Love Scars - 1: Scratch Read online

  “And I assure you it’s nothing illegal,” he said.

  “Oh, that makes me feel so much better.”

  “But it is something we need kept secret. For a while, at least. It’s a corporate intrigue kind of thing.”

  He smiled then, and his whole aspect changed. Like he knew how crazy it sounded, but what could he do? I wish he hadn’t smiled. It made him even sexier. I was really feeling it today, how long since I’d gotten naked with a guy. It was completely inappropriate and off topic, but I was ready to jump on him right there in the deserted hall.

  I felt my face go red as he caught me staring where I shouldn’t have been staring.

  “My student loans are over a hundred thousand.” I looked him in the face. “Close to two hundred, actually.”

  He whistled. “So having them paid off would be a good thing. Right?”

  I wasn’t lying. Sadly, I wasn’t even exaggerating. The fact he didn’t blink at the amount got my hopes up. The fact he got my hopes up pissed me off.

  I hate hope above all things. You can’t hope. You can’t depend on other people. You never knew when they’ll disappear from the face of the earth. Stacey doesn’t have to hope I’ll keep her safe and clothed and fed. She knows I will.

  Except I’d blown it. I’d been my niece’s sole caretaker since I our grandma died when I was eighteen. For six years, I supported us both with student loans. Every year I took out the maximum I qualified for, and now I was in over my head. I couldn’t keep going to school the rest of my life. I was a fool to study religion and philosophy and art. Whatever was I looking for there, I hadn’t found it.

  I should have learned computer programming. Or accounting. Or architecture.

  Now Steve offered a way out. But could I do it? Could I go back there again?

  “It’s something else, isn’t it?” Steve said. “You’re afraid of something.”

  Sometimes I wonder if angels walk among us, dressed up like mundane people, dropping off hints from God. I don’t believe in God anymore, but for a split second I thought Steve might be an angel, sent here to guide me if I’d only listen.

  “I don’t want to pry,” he said. Sheesh, he had a great voice. Calm, strong. “And consider the fact I have a conflict of interest. I want you to do this thing. But some advice? The only way anybody ever conquered their fear was to face it. Go through it, and come out on the other side.”

  I had worked like a dog to conquer my fears. My mini crackup on the quad was proof I hadn’t succeeded. Not totally. But if I could face those demons from my past, if I could get through it, maybe I could set myself free at last—and from a lot more than debt.

  “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  Chapter 3

  BlueMagick World Headquarters, Folsom, California

  “Take your pants off,” I said.

  Nicole stepped out of her skin-tight jeans and kicked them aside, keeping her shoes on. In those shiny red six-inch heels, she must be five-ten or -eleven. I took in the familiar long legs all the way up to the red lace panties, the smooth pale skin of her hips and stomach, the matching lace bra. The curly red hair tumbling over her shoulders.

  “Go to the window,” I instructed.

  My corner office at BlueMagick is on the fifth floor. The tallest building on the tech campus, it looks out over a grassy park area with trees and a pond. It’s nice. I like to fuck in front of the window. It really gives me that master-of-all-I-survey feeling—even if nobody can see in through the tinted glass.

  I stood behind Nicole and watched her faint reflection in the window as I unhooked her bra. She had great breasts, a little more than a handful. I played with a nipple and made it hard between my thumb and finger as I reached down inside her panties with my other hand.

  She groaned a little and tilted her head back against my shoulder. I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to kiss her neck, nibble her ear. To murmur sweet somethings with what she called my low grumbly voice. To admit that she was the one woman who’d finally broken through my outer titanium-coated shell to the chocolaty good person inside

  I didn’t care what Nicole wanted.

  I turned her around. The top of her head came to just below my chin. She reached for the buttons on my jeans, but I brushed her hands away. I hooked my thumbs on the lace panties and pulled them down and off. I knelt on the floor and slid two fingers between her folds into her warm and cozy wetness, and she hooked a leg over my shoulder. She moaned as my tongue found her nub. I reached grabbed her butt and pulled her closer.

