LUKE: Complete Series (7 page)

I took a deep breath before I spoke. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Hey, don’t let this get awkward. If you don’t feel the same way, that’s fine. We can slow it down.”

I tried to swallow the lump forming in my throat, but it only made my head ache as the pain built up in my face, stinging my eyes.

“I don’t want to slow it down,” I said, trying to keep my eyes on his, but my gaze kept darting to the computer screen every time I lost my nerve. “I… I think we should probably… just keep our relationship on a professional level from here on out.”

Our eyes met and I could feel the mixture of disappointment and anger building inside him with every breath he took. He cocked one eyebrow as he turned to look out the wall of windows on my right.

“Is this your decision or did someone else put you up to this?”

My breath caught in my chest. He knew about my meeting with Milo yesterday.

“What do you mean? Why would somebody tell me to do this?”

“I mean, your mom or your dad. Did they tell you to stop seeing me?”

The penetrating glare in his eyes did not match this innocuous insinuation and I was once again overcome with a strong sense that he knew what I was up to.

“I haven’t spoken to my parents about you.”

“You haven’t?” He appeared somewhat surprised and a bit disappointed.

“No. Should I?”

“I don’t know. I thought you would want to tell them about your new job since you
are
supporting them.”

“How do you know that?”

One side of his mouth curled up in a devious half-smile. “Brina, you’re working for the richest, most powerful nerd in America. Did you really think there was anything I wouldn’t find in your background check?”

My heart thumped in my ears and pulsated in my fingertips. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”

“Brina, come here.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your boss and I’m asking you nicely to please come here.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re asking me nicely.”

“Brina.”

I stood from the chair and rounded the desk. He patted his lap and I took a seat. He swung my legs over him and wrapped his arms around my waist. Just being near him changed the energy in the room and suddenly I couldn’t resist the urge to rest my head on his shoulder. He kissed my forehead then tilted my chin up so I was facing him.

“I’m not trying to manipulate you. Do you believe me?”

I nodded and he kissed me tenderly and slowly. I wanted to melt into him. I wanted everything to fade to black then wake up in a future where NeoSys didn’t exist. He pulled away and kissed the tip of my nose.

“If you want to keep our relationship professional, I can do that. It will be difficult, but I’ll do it, if that’s what you truly want.”

How could I resist him? It wasn’t fair. I had no chance at succeeding in this environment. Luke was much better at this than I was. I should get out now while I could still salvage my position at NeoSys.

He gazed down at me with those icy, aquamarine eyes and I knew I didn’t stand a chance. I might as well sign my parents up for food stamps now.

“I’m just scared of losing myself. I’m scared that the second I let my guard down, this is all going to come crashing down… like my brother and my parents. I turned my back on my brother for five minutes and now he’s gone. I moved out of the house and my dad lost his job. And now my mom is a nervous wreck and my dad might have cancer and I… I’m just really fucking scared.”

Something changed in his face and I feared I’d said too much. This was too heavy. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Fuck,” he whispered. “I didn’t realize you were dealing with all that. Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

“I’m telling you now. Is this too much?”

He shook his head. “No. I just want you to know you can talk to me about this stuff anytime.”

He was holding something back. There was a reason he wished I had told him this yesterday. I suddenly got the feeling that the phone I found in the restroom was not left there by accident.

“Did Josh ever find his phone?” I asked. I wanted to see the reaction on his face.

He scrunched his eyebrows together as he turned to me. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

“You asked me to order him a new one. I just wanted to make sure he hadn’t found it before I do that.”

“Oh, right. No, I think it’s still missing.”

“Aren’t you going to do something about that? Isn’t there some kind of protocol when important stuff goes missing?”

“It’s just a phone, Brina. There’s nothing important on his phone that can’t be recovered by syncing a new phone with the data backup on his computer.”

I thought of the NeoSys app I’d found on there and realized Luke was either lying to me or he didn’t know that Josh had a suspiciously named app on his phone. Something told me that there was nothing Luke didn’t know about his programmers, just as there was nothing he didn’t know about me.

I gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before I leaned over and whispered in his ear. “I don’t want to keep our relationship professional.” I slid off his lap and spread his legs as I knelt in front of him. I smiled at the look of uncertainty on his face as I undid his belt. “I love you, Luke.”

PART THREE: LINKED

1

The banging on the door startled me awake. I blinked at the glowing green numbers on my alarm clock: 1:13 a.m. Who the hell was at my door at this hour on a Tuesday?

I tossed the covers off and slid out of bed as the banging continued. “I’m coming!” I shouted from the bedroom, as I slipped my arms into my robe.

I couldn’t see anything. I grasped the breakfast bar that separated the living room from the kitchen and used it to guide me toward the front door.

“Who is it?” I shouted over the relentless pounding.

“It’s me, bitch! Open this door!”

I unlocked the door and my best friend Jill shoved me aside and barged into my living room. I flipped the light switch on the wall and the living room was flooded with light, revealing a secondhand sofa, an LCD television, and a laptop; the entire contents of my living room.

“What the fuck happened to you?” she shrieked, as she stood in the middle of the room, arms outstretched, mouth hanging open.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’ve been busy.” I took a seat on a stool at the breakfast bar.

“Yeah, busy moving and changing your phone number without telling me.” Her round face contorted with worry. “I thought something bad happened.”

I knew what she meant by “something bad.”

