A Game of Chance

by Emma Shortt

  “Well, I did,” Kate said.

  Meg slumped in her seat. “I know you did. Maybe that’s why I’ve waited to tell you the full, gruesome details. I’m…” She shook her head. “Embarrassed, I guess. Confused, too. It’s only been a few days since I met him, but it feels like it’s been a whirlwind, like it’s been nonstop since that night in X-Tech.”

  “Embarrassed?” Will laughed. “I saw your Wonder Woman panties the very first time we met. While you were wearing them. We passed embarrassment on day one.”

  “I saw her naked the weekend we first hung out,” Kate said. “I thought she was making a move.”

  “You wished I was making a move,” Meg said, and Kate finally smiled.

  That was enough for Meg to launch right in. She took a deep breath and told them everything. How the first interview had gone, including the whole lemon-cake issue, his office, the chronology, and then, the most maddening part, the fact that it wasn’t even his office, that someone from X-Tech had booked it for him. No, not just someone from X-Tech, but from the CEO’s office.

  “He is working for them, then,” Kate said. “I knew it!”

  “It looks that way.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, though,” Will said. “If X-Tech really has stolen your work, and they’re trying to cover it up, why lead you into an investigation?”

  “Maybe to find out what I know?” Meg asked.

  “Chance has already done that,” Will said. “You told him everything almost straight away.”

  Meg shot Kate a look. Kate shrugged.

  “Do you tell Will everything we discuss?” Meg demanded.

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  “I’m never giving you a Netflix excuse ever again.”

  “She won’t need one,” Will replied. “I’m turning the spare room into her office. She can stuff it full of computers and servers and whatever it is that keeps her at KIT.”

  “That’s my room!”

  “You’ll have to take the couch.”

  Meg glared at them both. “This is not helping.”

  “Let’s talk it through,” Will said. “That will help. You met Chance for the first time in X-Tech Towers. Did he tell you how he got in there?”

  “No. But then, I didn’t tell him how I got in there, either.”

  “He tracks you down the very next day,” Will continued. “He has information on you and Kate. He’s a PI. That makes sense. Finding people is his specialty.” He paused. “We’ll ignore the issue I have about anyone gathering information on Kate for now.”

  “Not sure why the electric-blue flowers were necessary,” Kate added as she patted Will’s hand.

  “To win her over,” Will said, entwining their fingers. “It’s a classic move. He disarms her from the very beginning with the flowers.”

  “The flowers did not disarm me,” Meg said. She ignored the way her heart clenched at her friends’ show of affection. She ignored, too, the longing she felt somewhere deep inside to have some of that same affection for herself.

  Kate snorted. “They’re still on your desk.”

  “Should have dropped them in the trash,” Meg muttered.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “He tells you about his investigation,” Will continued, as if they hadn’t spoken. “Doesn’t tell you who hired him, though. You try and find out. You can’t crack his site. Has that ever happened before?”

  “Of course,” Meg said. “There are plenty of sites that can’t be hacked. Kate might have spent the last year honing her skills, but she’s not that good and neither am I. They’re usually the big sites, though. A generic website like Chance’s? That should have been easy.”

  “He’s got good security,” Will said. “So, let’s say that means someone from the company did that for him. Why? What could possibly be on that site that they don’t want you to see?”

  Kate stood up and grabbed a pitcher of juice from the kitchen. She poured them all a glass. It was cold. Abruptly, Meg remembered the coolness of the water she’d drunk in the bar. How it had contrasted with the heat that had danced across her skin. Chance made her hot. She simply could not deny that.

  “I have no idea,” Kate said as she sat back down. “It’s so frustrating! The forums aren’t giving me anything, either. No one recognizes the description of Chance. No one’s heard of his company. No one knows anything about him!”

  “What I can’t work out is why he’s invited you into the investigation,” Will said. “If he is working for X-Tech, he’d already have a list of people at the competition. He could have gone and interviewed them himself. And X-Tech has already blocked all your attempts to lodge a complaint. They can just keep doing that. What are you going to do about it? You won’t take the money I offered for a lawyer.”

  Meg shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t take your money, Will.”

  Will waved her words away. “We can talk about that another time. The point I’m trying to make is that Chance doesn’t need you.”

  “Maybe he just wants her,” Kate said.

  Meg started at those words. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re really pretty, Meg,” Kate said. “Maybe he’s interested in you in that way. He did bring you flowers.”

  “To disarm me, you said.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “You think he likes me?” Meg demanded.

  Kate sighed. “You already know that he does.”

  Meg thought about the looks they’d shared, the moments of silence. She thought, too, about how her heart rate seemed to be permanently elevated since she’d met Chance, elevated enough that her mother had messaged her to ask what the hell was going on.

  “Today I was wondering if it was just me,” she said slowly. “Because I’m so attracted to him. Maybe all of the heat and the tension is just something I’m feeling?” She paused. “I don’t see how it could be, though. It’s too…”

  “Intense?” Kate asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “I remember that,” Kate said. “It’s horribly confusing.”

