Despite her wishes—and her need for home, a shower, and a bottle of Pinot—Laurel decided to stay at the office and play catch-up. There was just too much bullshit lumped on top of the heap. She could tread water for a while, keep up the appearance of productivity while at least staying afloat. But with her taking on Caitlyn’s slack, the stalled AIDA hack, the icy cold beginnings of that deathly, sinking feeling were starting in her gut.

In the limo with Mr. Andre, she had doubled down to keep her position. She had to. She wasn’t prepared to lose it the very next day after finally meeting and thanking Abe Hudson. The man had owed her father a favor. And now she felt indebted to both of them.

Get to work, Kiddo.

She got to work immediately, attacking the vulnerabilities of the AIDA server’s existing encryption. There was no need to work with Caitlyn, or even consult with her. Laurel had read over her files. And what she’d discovered had knocked away what meager appetite was creeping back since the morning’s shit-show presentation. She almost felt glad about it, about the otherwise horrible discussion with Mr. Andre. At least it forced her to see just how incompetent Caitlyn was, and how much of a mistake it was to put her at the helm of such a major task.

Laurel wondered just what the hell the biker chick was good for, aside from entertainment value at Sentry work functions where alcohol was involved. She might have been good for some other things for Mr. Andre and Mr. Geffen . . .

Laurel tried not to think about those other things, and instead focused on disrupting a server.

She also had to stop thinking how behind she was in other facets of the project.

Goddammit . . .

She had to close everything off and just concentrate.

But she needed to delegate better. Fuck . . . Caitlyn had been a mistake. A big mistake. Her first major blunder as Assistant Project Manager. There might be more mistakes to come, the inevitable ones, but she’d have to go a while now without any. She needed a few days of smooth sailing . . . No, she needed better than that. What Laurel needed was a high-speed racing boat to take her, at full throttle, all the way from the doghouse to the employee of the year board. And maybe then she could have that glass of Pinot.

In the meantime, she had some personnel decisions to make. She would need to shuffle around her resources. Especially Caitlyn.

Who could take over the TLS?

Fuck . . .

No.

Stop.

Focus.

Laurel needed to make at least some progress today. Just to get even the smallest achievement, the slightest headway.

She got started by putting aside Caitlyn’s work and starting from scratch, designing the beginnings of a basic hack. As she worked, Laurel felt a calm wash over her. She felt herself locking into the zone.

Until Mr. Geffen knocked on the door.

“Hey, Laurel, can we come in for a sec?”

The momentum, when she had it, was a physical sensation. Like the pulse of music turning a wheel inside her brain.

“Yeah, come in.”

But any interrupting to the wheel’s momentum, especially a knock on the door from Mr. Geffen, felt like a broom handle was shoved into its spokes. She couldn’t let things grind to a halt. She continued working, pressing on with her latest task while her boss entered the room.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said.

“Not at all.” She was still working, her eyes glued to the screen as her fingers worked the keys.

“I just wanted to introduce you to someone, a new addition to your team.”

Thank God. She’d finally get some help.

“This here, is Matthias.”

Matthias? Hm . . .

“He’s a Yankee like myself,” Mr. Geffen said. “Came all the way down yesterday just to help us out.”

He . . . A new face, and hopefully a handsome one. But would he be capable at all? Or would it be just another babysitting job?

“Laurel?”

She had way too much work to do, on top of teaching the ropes to some newbie . . .

“Can you say hi?”

“Sorry,” Laurel said, clicking out of her work window and then swiveling her chair around to take a look at the fresh meat.

“He’s here to help out with the AIDA hack.”

She lifted her head.

What the fuck?!

Laurel’s double-take almost sent her flying out of her chair.

It was him. Not Matthias, but Matt. Her Matt. And here he was, his hard physique stuffed into a tight-fitting dress shirt and pants, his flustered smile in a well-lit room instead of the darkness of a bar, or of her bedroom. She could see the color on his face, the embarrassment. And she could see him looking away, to anywhere but her, his mouth hung open like he’d been punched in the gut.

