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I nodded. “He still is, but he rarely gets to flex those muscles anymore. Occasionally, on days when he doesn’t have much to do, he’ll come to me and ask for some coding work to do. Nothing too complex; just something he can grind away at for a while.”
“You said he wrote most of the code for PayScale,” Amber said carefully. “Is that true.”
“It is.”
“I looked at the old PayScale source code last night,” she said. “It was… I don’t know. Intricate. Sophisticated. It wasgood.”
“That’s Owen for you,” I said. “He was probably a better coder than I was, back when we got started.” I frowned. “What made you look at the PayScale code last night?”
“I was curious,” Amber replied distantly. She got that thousand-yard stare in her eyes again, then abruptly snapped out of it. “So why did he stop coding?”
“We grew too big, too fast,” I explained. “One of us had to start focusing on the business side of things. He was the natural choice. I’m too shy and awkward to be the face of the business. Owen’s more charismatic, more charming. Better looking.”
“Don’t say that,” Amber immediately interjected. “You’re much cuter than Owen.”
Now it was my turn to blush. I shrugged and studied my keyboard.
“You were totally fishing for compliments,” Amber said, “weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Sure, sure.” Amber grabbed a stray noodle from her food container and tossed it at me. It smacked against my glasses, leaving a saucy smear.
“Food fighting is on the list of prohibited behaviors here at ACS,” I said. “As your boss, I can have you written up for that.”
Amber let out a dramatic sigh. “If a girl can’t throw a noodle every now and then, what’s the point of living?”
She leaned forward, hovering over me, and gently kissed the noodle off my glasses and ate it down. Then she breathed on the lenses and wiped them again with the hem of her shirt. When she leaned back over me to place them back on my nose, her long hair swung forward and brushed against my arms, tickling and electrifying my body. I caught a deep whiff of her fruity shampoo, and had to force myself not to take a deep breath.
“What? I didn’t have a napkin,” she said with a smile. “No more food fights. I promise.”
Amber and I had such a good camaraderie together—even after the kiss fiasco. I felt like I could be myself around her. And I got the impression she felt like she could act natural around me, too. Things would have been so simple if she were a man. We would have a growing work friendship. Things wouldn’t be complicated.
Instead, I found myself fantasizing about the round pools that were her eyes, and the lips that were warm and oh so kissable…
Stop it. Focus.
“I think we were still fixing the password routing function,” I said, turning back to my screen. “Do you remember where the problem was?”
The two of us hunched together behind my desk and got back to work, but my thoughts were anything but platonic.
19
Amber
As infuriating as Owen’s hack on my phone had been, it had one big benefit: it made me forget all about the uncomfortable situation with Jude.
From the moment Owen fried my cell phone and then signed off from the chat last night, I was laser-focused on securing my home network. I updated all of the firmware on my modem and the three wireless hot spots in my house. I bought a new firewall and spent three hours configuring it on my server.
And then I started planning how I was going to get even with him. Because this wasn’t just about the rooftop deck and my two thousand dollars anymore. Now it was personal.
So by the time I walked into the office the next morning and ran into Jude on the stairs? The kiss was thelastthing on my mind.
Yet as soon as I saw him, it became concern number one again. A reminder that I sometimes made mistakes and didn’t know how to fix them.
Things were awkward with Jude, at first. How could they not be? We kissed yesterday. It was a good kiss. Hell, it was downrightgreat. On a scale of one-to-ten, it was an eleven. And now we had to work together and pretend like it never happened.
But as we pushed our chairs together and focused on the work, we fell into a natural groove together. We were united by our shared expertise in computer code, and by the overwhelming pile of work that lay before us.
