hadn’t said she couldn’t, she realized.
“I’ll accept them,” she decided, swallowing the lump in her throat. Her voice stayed husky. “Do you know why?”
His brows went up in cautious inquiry.
“Because someday, long after our hideously civil divorce, when I’m old and gray and feeling sentimental, I’ll put them on. My daughter will ask me where I got them and I’ll say, Your father would never let me wear them while he was alive. He knew it made me think of my first husband with deep fondness.” Love. So much love. Her whole body ached with it. “But I won’t tell her why that memory was such a good one, because there are some things children don’t want to know about their mothers.”
His expression didn’t change, but his cheek ticked. “I thought you didn’t want children.”
She shrugged. “I’ll still think of last night every time I wear these.”
She put them on and deliberately met his gaze, confident that now, so would he.
* * *
You have violated our terms of service. Your access has been revoked. Join me in the tenth-floor conference room.
“What? Why? Argh.” She knew immediately what had happened. She had run an update this morning and Gabriel’s software had overwritten all her code. She couldn’t restore from backup, either. She didn’t have access.
Devastated by the white screen and the stark note, she gave her useless keyboard a few more random stabs with her finger, then picked it up and rattled it in frustration.
“Mrs. Dean?” Marco appeared in her door like one of those cartoon characters that defied time and space, conjuring himself from thin air in time to say his line. “I’ll call IT.”
Good luck.
“No. Show me where the tenth-floor conference room is, please. And please call me Luli.”
“Mr. Dean is the only one who calls you that. I presumed it was an endearment.” He cleared his throat, then tacked on, “Ma’am.”
An endearment? Gabriel had just nuked her ability to do the only job she had ever had—after picking away at it until it was down to bare bones. In the week they’d been here, he’d had her unload several investments, moving the cash into his own coffers. He’d had all the payroll records moved to his central accounting department. The property managers of Mae’s various complexes now answered to someone else and even Luli’s emails were cc’d to others.
“Will you go with me to my lunch tomorrow?” she asked Marco while they were in the elevator.
“Of course.”
“I’m not sure how to get around the city. You could show me how the subway works.”
He chuckled, then sobered with a start. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were serious.” He shot out a hand to hold the elevator door while she stepped out. “You have full use of Mr. Dean’s car. Why would you take the subway?”
Because she had to learn. She might love the man, but this marriage wouldn’t last and she refused to be dependent on him.
“This is it.” He paused at the first door and placed his hand on the latch and opened it.
“We’ll talk about the lunch when I get back upstairs,” she said over her shoulder as she entered. “Oh.” She checked as she discovered at least fifty people in the room. “Hello.” She took refuge in her stage persona, pasting on a smile.
They all stared at her with mouths hanging open, tracking her as she proceeded in a graceful walk down the aisle against the wall. They were seated theatre-style facing Gabriel. He stood in front of a projection screen that showed the note he’d placed on her screen to bring her here.
A public dressing down? Really?
“Why so shocked?” he asked the room. “Beauty does not preclude brains. Thank you for coming.” He took her hand as she arrived beside him. “Luli, meet my software-development team. Or rather, the lead technicians for the various modules and apps. These men and women oversee between fifty and a hundred coders each, but you’re looking at my best and brightest.”
His tone held an edge that made the entire room sink down in their seats.
Luli eyed him with suspicion as she made herself smile warmly and say, “Good afternoon.”
“I’ve been showing them how you tailored our software for my grandmother, the entry points you used and some samples of the code you wrote.”
He tapped his laptop and she looked over her shoulder at the string of script she had used to lock him out.
“We’ve been enjoying a little team-building exercise here. It took this room’s collective intelligence two hours to get past your gatekeeper and lock you out.”
“Your grandmother was very cautious,” she prevaricated, drawing her hand from his and clasping hers lightly together before her. “I was protecting her interests, not hacking into your system.”
“No, but you could. And there aren’t many hackers at your level, but the fact you got this far means every one of our customers is vulnerable.” His words left a resounding silence. “I wrote some rough and dirty patches while we were in Africa. That’s what we pushed to the update this morning. It’s going to impact functionality until it’s cleaned up and tailored. I’d like you to oversee that.”
She actually looked to her left to see who he was talking to because he couldn’t possibly be speaking to her. A couple of people snickered.
“Um...” She touched the fine hairs at the back of her neck. Oversee three or four thousand people? Wasn’t there an expression about trees and barking up wrong ones?
“And when people suggest I made my wife the new VP of software development because she’s my wife, what will you say?” he asked the room at large.
Silence, then a lone voice said, “Actually she’s a genius and made us all look like tools.”
“She did, indeed. But she’ll soon make you look like rock stars,” he promised. “See how good she makes me look?” He held out his arm.
She went to him, pulled by forces greater than herself to press against him, but she tilted an admonishing look up at him. Smiled brightly.
“Can I speak to you?”
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