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Or not.
CeCe nods. “I do, of course. I have a special young man who does all sorts of jobs for me. Thomas, what is his name again?”
Thomas is still here, though he refused to sit down and eat with us. He said it wouldn’t be proper. He pokes his head out of the kitchen where he’s been hanging out. “No idea, ma’am. You simply call him Hacker.”
CeCe nods as though this is normal. “Yes, Hacker can help us.”
“We’re not hacking Nick’s accounts.” I was pretty sure Nick wouldn’t have the balls to physically steal from the company. There were a lot of things the man might do, but it wouldn’t be anything so blatant.
“We set a trap for him.” Anika’s hands come up animatedly as she speaks. “For him and Sherry Carrigan. They think they’re going to a business meeting but then they meet with a shit ton of cocaine and oops, the cops show up and everyone believes it because in some circles she’s known as Snowy Carrigan for both her superwhite skin and her love of cocaine.”
Harper turns her way. “Sweetie, I’m worried about you.”
“I’m just saying, it wouldn’t be so bad if everyone involved went to jail,” Anika says with a shrug. “For a very long time.”
“I like her,” Darnell says with a nod to Heath. “She seems ready to cause some trouble. The one you have seems to have calmed down a lot.”
The arrogant grin on my boyfriend’s face has me groaning. “Yeah, I made that happen.”
“Heath,” I hiss under my breath.
“What?” Harper has sensed gossip, and she narrows in on me and Heath. “How did you calm Ivy down, Heath?”
“Is everything okay?” my mother asks.
CeCe leans in. “I believe the inference here is that Heath gave Ivy a physical release for her perfectly normal in her given situation anxiety.”
“He fucked her calm,” Darnell says with a grimace. “Would you please stop? His head is big enough. You would think he invented sex.”
My mom blushes but still looks my way. “You’re okay now?”
I nod. “I’m good. I’m afraid I came over to quit the company, and Heath talked me out of it.”
“Good for Heath,” CeCe says approvingly.
“I thought you were against the whole dating while they’re working together thing,” Anika points out.
“I was until I saw Emma.” CeCe had asked Heath to walk her through what we’ve achieved so far. She’d been impressed, to say the least. “Now I’m sure we’re going to make millions, if not billions, and I’m all for keeping the boy genius happy. Ivy, use your body as you wish. You might be able to negotiate another ten percent.”
“My daughter is not a prostitute,” my mom announces.
“Sex worker,” Harper corrects.
CeCe shrugs as though she doesn’t understand the problem. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. The young man is getting something out of it. I’ve found young men often need an extra push to achieve their goals.”
Darnell got the biggest smile on his face. “I love that woman. She’s one hundred percent going in a book.”
This feels right. Not the sitting around talking about me exchanging sexual favors for artificial intelligence part. The part where we’re joking and laughing and eating delicious food and feeling like a weird family.
Or maybe all families are weird in their ways. But this one feels right.
“I don’t think it was Ivy doing the pushing,” Lydia says. “Heath knew she was on the edge after that terrible article, and she needed some physical affection. That’s all.”
I could do with less talk about my sex life, though. A lot less talk.
Heath sits back, that dumbass sexy smirk on his face. “She needed some affection. As her boyfriend, I gave it to her. Now stop making Ivy blush. We need real solutions. Unless we can access Nick’s systems, I doubt we’re going to figure out where he got the money.”
“We’re not…” I’m about to say the word hacking when I realize we don’t have to hack anything. Not anything at all. “My backup system. I didn’t even think about it.”
My mom sits up, palms flat on the table. “He used your system when you were living together? For his laptop?”
We might not have shared a bank account, but we’d shared a freaking cloud. “For his everything, and he didn’t understand how to use it. I dumbed it down for him because he refused to learn. I set the whole thing up so all he had to do was plug his system in and everything got pulled to our personal cloud.”
“But that’s for business,” Harper replies. “I get that he would need a backup for his laptop. He would do all his business stuff there.”
Darnell snorts. “Not that dude. I assure you, that dude does the majority of his business on his phone or a tablet. I work with these guys. They’re all flash and no actual substance. He says he works in tech, but I would bet he’s never programmed anything on his own. He’s probably got a group of guys and one or two of them are the actual smart ones, but he’s convinced them he’ll show them the way to nerdvana if they carry him on their shoulders.”