  Meg remembered how it had been for Kate and Will. She’d spent hours and hours talking Kate through her confusion. At the time, Meg had secretly thought that Kate should just confront Will with her feelings, be honest, make it clear what she wanted and what she expected. That was how Meg had always behaved with her previous partners. She understood now why Kate hadn’t. And yet, Kate and Will had spent weeks and weeks circling each other before anything had happened between them. Meg feared it was not going to be like that with her and Chance. Not if she didn’t get some self-control!

  “He’s up to no good,” Kate said after a moment. “I’m suspicious of him. Suspicious of his motives. But if you have these intense sorts of feelings for him, there’s got to be a reason for it.”

  “Biology,” Meg said.

  “Maybe it’s something else,” Kate suggested.

  Meg almost rolled her eyes. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “I’m playing devil’s advocate here more than anything else. Not because I want to, but because you need me to. You remember how it was with me and Will. He was up to no good. We were suspicious of him.”

  “I was not up to no good,” Will said.

  “We thought you were,” Kate replied, squeezing his hand. “Same thing. It didn’t stop what happened between us, though. I remember trusting you, though I didn’t even know why. Meg trusts Chance already.”

  “I do not trust him,” Meg said.

  “You do,” Kate said. “You wouldn’t have told him about the ants otherwise. You wouldn’t have agreed to team up with him on this investigation. And you definitely wouldn’t be thinking about hopping into bed with him.”

  “I am so not doing that.”

  “Tell it to the judge.”

  “Katie—”

  “She has a point,” Will said.

  “And the game plays itself in weird ways,” Kate added. “What if Ch
ance is part of your game? What if you were meant to meet him?”

  “Meant to meet him?” Meg did roll her eyes, then.

  “If you subscribe to the idea that all atoms already knew their path when the Big Bang happened, everything that happens was always meant to happen,” Kate said.

  “I don’t subscribe to that idea,” Meg said quickly. “It takes all the fun out of life.”

  She snapped her mouth closed, trying to work through her thoughts, trying to express them in a way that made some kind of fucking sense. Did she trust Chance already? But then, how could she? He had done nothing to be considered even remotely trustworthy.

  “I guess I just didn’t expect to feel this intensely for someone so soon,” she eventually said. “It’s only been a few days, but the emotions are so intense it feels like it’s been a lot longer.”

  “He could be the guy who balances your crazy,” Will said.

  “Okay, I don’t have a crazy to balance,” Meg said, even as her damn heart started thumping once more. How could she still think of Chance in that way when she knew he was lying to her? It was ridiculous! “And I’m not even convinced that Chance would do that.”

  “Why not?” Kate asked.

  “Because, I think he’s a bit crazy, too.”

  “In what way?” Will asked. There was a note to his voice that made Meg sigh.

  “Not in any way to worry about,” she said. “It’s…just…it’s going to sound strange, and I only got to thinking about it because of a conversation that I had with him, but there’s almost something of the mathematician to him.”

  Will frowned. “Explain.”

  “You know how you once said that you thought Kate and I only lived in the real world about half of the time?” Meg asked.

  “I’ve said that more than once, and I believe my exact words were some of the time.”

  “And I said to you, ‘that’s because our real world isn’t your real world.’”

  “You said the real world was the world of numbers.”

  “Yes.”

  Will shrugged. “I still don’t understand what you meant.”

  “Of course, you don’t,” Meg replied. “And Chance shouldn’t understand what that means, either.”

  “But he does?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a private investigator,” Will said slowly. “He’d have to be analytical.”

  “Being analytical isn’t enough,” Meg said. “And there’s other things that he’s said, almost like…slip-ups. I don’t know that I can explain it right,” she added. “But sometimes, I get this feeling that there’s something there, something about him that I’m not picking up on. And every time it comes to me, just on the edges of my awareness, it disappears before I can grab it.”

  “It will click at some point,” Kate said.

  “How long?” Meg asked, but the question was for herself more than for them. “Because I’ve thought about this all day, and I don’t see how I can just walk away from what’s happening here.”

  “The investigation or Chance?” Kate asked.

  “Both,” Meg admitted.

  “You’re going to play the game right until the end?” Kate sighed.

  “What other choice do I have?” Meg asked, and once more the question was for her alone.

  She looked across at her friends. Their hands were entwined again. Meg’s chest tightened. She wanted to hold Chance’s hand. The desire to do that and more was stronger than any desire Meg had ever experienced before. She knew then, knew it deep inside, that at some point she would act on that desire and any others that came with it. It was going to be impossible not to.

  A roll of the dice.

  A spin of the wheel.

  The flip of a card.

  That was what was happening between them. It was what had been happening from the very start. Random emotions. Sparks of desire. In the end, it was a game of chance. Question was, who was going to win?

  Chapter Fifteen

  The second interview took place the following evening. It was held at a gaming club that Chance had heard of but never visited. Meg was already there when Chance arrived. He found her sitting around a console with the four developers they had come to speak with. They were playing The Last of Us. It was one of Chance’s favorite games. He had the remastered version on PS4 waiting for him to play at home.

