I found a nice dress, not too fancy but not too plain. It hugged my ass and cinched in the waist. And it pushed the "girls" up. Flaunt it if you got it, I always say.

This suite was seriously nice. I looked around before leaving - three bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a huge balcony. The kitchen had a wine fridge and the living room had a giant flat screen TV.

I had to hand it to him, Daryl did good for himself in ten years.

But all that success and such a smart guy, why wouldn't he take the hint? Did he really not know that I loved him and that I didn't want him to leave? Or that I would have gone with him? Fuck, I would have followed that guy to the ends of the Earth.

And what was he doing bagging on this place? I live here, hello! And he grew up here, too. Just because you got money didn't mean you could be an ass to everyone in your past.

Or, more importantly, to me.

Still, his tongue worked me over good. I smiled to myself. I wish we could have finished.

I wished I would have had the guts to say something to him before he left. To tell him how I felt. I was so stupid.

And who the fuck was Victoria? Why was he so evasive about her?

I sat at the kitchen counter on the bar-height stools and logged in to the email server.

There was some strange activity. I opened up a new terminal and checked the logs. I saw something strange. It looked like someone was sending a lot of emails on the company server in the past few days, through my email server, and, if I didn't know any better, that law enforcement was trying to break in to my system.

At the very least, they were intercepting messages once they left my system.

Back in the email server, I pulled up some email headers, found the messages, and looked who they were from.

"[email protected]"

Daryl, what were you up to?

* * *

Lisa wasn't in the server room when I got there. Which was good, because she just slows me down and it's just weird how she looks over my shoulder, like she even understood half of what I was doing.

And her perfume... ugh. She's a big girl and I'm sure she uses it to cover up, well, you know what I mean.

Back on the server with a real keyboard, I did some additional digging into these emails.

The more I dug, the more I realized that the FBI was onto Daryl for some reason. I couldn't figure out why, and I couldn't read his emails because we encrypted outgoing messages by default - I couldn't read the emails without the password to his account.

I was getting into some borderline illegal stuff here. And by borderline I mean 100% totally illegal, unethical, the sort of stuff that IT folks get fired for doing all the time. Losing this job would really screw me over.

What was he hiding? He left, he didn't keep any contact with me but now tells me he thought about me all the time, then he buys this hotel a year ago and doesn't come and look me up or anything. He's fucking here and doesn't so much as pick up a phone book to try to find me.

What if he wasn't really here for some political thing, maybe he was here to run to Canada if shit got real? I mean, if the FBI is monitoring his emails, I'm sure they've cracked the encryption by now, or did some human engineering to get his password. It's not that hard, people are nice and helpful and that's how Kevin Mitnick did all his hacking, and the FBI fucking hated that guy.

What are you running from, Daryl Daneski?

And if you're just here to make a quick getaway, maybe I shouldn't be messing with you. You seem like a dream come true - I'm out on my ass, my car's dead, and I find out you're my boss.

But what the fuck?

You're just a big question mark to me right now.

I jumped at a knock on the door. I scooted over on the chair and opened the door.

"Oh, it's you," Evelyn said.

* * *

"Look, I don't have any beef with you, so just run back up and do your thing, okay?" That was me trying not to jump down her throat. She interrupted the best sex I'd had in a long, long time, and I needed it.

Right now, I needed to do some more digging on Daryl.

"Do you know where Lisa is? I was told she's usually down here." She ignored me like I was nothing to her.

Then she looked me up and down and made a face - that one where you slightly purse your lips and pull your head back. It was subtle, but she might as well have said, "Mm, hmm" and snapped her fingers in a zee formation.

I stood up and bit my lip, shook my head. I started to say something and stopped. She raised her brows at me but didn't say anything.

That smarmy bitch.

"Lisa is running around, trying to manage the conference. Maybe check by the ball room. Or have her paged over the hotel system?"

"We don't use our hotel intercom for anything except emergencies. It's tacky to do otherwise."

I almost lit that bitch up. Instead, I cracked my knuckles in front of her face and sat down in the creaky office chair. I pushed myself back over to the terminal and started typing away. I wasn't really typing anything, but she didn't know that.

I didn't look up. "You can go now."