Senior Advisor to the Boss: Billionaire Obsession Dark Romance (Managing the Bosses Series Book 9) (12 page)

Now there would be none of that.

He thought about calling Jamie. She would want to know that he’d broken up with Erica. But she had enough of her own issues going on with the things that were happening at Reid Enterprises, and didn’t need to be burdened with his love life. Neither did Alex.

Which left… There really wasn’t anyone to talk to. He hadn’t made a lot of friends since he moved, and Erica had been the person he talked to the most. There were some other employees he was friendly with, but that didn’t translate to them wanting to listen to him mourn his breakup.

There was Christine, he realized. He’d talked to her the other night at the bar, and she’d said she would be there if he needed her, the same he had promised to be there for her. He thumbed through his phone and found her number, hesitating to dial it.

“Christine,” she said when she answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Christine. It’s Mark. I hope you don’t mind me calling so late.”

“Not at all,” Christine said, the tired curiosity in her voice replaced with concern. “Is everything okay, Mark?”

“It's...” Mark paused, uncertain what to say. He wasn't sure that he could say it and keep his voice steady. “Not really,” he admitted. “No.”

“What's wrong?”

He hesitated again. Was it really a good idea to tell her? Should he be calling her and putting this on her at all? She'd offered to be there if he needed anything, but that didn't mean she'd actually wanted him to call her when something happened. It could have just been polite. But he hadn't just been being polite, and so he took the chance that she hadn’t either.

“Erica and I broke up,” he said, finally.

“Oh no.” On the other end of the line Christine's soft voice was pained. “I'm so sorry, Mark. Do you want to talk about it?”

Did he want to talk about it? Was he ready to lay the issue out in front of someone else? He sank into the chair that he'd been sitting in when Erica arrived, and held the phone close to his ear. “It was a stupid argument,” he said. “It shouldn't have even been that big of a deal.”

“Was it the issue that you had with those pros?” There was no judgement in Christine's voice.

“It started with that,” Mark said, turning a paperclip restlessly over and over in his fingers. “And then it went to flirting and what was acceptable and I told her that I didn't like the way she was hanging all over Dale Richardson, and she accused me of being inappropriately interested in you, which is ridiculous. You're my sister-in-law. We're family.”

There was an instant of silence from Christine. “We are,” she said when he'd just started to wonder if maybe she hadn't heard him or something. “We're family. She should be able to see that.”

“That's what I told her, but she kept insisting on acting like me touching your hand the other night was the same as her practically gluing herself to Richardson.” Mark's voice caught. “I tried to let it go, but it just made her angry when I didn't say anything even though I disagreed with her. She told me if I couldn't understand her reasoning then maybe we couldn't work through it. And I—”

He cut himself off, not wanting to cry on the phone. He wasn't going to put her through listening to a grown man actually cry about getting dumped.

He was tough. He didn’t cry. This was stupid. He swallowed the damn lump in his throat.

“You what?” Christine encouraged gently. “You can tell me, Mark. I promise. If there's something that you don't want anyone else to know, I won't tell them. Not even Jamie.”

A laugh escaped Mark's throat. “That's kind of you, Christine. Really. And I appreciate it. But it's more that... I'm not really sure I'm in the right place to talk about this stuff, you know? I don't really feel like sobbing on the phone to you. It’s stupid.”

“If you don't want to talk about it, I'm not going to push, but it might help to talk it out with someone else,” Christine said. “That's one of the things that I learned in therapy, actually. Just having the ability to tell someone about something can make it seem a little less terrible. It's good to have someone you can share with.”

“It's just that…” Mark sighed. “I told her if she left she shouldn't come back. If she was going to leave without talking then there wasn't any point in us continuing our relationship.”

“And she walked out?”

Mark blinked against the sting of tears behind his eyes. He wasn’t going to cry. “Yeah,” he said, voice rough but not obviously trying to hide crying. “She walked out. I was kind of hoping that she would stay.”