  Chance took a moment to watch the group from the bar before he went over to them. As he had suspected, none of the four guys that Meg was busy laughing with were the newest recruit to X-Tech. Chance had already found a picture of him from the information Rebecca had provided, and that particular nerd was last on their list of interviews. That was a good thing. Because Chance had no idea how he was going to tell Meg that he’d discovered that the competition was on the up and up. Where the hell would he tell her he’d gotten the information from?

  Meg…she looked particularly lovely tonight. Her blue hair was loose, curling around her shoulders. She wore tight khaki pants, an equally tight denim shirt, and bright green heels. Chance had dreamed about her last night. In the dream her hair had been loose. He had run his fingers through it as he’d lowered her onto his body.

  He shuddered. The day apart had only increased the desire that Chance felt for her. He’d fallen asleep thinking about her. Woken up with her image dancing in his mind. He was in deep. He knew that. The only question that remained was how deep.

  He wandered over to the group with that thought in mind. Meg greeted him with a cheery sort of smile. Chance smiled back. He felt the tension a moment later. She felt it, too. He knew she did.

  With a slightly different sort of smile, she introduced the developers. Chance took a seat. He got the impression he was not a particularly welcome addition to their group. One of them offered him their gamepad, a slight smirk playing around his lips. Chance noted that he sat a little too closely to Meg.

  Chance looked down at the gamepad. How could he possibly refuse? Twenty minutes later and Chance passed the pad back before launching into the same questions he’d asked Florence. The smirks were no more. Their answers were the same as in the previous interview. Chance knew now that they would be. This investigation was a dead end.

  “Let’s go get some dinner,” he said impulsively when the group finally broke up.

  Meg shot him a look. She was waving at the developers. They were all waving back. One of them, the same one who had sat a little too closely, had given her his number before he’d left. Meg had taken it. Chance told himself that it was obviously for business reasons, but he seriously doubted the developer, Billy, was thinking along the same lines. For perhaps the first time in his life, Chance was jealous. It was not a feeling he particularly liked. He couldn’t help it, though.

  As the developers left, and the gamers around them kept shooting looks their way, shooting looks at Meg, Chance couldn’t help but wonder how many guys Meg had dated over the years. And, more importantly, how many were waiting in the wings hoping to be next? There was a reason Meg appealed to him. Chance suspected it was the same damn reason she appealed to practically all the other men in the room. A nerd’s fantasy come to life…

  “You want to buy me dinner?” Meg asked as they approached the bar.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “So, we eat,” Chance said.

  “Perhaps you can tell me where you picked up your PS4 skills at the same time?” Meg asked.

  He leaned against the bar. The action moved them closer together than they had been a moment ago. Meg let out an obvious and shaky breath. Excitement danced along Chance’s spine. Meg had not given any of those signals to Billy. She gave them only to him. He lifted a hand, almost to reach out and touch her. At the last minute, he realized what he was doing and why he shouldn’t be doing it.

  “I’m not allowed to have a console?” he asked as he dropped his hand on the bar.

  “I would have put you down more as an X-box and Grand Theft kinda guy,”
she said. She lifted her own hand and placed it next to his.

  “I like games that make me think,” Chance said. Did his finger actually just twitch? Twitch toward her?

  “Not just video games,” Meg whispered.

  “No,” he agreed. How could he not? “Not just video games.”

  Silence held between them for a moment. Chance looked at their hands. So close…so close but not touching. Hell, he wanted to touch her. He wanted to touch every single part of her over and over again…

  “We don’t have time for dinner,” Meg eventually said. “We have the senior management profiles to go through.”

  “We can do it over dinner.”

  She shook her head. “I have a board.”

  “A board?”

  “A profile board. I’ve laid it all out on there, Criminal Minds style. It’s back at my place.”

  Her place…Chance’s body reacted to those words in the exact way that he knew it would. He shifted position. Meg smiled.

  “You want us to go there?” he finally asked.

  “You have a problem with that?”

  “No,” Chance said quickly. “Why would I?”

  Her smile widened. “You have your car?”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s go then.”

  He was parked across the road from the gaming club. Meg spotted his car before he did. She waited there for him. Chance gestured for her to get inside. He took several deep breaths once she was out of sight. The proximity in the car was going to be a problem. He knew that. But being alone in her apartment with her? With a bed close by? Chance closed his eyes. This was going to be the hardest test so far. How many days had it been since she’d kneed him in the groin? Four? Five? Hell, it felt like forever. Either way, Chance thought it fair to say that he was fully recovered.

  They made the drive in relative silence, Meg speaking only to give him directions. He parked outside of her apartment. The sky was darkening. Meg led them through the main door and up a narrow staircase to her home. Chance was more nervous than he could remember being in a very long time.

  She flung the door open and flicked the lights on. She dropped her satchel on the floor next to her couch. Her heels soon followed. She seemed tiny without them. She would fit against him just right. Chance knew that. He remembered exactly how it had felt in X-Tech Towers.