  “Oh, J.D.,” she whimpered.

  I pushed her away. It was over. Sex wasn’t going to happen today.

  “Get dressed.” I stood up and gave her a playful slap on the butt.

  “Shit, J.D., you’re killing me here.” Her voice was husky and convincingly desperate. “I need to feel you inside me.”

  “You know the rules, Nicole.” Never say my name during sex. Names were too personal. “I’m disappointed too.”

  I was. Kind of. Okay. I wasn’t. I didn’t give a fuck. My office suite included a private bathroom. I’d take care of my disappointment easily enough as soon as she got out and went back to her lab.

  “Fuck you, J.D.” She buttoned her jeans and found her shirt. “Someday you’re going to fall in love, and I hope she stomps all over your heart.”

  “Too late, Nicole. Been there. Done that.”

  She was a good sport about everything. Now that she got her scratches in, she put her claws away. She already had her white lab coat on over her jeans and her hair stuck up on top of her head with two pencils. How did women do that?

  At the door she turned around. “Tomorrow? Same bat-time, same bat-place?”

  The door flew open behind her, and Brad barreled into the room like the building was on fire. His face was all screwed up in a distorted frown.

  “J.D., we’ve got a problem.”

  “Hi, Brad,” Nicole said, still in the doorway. “Did MolyMo corner the market on something else?” She rolled her eyes at me.

  Like we’d share a joke at my best friend’s expense? Ah, no. “Goodbye, Nicole,” I said. “Close the door behind you, ’mkay?”

  Under all that hot sexy beauty, she was actually a pathetic soul. I had no idea why she kept coming back for these little after-lunch grope sessions. There was never going to be anything more. She must be in it for the orgasms.

  “Is that still going on?” Brad said when the door slammed shut. He looked at me like he thought I was crazy.

  “Well, no. Not precisely. If you’d barged in three minutes earlier, it would have been a different story.”

  “You do know that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen, J.D. You’re her boss, and you’re breaking her heart.”

  “Nicole has a heart? I think not. And how would you know? She never talks to you. She hates you.”

  “Except when we’re having a three-way with Jose Cuervo,” Brad said. “She’s starting to think you need to marry her. What if she gets pregnant?”

  “I’ll wear two condoms.”

  “Double-bagging is contra-indicated.” Brad used his Mr.-Know-It-All voice.

  “Ack, that’s creepy,” I said. “Nicole’s not getting pregnant. And she’s…convenient. She’s circumspect about her personal life.”

  “After a few Long Islands, dude, she’s not all that circumspect.”

  I thought about it for three nanoseconds. “Point taken,” I said. “It’s over.”

  “Good decision,” Brad said. “It’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

  “So what’s the problem? It must be urgent. One of your P205s is about to fall out of your pocket.”

  I love the guy like a brother, but “problem” is the basis of his operating system. His problem went by different names, but it was always the same problem: Julia. Clarice. Marsha. Clarice 2.0.

  Lately it had a new name.

  “Is it named Lisa?” I said. “My friend, when will you learn? There’s no love in this wor
ld for guys like us.”

  I learned the lesson ten years ago when I sold my first app to a multinational for $50 million. I was eighteen, still a kid, and suddenly every woman in the world wanted me. Like I wouldn’t remember the week before when I had twenty dollars in my bank account and no girl would be caught dead on a date with Jaxom Draco Reider, loser tech nerd, named after a character in a fantasy novel.

  The fifty million financed my company, BlueMagick, now worth fifty billion. I’d learned the lesson over and over again. Until it stuck.

  “I guess you think I should I be like you,” Brad said. “Find a fuck buddy and build a wall around my emotions.”

  “Ooh, harsh.”

  “Harsh is as harsh does,” he said. I don’t love Brad for his originality.

  “Blah, blah, blah.” I’m no Shakespeare either.

  Brad’s the dude who always has my back. We’ve been friends since sixth grade. Plus he’s the master of a mystery I’ll never understand: human relationships. Without Brad, BlueMagick doesn’t exist. Without Brad, I have no company. I’m a jerk. The peasants would riot.