After my brother’s suicide seven months ago, I disappeared from Seattle for six days. I couldn’t face anyone knowing that not only was I the one who drove Ryan to the hospital where he jumped to his death, but I was also the one who encouraged him to enlist in the Marines two years earlier. Jill was the one who finally found me in a hotel room in San Francisco: the destination of the last road trip I took with Ryan before he was shipped to Afghanistan. My eyes were swollen from crying for six days straight, my hair was in knots, and I had lost eight pounds from not having eaten for six days. She never asked what I was doing there or, rather, what I had been too afraid to do there. She knew.

She talked me down from that ledge seven months ago and this was how I repaid her. I was a horrible friend.

“What’s going on, Brina? Are you mad at me?”

“No! I’m… I changed jobs. I moved to be closer to my new office. But it was all really sudden so I didn’t get a chance to tell anyone about it.”

I hung my head in shame. I had been dreading this moment for the past week since I moved into this apartment.

“So getting a new job means you disappear off the face of the Earth? What the fuck’s going on, Brina? And I don’t want anymore of this new job bullshit.”

“I
do
have a new job. Well… I have two jobs: the new one and the old one. It’s complicated. I can’t really talk about it.”

Jill crossed her arms. “You always tell me about your assignments. What’s so different about this one?”

“Uh… hello, Jill? Do you not see that I was actually moved out of my old apartment for this? This is the biggest assignment of my career.”

She rolled her eyes and finally took a seat on the sofa. “How about you get us something to drink ‘cause I’m not leaving until you dish.”

I couldn’t help but smile. Even though I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone about this assignment, I desperately needed Jill’s advice. She was the sensible one in this friendship. I was the one who went to a college clear across the country. She was the one who stayed behind to run her family’s travel agency when her mother got sick. I was the one who took a job as a corporate spy. She was the one who took her mother to dialysis appointments every week. I needed her to talk some sense into me.

I poured us each a glass of Reisling and tucked the bottle of wine between the sofa cushions as I sat next to her. “I’m working for Maxwell Computers.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re spying on Maxwell Computers?”

“Well, specifically, Luke Maxwell. I’m his new executive assistant. We paid off his old assistant to retire early.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“That’s not it. Luke and I… we’re sort of….”

“No fucking way!”

“Yes, fucking
many
ways.”

Jill downed the whole glass of wine and held it out to me for a refill, which I promptly poured. “You’re dating Luke Maxwell.”

I held my wineglass up to my mouth to hide my huge grin as I nodded.

“How is he?”

“So sweet. You would not believe how safe I feel when I’m with him. And he’s funny and sexy and—”

“Brina? How
is
he?”

I sank back onto the sofa and shook my head. “There are no words.”

“That good?”

“Better.”

“Wait a minute. Aren’t you supposed to be spying on him? How are you supposed to steal from him if you’re all gaga for his hot jalapeño?”

“Please don’t call it that.”

“His love sausage. Whatever.”

“You really need to stop watching so much Food Network.”

She guzzled the rest of her wine and held her glass out again.

“If I give you this, you’re staying the night,” I insisted, holding the bottle behind my back.

“Yeah, yeah. Just fill her up and fill me in. I want to know everything.”

I told her everything from the day my boss at NeoSys, Kip Singer, gave me the assignment to earlier today at the office with Luke when I got a strong suspicion he was on to me.

“What am I going to do? If I come clean to him, I’ll lose my job at NeoSys
and
my job at Maxwell Computers.”

“And you could lose him. I mean, that’s what’s
really
at stake here, right? Fuck the job. You can get another one.”

“If I screw this up, I’ll be blacklisted.”

“Brina, you’re gorgeous and you have a degree from Cornell. You will find another job, even if it’s not in the same industry.”

“And in the meantime, what about my parents? They need my help
now
. They can’t afford to support me while I look for a job. My dad’s pension barely covers their mortgage.”

“Your parents might have to sign up for
Meals on Wheels
for a while, but they’ll survive, Brina. But if you keep lying to Luke, you can kiss him goodbye. The real question isn’t if you should come clean. The real question is can you survive
another
broken heart?”

The silence that followed this question told us both everything we needed to know.

I strolled into the lobby at Maxwell Computers, not at all in the mood to be ignored by the receptionist or to make the trek up the stairs all the way to the twelfth floor, but there was no way I would ever get into that glass-bottomed elevator again. The entire way up, I kept trying to think of what I was going to say to Luke. I tried to imagine what he would say in return, but these things never went as planned. I’d been through enough breakups to know that.

Is that what this was? A breakup?

I finally reached the twelfth floor and I burst through the door into the corridor outside the executive offices. I entered the lobby where my desk was positioned perpendicular to the wall not far from the elevator. My eyes kept darting back and forth from my desk to Luke’s office door about ten yards further along the wall. I set my purse on my desk and took a deep breath, trying to steal as much courage from the woman who once sat here. Janice had to have balls the size of the moon to betray Luke the way she had after working for him for nine years.

Just as I was about to walk to Luke’s office, the elevator doors slid open and Janice stepped out holding a small cardboard box in her hands. She smiled at me and I tried not to appear totally surprised as I smiled back.

“Special delivery for Miss Brina Kingston,” Janice cooed, her Barbie doll makeup still doing a poor job of hiding the fact that she was nearly sixty years old.

“Thank you, Janice,” I said, taking the package from her hands.

I glanced at the return address and saw the location of Maxwell Computers’ distribution center in Arizona. This was the new phone I had ordered to replace the phone lost by one of Luke’s lead programmers, Josh Ramos—the phone I’d actually stolen after Josh left it in the restroom of Luke’s sailboat.