“I’m so sorry, Mark,” Christine said. “I wish that there was something a little better I could do for you.”

“It’s enough that you just listened,” Mark said. “Like you said, having someone to talk to makes things seem a little less terrible.”

“Like I said before, I’m here. If there’s ever another way I can make things seem a little less terrible for you, please just let me know.”

“Thank you, Christine. That really means a lot.” Mark found a smile that he knew she would be able to hear over the phone. “I didn’t ever really expect to go from zero sisters to two, but I’m glad that I did.”

“Yeah, well, it’s kind of nice having a couple of brothers,” Christine answered. “So we both got something out of the deal.”

She paused, and Mark could almost hear her hesitation humming between them.

“If you wanted to, we could go somewhere maybe in the next couple of days. Just out for lunch of something nice. Hang out and talk a bit in person.”

“Sure,” Mark said. “I could do that.”

“Then it’s a date.” Christine was smiling. He could hear it. He wondered what had brought a smile to her face and decided that if he was meant to find out she would tell him.

“See you then,” Mark said. “And thank you, Christine, for doing this for me. For letting me talk. I’m glad I got you as a sister-in-law. You and Jamie are a lot alike.”

“Of course,” Christine said. “It’s not a problem, Mark. It’s never a problem to hear from you.”

They ended the call, and Mark hung up. He missed Erica already.

There were stacks of paperwork on his desk, piled there like insult added to injury. Alex looked down at them and thought about dumping them out the window of his office and watching them float down to the street below. It was a pleasant fantasy, but back in reality he was going to have to either fill it all out or approve it, and on top of everything else he had to accomplish to keep his business running, the task seemed daunting in a way that very little ever had been to him.

After everything with the hacker was over, he was going to take Jamie and the twins on a nice, long vacation. And maybe not ever come back to work at all, considering the way it had been treating him lately. Of course, Jamie would laugh if he told her that; she knew how likely it was that he would ever actually abandon the business he'd built, but like throwing the stacks of paper out the window, it was a nice thing to think about for a minute or two.

Someone knocked on his door. Alex, a little relieved that he had an excuse not to do the paperwork immediately, looked up. “Come in,” he called.

The door opened just enough to allow Emelie to slip through. The scan of her laptop and phone hadn't found anything that made her look like the hacker, and the fact that she'd often been busy doing other tasks out in the open where people could see her when the unauthorized changes went through did a lot to let her off the hook.

Honestly, Alex was glad to have her back. It took some of the too-heavy workload off Jamie, and let her go home four days a week to spend time with their children.

“Yes, Miss Eriksson?”

The tall, blonde woman hesitated near the door, then, like she'd made some decision, lifted her chin and strode across the room to take one of the chairs in front of his desk. It was an oddly familiar situation so soon after the meeting where he'd told her that he was going to be suspending her until he could be sure she wasn't the person trying to destroy Reid Enterprises. The outcome of that had more or less proved that she wasn’t, but Alex wasn’t one hundred percent sure of that, and even that small edge of doubt made him wary around her.

“I wanted to talk to you, Mr. Reid,” she said, holding out a manila envelope that she'd been carrying under one arm. “I know that you're still looking for the person who caused all this damage, and I think I might be on the way to discovering who, sir.”

“You think you might have an idea who the hacker is?” Alex asked, just to be sure that he was understanding her correctly.

She nodded. “Yes, Mr. Reid. I was going over some of the old files, and I'm sure you'll want to look at what I found.”

“And what makes you think that you know who the hacker is, then?”

“It's all in the anomalies, here,” she said. “And I know that you're probably not going to like what I have to say, but I've been going back and forth for a while now, and I'm fairly sure of my conclusion.”

“What is that conclusion?” Alex asked. He was ready for a hint on something. Anything to give light on who the hell was doing this.

She set the file down on the desk in front of him, and Alex turned it around so that it faced him properly, flicking through the contents. “You want me to believe that Zander is the one who is doing all of this?” he asked slowly.

“I do,” she stated, her voice steady.