“Hi . . .” Laurel wanted to turn around and keep working, fingers and mind just working away as if nothing had happened. As if the guy that just fucked her last night was not standing in her office with her boss. As if he hadn’t just become “part of her team.”

“So?” Mr. Geffen said. “What do you think? Can you use him?”

Laurel’s hands had automatically returned to her keyboard, just lying there doing nothing. She peeled them away and leaned back into her chair. “Can I . . . use him?”

She had used him before. Oh, God, did she ever use him . . .

“Yeah,” Geffen said. “We thought you might need some extra muscle.”

She certainly could, but maybe anywhere else than her office. And as far as “muscle” . . . Maybe a different type of muscle would be more helpful right now. His brain, if he even had one strong enough to not only resist his instincts but to actually help hack into the servers of a major corporation.

Hacking. Coding. Boredom. Office work . . . Would either of them even know what that was once they were alone again together?

Matt—or, Matthias—was looking back at her now, a nervous smile creeping over his face.

“He’s from D.C.,” said Mr. Geffen, patting Matt’s shoulder. “Where he’s done hack jobs for fortune 500s.”

It was hard to believe. She had never seen a hacker look like Matt. Underwear model, yes. But someone who sat in front of a computer all day? Where did he find the time, between pull-ups and bench pressing three hundred pounds, to actually get any work done? The equation was the opposite for Laurel, and had resulted in gym membership cards getting lost under computer keyboards and code manuals. Which, in turn, resulted in a steadily widening roll around her tummy since taking on her new leadership role. Nights spent stress-eating pints of ice cream were beginning to take their toll.

“Well, yeah,” she said, finally rising out of the shock and mustering up a smile. “I reckon I can use you.”

Matt smiled back. He hadn’t said anything yet, and more than ever he looked like that quiet, shy, lumbering type of guy. Much different than last night. He was still a hunk. But a hacker, though . . .

“What kind of work do you do?” she asked him. “Do you specialize in anything, aside from the gym?”

She felt her defense mechanism kicking in, the wall of crude jokes holding the world at bay and making everything manageable.

“Uh, well, you know . . .” He seemed tongue-tied. “I’m just an all-around, general-purpose type of guy.”

“General purpose, huh?”

“Whatever you need,” he said, smiling.

“Well, alright,” said Mr. Geffen. “I’ll set him up in Todd’s old cubicle. Can you come check on him later with a rundown of what you need?”

Laurel agreed, watching with pleasure as the two men left her office. Pleasure in the fact that Mr. Geffen was leaving. And because Matt had followed behind, turning around and walking out with that hot ass of his.

Although for the immediate future, Matt seemed like more work. And more time away from hacking into AIDA. She imagined some awkward small talk, an introduction to Sentry. And maybe a tour and a summary of her work on AIDA. And absolutely no talk of last night. With all that combined, she’d be looking at two hours gone, minimum—and with nothing at all to show for it but this hulking slab of man she wasn’t even sure could use Google.

He could dance, yes. He could flirt, and he could annihilate ex-boyfriends in parking lots. And he could annihilate her in bed. But could he actually be helpful for anything Sentry-related, aside from stress relief?

There was also, of course, the creeping paranoia. Thoughts that she knew were crazy—but still very slightly possible, that this new guy was an intended distraction set up by Mr. Geffen, a wrench thrown in to sabotage her efforts and to finally give justification for her firing.

A distraction at best, a spy at worst.

Matt was certainly a distraction, physically. And Laurel didn’t mind that one as much. Maybe she could make room for a little distraction. It might help with her anxiety. He certainly had the tools for that.

The more she thought of his extracurricular skills, the further she slid away from hacking into AIDA’s servers. She could feel herself losing ground, her concentration slipping away by the minute.

She tried to refocus, tying to push Mr. Geffen’s hired hunk out of her mind. In his place came rushing in an ice-cold panic, thoughts of how far off-track she had become. How delayed the hack was.

