormone-driven teenagers.

  “You wearing a short skirt again today, baby? I had real trouble in yesterday’s briefings. I kept thinking about us fucking on the desk, and it made it difficult to concentrate.”

  The hairs on the back of her neck tingled at the seduction in his voice.

  “Where are you now? What are you doing?” he asked.

  Was it her, or was it suddenly hot in there? She swallowed. “In the kitchen. Making coffee.”

  “Hmm. I’d like to sidle up behind you, as you lean forward against the counter, push your skirt up, part your legs, and—”

  “Right, Marcus. I’ll see if Aiden has any news.” Her interruption was shrill. Rico scowled at her from the doorway, and her cheeks burned. “I’ll come straight back to you.” She glared at Rico and stalked to her desk, coffee abandoned.

  Shit. That was close. Sexy too. She was mightily turned on now, thanks to Marcus, who wasn’t even there, damn him.

  * * * *

  Off to a shaky start, the day deteriorated. Marcus had called it the boss’s privilege, to go in late, but in reality it was bad manners.

  When he arrived nearly forty minutes late, it was to find the email system still offline. Some people, like Cassie, his P.A., had pre-printed their schedules the night before, but most relied on the online system.

  Thaddeus had called personally. Twice so far. Apparently ripping Marcus a new one was so good, he had to repeat the fun. Add in a panicked early call from the Marketing Director, warning that TM-Tech lost another customer, and Marcus was stuck in his own private level of hell.

  His head thumped, and his stomach churned. Not a great time to be hung over. He popped some headache pills, cursed his rashness, and reflected on the memory of spending the night with Marianne. Damn. It had been good.

  She flashed him a smile as she walked into his office, and he was hot for her again. Rico was dour in comparison, and Aiden—now a regular attendee—looked stressed.

  “Okay.” Marcus started the meeting. “What the hell’s happened to the email?”

  Rico nodded to Aiden, who said, “We don’t think it’s connected to the ongoing issues. At the moment, it seems to be a hardware problem, and the techs are checking the switches and connections to the Exchange server. We’re told it could be back up within the hour.”

  Marcus grunted and swigged more coffee. An hour would be okay.

  “I’ve made some progress on digging into the three I.T. people who had access to your laptop,” said Rico. “Andy Belshaw and Graham Wilks are squeaky clean, as far as we can tell. Pete Tandy, though, has thrown up a few red flags. He’s been with TM-Tech almost a year. At the time of the previous leakage in Houston, he was working in the Middle East, as an I.T. specialist, contracting mainly in Iran. He was recruited as Head of I.T. Security when Chris Lomax left, and he’s done a good enough job according to his line manager. However, he was passed over for promotion six months ago, when he applied for a more senior role in Houston. He also applied to head up this audit. On both occasions, Marianne was selected over him.”

  Rico shrugged. “It’s tenuous, but there could be some residual bad feelings towards her, especially in view of her—” He paused. “Her good relationship with you, Marcus.” Marianne gave him a frost-filled stare, but Rico ignored her. “It does make him a good candidate for being targeted from outside,” he said.

  “Please explai
n.” With his head still pounding, Marcus didn’t feel up to a complex conversation.

  “Say you’re on the outside of TM-Tech. You need to find someone inside the company with a grudge—legitimate or otherwise—groom them over a period of time, win them over, and make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

  “It is tenuous.” Marianne’s words were clipped. “Can you get any actual evidence?”

  Rico and Aiden glanced at each other. “I’m getting to that,” Rico replied. “Entirely off the record, we’ve been checking Pete’s bank accounts. There have been a number of unusual deposits over the past six months, all of which were transferred to an offshore account.”

  He produced a printout, and Marcus stared, trying to make sense of it. Next to the list of stolen laptops was a new column of data.

  “Each time a laptop was stolen, Pete received a deposit of a thousand pounds,” Rico said. “Not a large amount, but perhaps by keeping the figures relatively low, they’d be more likely to escape scrutiny. In each case, the deposit came from a bank in New York and tracked back to a holding company in the Cayman Islands. More offshore banking and virtually impenetrable.”