“And what makes you think that's going to happen?” Alex looked across the desk at her. “Zander was one of the first people that we investigated. His number was the first one to come up in connection to the hacker.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Reid, do you think that's completely a coincidence?” She met his gaze like she wasn't a bit worried about the fact the he could have fired her at any moment.

“What evidence do you have that it isn't?”

“It was Mrs. Reid who suggested that we look back through personnel files to see if any of the people previously deemed innocent might be collaborating with the hacker.”

“We have been keeping tabs on everyone. This is not a one-man job. It’s impossible. For the hacker to do as much as he’s done, it’s likely that he has at least one helper.”

She nodded. “I’ve marked the people that I believe are likely to be helping the hacker.”

Alex refused to believe it was Zander. He’d cleared the man himself. “Which still doesn’t bring us back to Zander,” he said, although he glanced down at the names that she had highlighted. Some of them were names he would have picked as suspicious himself. Some of them weren’t. He wondered how much involvement Jamie had actually had in the project.

“Forgive me, Mr. Reid, I’m getting to that.” She looked up and met his eyes as she spoke, and Alex looked back, waiting for her to break contact. She didn’t. “Zander was the first one supposedly targeted by the hacker. But what if he started off using his own employee number on purpose? To get suspicion to come up early and vanish quickly. If it had come to him closer to the end, you would have been more suspicious of it, like you were when mine came up.”

She was making a surprising amount of sense. Alex probably shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d seen how competent she was as a PA. It seemed she was equally capable of anything else that she decided to do. However, it seemed almost too obvious. Why wouldn’t his IT guys have looked into this earlier? It seemed too obvious. And yet…

“This is a little less credible, but I heard him whistling the other day after the news came out that the stocks were dropping. I don’t know any high-level employee who would whistle as he found out the business where he worked was rapidly losing value in the stock market. Unless it’s some kind of nervous habit. Which isn’t likely.” She shook her head. “I don’t know many low-level employees who would be happy either.”

“He could easily have been whistling as a nervous reaction,” Alex said, but the words planted doubt, and he wondered if maybe he’d been too quick to give Zander the all-clear last time. Maybe he should have been a little more strenuous in his search.

“I also, by the way, haven’t heard from anyone that he spoke to when we were all answering the phones to angry customers. I’ve been handling the paperwork for most of them, and none of them have mentioned him. Me. Jamie. Justin. You. No mention of Zander.”

Alex closed the file sitting in front of him. “Thank you for the information, Miss Eriksson. I appreciate your concern for the company and your attempt to help in this matter.”

Obviously aware that she was being dismissed, Emelie stood. She gave him a nod. “You’re welcome, Mr. Reid. I hope that the information I brought can be helpful to you.”

She stepped out, and Alex was left alone in the office again, looking down at the file folder that might mean multiple employees were betraying him and Reid Enterprises. That wasn’t as big a shock as the chance that the man he’d trusted to help run his company might be behind it.

Had he allowed a man who intended harm to him and his family to have power second only to his own, or had Zander started with good intentions? If he had, what had corrupted him?

***

The idea struck her while she was out running errands.

Jamie didn't know why she hadn't thought of it before. Nicholas had been behind every other attempt to ruin Reid Enterprises. What if he'd had a hand in this one?

She'd left the twins with Brianna or she wouldn't have done what she did, at least without thinking about it a little more first, but they were safe at home, so she let Brianna know that she was going to be late, and headed for the prison. It wasn’t a short drive. She wondered several times if she should turn around, but thinking about the recent headlines made her go forward. If there was a chance to help Reid Enterprises, Jamie was going to take it.

Jamie had never visited anyone in prison before. The only other person she knew who'd ended up in one was Stephen, and she had no interest in visiting him, ever. When she arrived, they told her they would have to check with Nicholas about whether or not he would agree to see her. Jamie didn't expect him not to, and the suspicion proved correct when the guard returned a few minutes later and informed her that she'd been accepted.