Like her latent horniness, panic wouldn’t help the cause, either.

She finally, begrudgingly, lifted her eyes back to her computer screen, where they were met with an ache. Already this week she’d racked up record amounts of time staring at her screen. And it was beginning to take its toll on her already-abused retinas. For the last several nights, she would go to bed late and close her eyes, still seeing the blinking cursor paused after an unfinished string of code. She could see it burned into her mind: the imminent failure of her project.

Sitting uncomfortably at her desk, Laurel suddenly felt the anger, the slow boiling beginnings of it. That was her usual cycle, going from panic, to frustration, and then anger. And once she’d reached that stage, it was too late to turn it back around again. Like the slow build of lactic acid in a marathoner’s legs, she’d felt it. Heavy. Thick.

Too much poison had built inside, too much vile emotion. Too many thoughts about Mr. Andre’s not-so-carefully veiled threats, about Caitlyn letting her down, about Mr. Geffen’s suspicions that she’d been some type of spy. For Laurel, anger was the ultimate distraction. A dark place that she couldn’t work out of. The only way for it to end was to face it directly, to move through it, to let it blossom fully into a most poisonous fruit. Only after reaching the apex could she reset, like an overturned hourglass.

She needed a break.

Needed to reset.

She left her chair with an angry grunt, stomped over to the door and then closed it—this time, without caring how loud it slammed into the door frame. Back at her desk, standing, she looked at her screen one last time before turning around facing a blank wall. Laurel picked her phone from her pocket and dialed her mother.

“Hey, Mama.” She ran a hand hard through her hair, her chin tucked down to her sternum, the computer screen well out of sight.

“What’s wrong, Baby?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothin’ at 3 p.m. on a workday?”

“It’s been a slow one.” It was partially true. Work-wise, it had been one of her slowest and most unproductive days that she could remember.

“Well, I just thought you said something earlier about a presentation.” In the background, there was the rusty creaking sound of an opened screen door, and then the mewing of cats.

“Is that Rascal?” Laurel asked.

“And Oliver.” Her mother made little kissing sounds for them, talking to her precious babies, asking them to come. “And Betsy. You know how she can get to carryin’ on.”

“She mad again?”

“Madder than a wet hen.”

“What happened?”

“Come on, Betsy . . . Here Betsy . . .Oh sweetie . . .”

“Mama?”

Her mother sighed. “What’s goin’ on, Babe?”

Laurel thought for a moment. It was hard to get the words right.

In a low tone, Mama said, “I take it you heard about Mr. Hudson?”

Laurel found it strange that her mother, of all people, would know about their clandestine meeting.

“Like, you mean the retirement?” she said.

Perhaps he’d stopped by for those crab cakes, after all.

“No, Child.”

“What Mama?”

“He got sick.”

Laurel felt her grip loosening on the phone. Mr. Hudson was far too old to get sick.

“Sick, how? How do you mean Mama?”

“Child, he passed on. He passed.”

“He’s dead?”

“I’m so sorry, Babe.”

“What?!”

Mama was making little sweet noises again. Maybe for the cats.

“Mama, how did he die?!”

“He’s an old man, child, he—”

“But how? What happened?

“He had himself a heart attack.”

Laurel covered her mouth.

“This morning. Grandkids found him in bed.”

The tears had already been coursing down her cheeks and off her chin, dotting her sweater in little wet spots of misery. Somehow, she found herself sitting on the ground, next to her chair, one arm on the seat, the chair swiveling slightly with each heavy sob.

“They said he went in his sleep, Laurel. That’s about as good as anyone can hope for.”

“Yeah” she said, her voice filled with tears.

“I know,” said Mama. “But he was an old man. And he lived a good life.”

“Yeah . . .”

“And now he’s drinkin’ beers with your pa.”

She sobbed harder. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, Babe.”

She tried sniffing hard, trying to clear up.

“You wanna call me back?”

Laurel sniffed again. “Yeah.”