two new women laughing with him. She cursed under her breath.
“He was just with your sister.” There was censure in Brody’s tone, and she looked up to see his gaze had hardened.
“It’s not that.” It was clear from his frown that he didn’t believe her. “I’m not here to make a play for Quentin.”
“You nearly injured yourself trying to get over there to chat him up.”
“Not for that.”
“Listen, it’s not really any of my business.”
“You’re right. It’s not. But I’m going to tell you anyway. I’m not romantically interested in Quentin.”
She couldn’t imagine any circumstance where she’d be romantically interested in a man like Quentin Roo.
Brody’s gaze took a leisurely tour of her outfit. “Good news, Kate. Romance is not at all what you’re projecting.”
Despite the fact that she’d done so on purpose, she was offended by his implication that she’d dressed provocatively. “I’m not after Quentin in any way, shape or form.”
“Of course you’re not.”
She didn’t care what this Brody person thought. At least she shouldn’t care about his opinion. But for some stupid reason, she did care.
It was on the tip of her tongue to explain that this was all about her niece. She was playacting here, making sure Annabelle was going to be okay. But she stopped herself just in time. Instead, she looked up at him and gave her highlighted hair another defiant toss. “I’m here for a good time.”
His eyes reminded her of flints. “Aren’t we all.”
* * *
Brody watched the fleet of tiny electronic spaceships blast their way through an asteroid field on the wall-mounted wide screen. The ships changed colors, using different weapons, all jockeying for position while trying to avoid being annihilated by other players.
“See that? Right there,” said Will Finlay, the head programmer from Shetland Tech. “The organics on the planet surface.”
“All I see are a bunch of things exploding.”
“It’s the way they’re exploding,” said Will. “Or rather, the way they’ve changed the way they’re exploding.”
“If you say so.” Brody wasn’t a software engineer, and he wouldn’t pretend to come close to Will’s technical understanding.
“This is the best evidence yet. I’ve checked with a few contacts at MIT, and they agree Shetland Tech has been ripped off.”
“Can we prove it with this?” Brody asked.
Will had managed to get his hands on a prototype of the Beast Blue Designs’ new game, “Blue Strata Combat.”
“Not without the source code,” Will said. “We can prove they’re using advanced algorithms that trigger object evolution within an AI environment, but we can’t prove they stole it from Shetland.”
“But they did,” said Brody.
“They did.”
“If we move now?”
“I’m told that if we make a move based on the evidence we have right now we’ll be tied up in litigation for a few decades. And after that we’ll probably lose.”
Brody sat back in the burgundy leather armchair that was positioned in the living area of his hotel suite at the Diamond Pier Towers. He’d been away from home for over a month now, and he was growing impatient.
Back in Scotland, his brother Blane had too much to worry about already. Suffering from the neuromuscular disease Newis Bar Syndrome, Blane tired more easily than most people. But as eldest son, the Viscount and the future Earl of Calder, the responsibilities for the family seat fell to him. Brody had to at least take the money trouble out of the equation.
“We need to get inside their facility,” Will said. “Proving our case still hinges on accessing their resident servers and finding our proprietary code.”
“We already tried that.”
The attempt had been a dismal failure. The technical security was impenetrable, and the server room was on lockdown twenty-four hours a day. The private detective they’d hired to go undercover as a technician was caught trying to gain unauthorized access and was summarily fired.
“Do you think Quentin might confess something?” Will asked.
“To me?”
“To anybody.”
Brody found his thoughts moving to Kate. If he looked like Kate he might be able to get Quentin to spill his darkest secrets. But he didn’t look like Kate, and so far Quentin didn’t want to talk business with outsiders.
“I need to find an opportunity to search his house,” Brody said. “If we can’t get into their corporate headquarters, Quentin’s house is the next best bet.”
“You get caught snooping around? Well, I have to say, those security guys he’s hired seem very serious.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“They have Russian accents.”
“I know.”
Brody had heard rumors about Quentin’s financial backers, that they had shady backgrounds and even shadier connections to overseas criminal organizations.
“I don’t see we have any choice,” he said.
“There’s always a choice,” Will said.
“You mean I can make the decision to bankrupt my family?”
“It’s better than being shot.”
“Marginally,” Brody said.
Quite frankly, he’d rather take a bullet than be responsible for losing the Calder estate. The earldom had been in his family for twenty-two generations. They’d had ups and downs over the years. The land had been mortgaged before, but the family had always made it back to better times.
Five years ago, their financial position had become particularly precarious, and Brody knew they needed to modernize. His brother Blane, the viscount and eldest son of the earl, wanted to develop tourism infrastructure on the estate, starting with a hotel. But Brody worried about the high investment and slow rate of return that were part of Blane’s plan. He knew they needed something faster, so he’d convinced his father to buy Will’s start-up company and go into high-end gaming technology.
At first, it had worked brilliantly. They’d paid down their debt and were looking forward to moving into the tourism sector. But then Brody got overconfident. He’d borrowed again, borrowed more, and plowed the money into expanding Shetland Tech, creating a new game that he and Will were sure would