  Rico handed round another printout. “This is a copy of Pete’s recent bank statement. Last week, he received a deposit of ten thousand pounds.” He glanced at each of them in turn. “Last week was when Sylvie Woodrow’s stolen laptop reappeared.”

  Aiden spoke next. “We have several problems. The evidence is circumstantial. The deposits could be legitimate, and our data-collection methods were illegal. We shouldn’t have accessed his banking information without a warrant.”

  Marcus wished his head was clearer. He felt as though his brain worked at quarter-speed. “Do we have enough to go to the police? And who would we contact? Fraud Squad?”

  Aiden nodded. “Probably, but since he appears to be working with someone—the deposits suggest that—we need to find out who. Putting him into custody is unlikely to help. His partner will probably cut him loose and disappear.”

  Marianne was largely silent so far.

  Marcus turned to her. “Any thoughts?”

  “It’s a long shot, but how about we bring Sylvie back to the office? We could circulate a story she was proved innocent and we’ve identified the culprit. If it is Pete, which looks likely, he might panic and make a mistake.”

  Anger flashed over Rico’s face. “A better idea would be to suggest she’s guilty. He might think he’s got away with it.” His voice was sharp.

  “No. Not at all.” Marianne looked energised. “Think about it. His attempts to discredit her have failed. He’ll have to try again, to shift the blame away from himself. He might turn up a second stolen laptop. It’s a great opportunity to set him up and catch him with real, hard proof.”

  It sounded reasonable, and Marcus thought for a moment. “She’s suspended on full pay, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s do it. Bring her back to the office and start spreading the rumour we found the spy. In the meantime, I want Aiden to suggest how to engage the appropriate authorities for an official investigation, without Pete finding out.”

  “No.” Rico’s face was tight with disdain. “It’s not safe to bring Sylvie back. I won’t let you do it.”

  Any other time, Marcus might have heeded his advice, but today he just wanted to get to the end of the meeting. “Rico, let me remind you Sylvie Woodrow doesn’t report to you. You don’t get to decide if she’s deployed in the office or sits at home being paid for nothing. We’ve established she’s innocent. There’s no reason she can’t come back to work. The audit team is shorthanded without her.”

  “You seem to have forgotten the threat made against her, just as you’ve forgotten the threats against your wife. Sylvie Woodrow is not a fucking weapon to be deployed.” His voice was low, and chilling in its intensity. “She’s a real person, in real danger if she returns to London.”

  Marianne stared at Rico. “We can keep her safe. Keep her location secret. Our role here is to fix the leak, by any means necessary.”

  “Sacrifice her? For the good of TM-Tech? I don’t think so.”

  Marianne scowled. “Are you sure you’re not getting personally involved here, Rico?”

  “That’s rich coming from someone whose personal involvement runs as deep as yours, Marianne.”

  Every word made Marcus’s head thump. He needed a huge black coffee and silence. A half-hour nap wouldn’t go amiss, either. This discussion was going nowhere.

  “Guys.” They ignored him, and that was enough to infuriate him. He thumped the table with his fist. “Take the personal digs offline. Rico, if you’re so adamant she doesn’t come back to the office, do you have an alternate plan we can use?”

  Rico stared at him like something he’d scraped off his shoe. “What happened to you, Marcus? You used to be honest and cared about the people you were responsible for.”

  Marcus held onto his temper by the thinnest of threads. “If you want to be reassigned, let me know. I’ll happily talk to Thaddeus.”

  Rico stood and glanced at Marianne, before swivelling his attention back to Marcus. “That’s good of you, but I’ll give my own update to Thaddeus.”

  Marianne looked up. “Hang on. I’m heading the audit team.”

  “Perhaps”—Rico’s voice was icy—“but as Marcus will confirm, my direct report is Thaddeus.”