  “Here, check out your new toy.” I handed him the latest gadget from Q. Hey, when you own your own company, you get to call Research & Development the Q Division. “For the Barton dig.”

  “Nice.” It fit well within his outstretched palm. “Bioplastic, I presume?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m a misanthrope, Jim, not a planet killer.”

  Brad shook his head. He never laughs at my jokes. “What does it do?”

  “See the little buttons on the side? They’re for lanthanum, europium, erbium, and neodymium.”

  “You’re fucking with me.” Brad forgot his Lisa problem. His eyes lit up. He wasn’t the scienciest guy in the building, but he knew his rare earth elements.

  “I’m not fucking with you.”

  “You’re telling me this little thing tests for REEs.”

  This project is Brad’s baby. A few months ago he brought in some artifacts to test for the professor of a seminar he’s auditing, and he found lanthanum on an arrowhead. We wanted to know if there was more where it came from, but we didn’t want the world to know we were looking. Not just yet.

  “It does,” I said. “You can send in test results immediately through your satellite phone.”

  “Satellite?”

  “The cell reception up there is for shit,” I said. “Even if you’re not deep in a cave in the bowels of the earth.”

  “Not surprising.” He pushed each button, and different colored lights blinked to indicate which mineral the device was set to test.

  BlueMagick had a new lightweight vehicle battery on the books that could go five hundred miles before charging. It was ready for production, but we needed a reliable source of lanthanum. Most of the world’s REEs, including lanthanum, came from Chinese manufacturers who were screwing around with the supply. Hence Nicole’s feeble attempt at humor.

  “Lanthanum’s the important one,” I said. “Any others will be gravy. And you’ll have three weeks with the lovely Lisa in the bargain.”

  “That’s the problem.” Brad put down the tester.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “After buying your way onto the dig with your big secret donation, she isn’t going. Imagine that.”

  “No—I mean yes. Lisa isn’t going. But that’s not it,” Brad said. “I saw Steve Heron at the university today.”

  A chill ran up my spine. “Bastard. No.”

  “He was in the humanities building, talking to Jane Marks. That’s Barton’s TA.”

  “Shit, I don’t like MolyMo sniffing around our project.”

  “Well, technically, it’s not our project.”

  “More ours than theirs,” I said.

  We’d funded a few cheap internships to get in the door, but if Brad found REEs up there in decent quantity, we planned to go all in with an exclusive underwrite of the entire dig and snap up the mineral rights in the bargain.

  Brad wasn’t just a pretty face. He was a fucking genius who deserved the thirty percent of BlueMagick I gave him three years ago on his twenty-fifth birthday.

  “If they figure things out they’ll bid up the price,” Brad said.

  “Or worse,” I said. “MolyMo has so many US senators its pocket, they could tack a rider onto some legislation and make it impossible for any company except MolyMo to bid on the mineral rights.”

  “Fucking congress,” Brad said. “Why don’t we have any senators in our pocket?”

  “Did Heron see you?” I said.

  “No, but I heard something later when I was helping Lisa get ready for the party tonight—the one you’re going to, by the way.”

  “Am not. I don’t do parties. I especially don’t do parties with civilians.”

  “You’re going. When I was setting up the keg, I heard Lisa talking with her roommate Nora—who is taking the internship, ironically. Nora said some guy approached her outside Dr. Barton’s office today with an offer to work on a side project at the dig.”

  “Some guy meaning Heron,” I said. “Dammit. What project?”

  “Nora wouldn’t say. Said if she didn’t keep it a secret, the deal was off. That’s why I came back here, to get you. You’re going to the party, and you’re going to sweet talk it out of her.”

  “Sweet talk? Jeez, Brad. Grown men don’t actually use words like that.”

  “You know what I mean,” Brad said.

  “Why don’t you sweet talk it out of her then?”

  “I can’t hit on my angel’s roommate.”

  “She’s not your angel, last I heard. Or did the boyfriend crash and burn?”

  “Fabulous Frank is still in the picture.”

