Chapter Twenty

 

The office is dark. The summer heat has just begun, but keeping the lights off keeps the room cool, and the only one still there doesn't mind the dark. At least, Adam Quinn thinks he's the only one there. He barely manages to hide his surprise when Tom's gravelly voice pipes up from the door.

"How'd we do?"

"What?"

"The news report. You still feeling good about it?"

"You know I trust you," Adam answers, not looking away from the screen. "I hired you because you know what you're doing. Better than I do."

Adam can hear the heavy sound of his footfalls. "That's great to hear. I wish all my clients were as trusting."

"Most of your clients don't know how to run a Smash TV campaign."

"Most of my clients don't know what Smash TV is."

"No, I guess they wouldn't," Adam answers. He shouldn't really be coding. There are guys working for him who are geniuses at this stuff. Guys working for him who are making too much money to be in the trenches were geniuses. The guys working below those guys, those were the ones who wrote code.

But here he was, digging into an editor. It made Quinn feel a young again. How had he let himself get away from this? What had taken him away from what he was good at and into all this? He knew intrinsically. He was a businessman now, not a code monkey. He made too much money and too much of a difference.

"What are you doing here, Tom?"

"I wanted to figure something out."

Adam closed the line of code and his fingers flew across the keys as he commented in what he'd planned to do next. Nothing was worse than coming back to the code and not having the least idea what the fuck you were doing with it.

Then he turned. The light from the hall spilled into the room. It didn't quite touch Adam, but it framed Tom in light in a way that he might not have realized when he'd set it up, but Delaney would have been very pleased to discover.

"Yeah?"

"You slept with her," he says. It's not particularly an accusation. There's no hurt in his voice, or anything like that.

"Is that what you came here to say?"

"I need to know you're not going to let this get in the way of the campaign. I've seen men who were much less controversial than you go down over just this sort of thing."

"I know what I'm doing."

"That's what worries me," Tom says softly. "You always know what you're doing. Always five moves ahead."

"What's your point?"

"My point is, you're always five moves ahead, and you like situations that get ugly. I don't care what you do with the girl, but don't ruin her, and don't put me in a position where I can't make the campaign work."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Adam couldn't read his face, shrouded in darkness and surrounded by light. Tom Delaney had never been a sentimental man. It was strange to imagine that he might have suddenly grown a heart after all these years. Extremely strange.

"I don't think I need to say any of this, but if you're really not sure, then I'll lay my cards on the table." He steps out and away from the light, leans against the back of a couch. "My priorities in this campaign are few. I work for money, and it's money you're supplying. There's no problem there. But I have an image to protect, and I'm not going to let that get hurt. I think of you as a friend, but I'm not going down for you."

"I wouldn't ask you to."

"You've done worse to better men over women."

"There's no worry about anything like that, Tom."

"Is it? Because I think she's taking it to be something."

Adam frowned. He wasn't wrong, and there wasn't an easy answer. It raised questions he didn't particularly want to answer right now. Questions like what it really meant, if it wasn't what she thought it was. If it meant nothing, then why get so uptight?

And if it didn't mean nothing… what did that mean?

"Your concerns are noted, Tom. I'm not going to fuck you over on this. I watch out for my people."

"And as much as it might surprise some to learn," Tom said, his low natural growl almost tamed by the softness of his voice, "but so do I."

"Then we're together."

"We'll see," Tom answers. "Don't work too hard."

"I've never worked too hard in my life," Adam answers. "I could do a lot more if I wanted to burn myself out."

In the darkness, with his head no longer framed by light, Adam can almost make out a smile on his usually-dour face. "That's what worries me."