  The tension levels in the room crept higher, and this time Aiden spoke. “This is all very interesting, but aren’t you losing sight of the objectives? I thought I was here to discuss a case of corporate espionage, not to referee a playground fight.”

  His calm words, in his crisp English accent, cooled Marcus’s anger a fraction. Rico strode to the window and stared outside, while Marianne scribbled a note in her file.

  Aiden waited a moment. “That’s better. Now does anybody want to hear my server update?”

  As soon as the briefing finished and Aiden left the office with Rico, Marianne rounded on Marcus. “What the fuck was that about? Rico reporting directly to Thaddeus? It’s my team, Marcus. Or at least it’s supposed to be.”

  He rubbed his hands across his face and took a gulp of the cold coffee. He’d rather be anywhere but here. “It’s a technicality. Does it really matter?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Right now?” He injected as much scathing into the two words as he could, but she carried on, as though he didn’t speak. He’d never seen her furious before, and like everything about her, it was a huge turn on.

  “You can explain to me how I’m supposed to run this audit when I don’t have control—”

  He silenced her with a kiss. She stiffened for a heartbeat, and then placed both palms on his chest and pushed. “Marcus. This is work we’re talking about.”

  “How about if I promise to tell you everything over dinner?”

  “Don’t try to brush away my concerns, as though they don’t exist.”

  Marcus knew Cassie sat just feet away on the other side of the door. He also knew that, the higher the risks he took, the greater chance he’d be caught. “I’m not. I promise. Later?” He snuck another kiss, and this time Marianne acquiesced.

  As he ran his hand up Marianne’s leg and discovered she wasn’t wearing panties again, he didn’t care about anything else.

  Chapter Twenty

  The email outage lasted all day. Most annoying to Marianne was the loss of everyone’s calendars. The audit team would normally spend hours in meetings, gathering and reviewing information, but now they had little idea of the day’s schedules. Half her team sat around, shuffling paperwork.

  To raise morale, she sent them for a long lunch break, while she slipped back to her apartment with Marcus. She couldn’t understand her behaviour; she’d never been so passionate before. With Marcus, it was as though a switch in her brain was flicked to the ON position. She couldn’t get enough of him. Every encounter left her desperate for the next. She refused to think about Louisa.
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br />   AJ was a different matter. There were more cheery texts from him, and despite the craziness of the situation with Marcus, she still hugged herself at the prospect of seeing AJ soon. He was her first love. That they’d found each other again, after such a long time apart, seemed significant. This time, they’d make it as a couple.

  The evening briefing was short. There’d been little progress. Aiden confirmed a hardware problem on the Exchange Server, and talked about the failure of a recently installed backplane. The system would be online again by nine that evening, after being out for over twelve hours.

  The impact on corporate productivity was difficult to calculate, and she knew Marcus was stressed about it. With the loss of another contract and the increased costs of the audit, he was running a tight budget. A day of unplanned downtime across the entire TM-Tech Europe network was bad news.

  Marianne and Marcus had dinner in a quiet restaurant. It seemed he’d given up any pretence of being discreet. He spent most of the meal with one hand creeping up her skirt, and snogged her intensely as they waited outside for a taxi.

  She had to tell him about AJ. She and Marcus had to stop seeing each other like this.

  Back at his apartment, as he poured drinks, Marianne braced herself to talk to him. She stood at the huge windows, gazing down at the darkened city, lost in thought.

  When he shucked up behind her and lifted her skirt, she sighed and stepped to one side. “Marcus, we need to talk.”

  He looked surprised, and then wary. “Is this to do with Louisa?”

  “No.” Now that she’d come to this point, she wasn’t sure if she could go through with it.

  Marianne took him by the hand and looked into his handsome face. His super-white teeth, shaggy blond hair, and bright blue eyes, so dear and familiar. “We can’t carry on like this.” He opened his mouth to speak, but she rushed on. “I’m seeing an old boyfriend soon. Someone I used to be in love with. I’m hoping to start a new relationship with him.”

  She wasn’t prepared for the look of intense hurt that rushed across Marcus’s face. Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.