  If Brad was a cartoon, a dark cloud would’ve appeared over his head complete with thunder and lightning and rain.

  “What’s the problem, then? Is she gross?”

  “She’s fine. She’s cute. She’s a babe.”

  “Somehow you’re not convincing me. Besides, I hate going out in public. Everybody always wants a job. Or a loan. Or a grant.”

  “J.D., nobody will know who you are. It’s a bunch of humanities students. They think about art and philosophy and ancient near east fertility goddesses. They wouldn’t know sexting from ethernet audio/video bridging. Your secret will be safer than Nora’s.”

  “What’s my secret?” I shouldn’t have asked.

  “You’re a tech genius billionaire asshole.”

  “As long as that’s cleared up.” I had to go, since apparently Brad couldn’t hit on his angel’s roommate. But I was getting something out of it. “Okay, I’ll do this. But you have to do something for me.”

  I went through the shirts I kept in my office closet and picked out a sky-blue hemp and cotton blend sleeveless pullover.

  “Wear this.” I threw it at Brad. “Think of it as a disguise. You’re going to a party as not-a-dork.”

  “Now you’re a fashion critic,” Brad said.

  “Lisa might see the real you if you didn’t dress like a dork,” I said.

  “The real me is a dork,” Brad said.

  I grabbed my Pashley Roadster from the corner. “Where is this party, anyway?” We headed for my office’s private elevator. I’d had it built deep, like a hospital elevator, to accommodate the bike.

  “Carolinda Estates,” Brad said. “Close enough to you. You can ride home if the earth opens up and swallows Frank and I get lucky.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “It could happen,” Brad said. Ever the optimist.

  Chapter 4

  “Carolinda Estates,” I said. “Not exactly a distressed neighborhood.”

  “It’s an older place. But yeah, on acreage in Granite Bay. It’s worth a few bucks.” Brad pushed the button for the lobby. “Nora inherited it. I don’t think she’s swimming in cash, though. She’s excited about Heron’s gig because it will pay off her student loans. Lisa had to buy all the stuff for tonight.”

  “You did
n’t…”

  “Pay? No. I should have, but no. I didn’t blow my cover.”

  “That had to be hard on your manhood, letting your angel pay.”

  “Okay. Maybe I paid for the keg a little bit.”

  We stopped at the Raley’s at Douglas and Auburn-Folsom so I could pick up a bottle of booze. I wasn’t crashing a party empty-handed. Even with the stop, the girls lived only about twenty minutes from BlueMagick. Brad was right. I could ride the Pashley from there to my place in Granite Bay.

  Judging by the one-story, ranch-style architecture, the house was built in the 1960s or ’70s. The long driveway was lined with lilacs in bloom. Brad drove past all the cars and trucks and found a parking spot at the side of the house.

  “You always get a place up front.” I shook my head.

  “That’s because I expect one, and most people don’t even look.”

  That about summed up Brad’s philosophy of life: Expect all good things, and then go get them.

  “Wait,” I said, halfway out of his SUV. “So what do they know about us?”

  “I’m a mid-level manager at BlueMagick,” he said. “In accounting. Oh, and I’m your boss.”

  “Right.”

  “You just started two weeks ago, so you don’t know much about the company. You’re an entry-level programmer who got laid off in the recession, and you haven’t had a job for three years.”

  “This is supposed to make me attractive to a woman?”

  “You’ll do fine.” Brad chuckled and closed his door. “You clean up good.” He does laugh at his own jokes.

  An old Crowded House song blasted from speakers in the backyard. The sun had just dipped below the oak trees, and in the twilight the early stars blinked at the crescent moon. I felt oddly happy. It was ages since I’d taken on a challenge without being certain of the outcome.

  We went through a side gate to the back of the house. There was a keg on the lawn and a bar on the back deck. A tall blonde in cutoffs stood out among the dancers on the grass.

  “That’s her,” Brad said. “My angel.”

  I’d known the guy since sixth grade. He was always a romantic, but never so hopeless. “She’s great,” I said.