It was bleak and grey inside the prison, and Jamie wondered if she'd made the right decision after all in deciding to come as she went through the metal detector and handed over her purse to be searched. But she was already there, and she wasn't going to turn back without at least speaking to Nicholas. So she followed the guard down the hall, through barred doors that buzzed as they opened, and to the visitor's area.

Nicholas apparently had enough clout to get a private visitation room, because the one they led her to wasn't the open space full of picnic tables that television shows had led her to believe she would find. It was a small one, with couches, and windows on all sides of it. She wondered if his money helped him even in here. It probably did.

He was already sitting on one of the couches, and Jamie took a nervous seat on the other. She'd had to leave her purse behind when she came through, and so there was nothing to set between them, just her hands folded in her lap. Nicholas looked older, she thought, lines around his eyes where there hadn't been any before, but he was still handsome.

She wasn’t really dressed to impress, still wearing the yoga pants and T-shirt that she’d run out to do her errands in, her hair tied up in a bun that probably wasn’t as neat as it had been when she’d started out that morning.

Nicholas still looked her up and down in a lingering way that made her want to turn around and walk right out again, and then he smiled at her. “Jamie Reid,” he said. “What an unexpected treat.”

“I'm not here on a social visit, Nicholas,” Jamie said sharply. “I want to know if you're aware of what's going on at Reid Enterprises.”

His smile widened, showing a lot of straight white teeth. “Of course I'm aware,” he answered. “I've been watching the news with great relish these last few weeks. Nice to see that despite my unfortunate incarceration someone is still making sure that Alex Reid has a bad day.”

Jamie's hands clenched. “It's a little more than a bad day, Nicholas. Someone is trying to ruin us, and I know that you have something to do with it.”

“And what could possibly make you think that?” He spread his hands out to the sides, showing that there was nothing in them, maybe. Or showing off the prison jumpsuit he wore. “What could I do from prison to harm Reid Enterprises?”

“A lot, I'm sure,” Jamie said, tone flat. “And if there was a way to do it, you'd find it. You still have a lot of money even if you don't have anything else, and I know how far money can go.” She took a deep breath. “Look. Just tell me who the hacker is.”

There was a moment of silence. Nicholas looked at her, the grey wall of the prison behind him stealing the warm color from skin that had been tan when she'd first met him.

“You're a beautiful woman, Jamie Reid,” he said slowly. “But I can't forget that last name. You chose to marry Alex. Despite, may I add, the way that he treated you, which people did notice. And so you have no pull with me. Even if I did know who was screwing over your husband, I wouldn't lift a finger to help you.”

“Alex treats me perfectly,” Jamie said, shaken despite her determination not to let anything he said put her off guard. “The fact that we had a few rough patches in the beginning doesn't make that untrue. All couples go through that. No relationship is all flowers and honey.” She tilted her head to the side. “And, to be honest, Nicholas, jealousy is an ugly look on you.” She stood up, and turned to go.

“Jamie,” Nicholas said. For the first time he didn't sound smug.

Slowly, Jamie turned around to face him, her eyebrows lifted. “What is it, Nicholas?”

“Why don't you stay, for just another minute,” he suggested.

Jamie laughed. “Why would I do that? I walk in here and you slander my husband, rejoice in the fact that he may lose the business he built from the ground up, and refuse to help me when I know that you can. What about that would make me want to stay here at your request?”

Nicholas sighed. “You're right, Jamie. I haven't given you any reason to want to stay here.” He smiled again, pulling the persona back around himself. “And I'm not going to give you what you want. It isn't a game anymore, Jamie. There are real things at stake here. I admit I would have been more satisfied with winning if I wasn't rotting in prison, but you can't have everything.”

“You're rotting in prison because you killed someone and didn't even have the balls to admit it,” Jamie said, making her voice icy.

She didn’t give him a chance to respond to that. Whatever information he had, it wasn’t worth sitting in that visiting room with him, watching him act superior when he was a murderer. Jamie turned away again and walked out.