by Emma Shortt
“Jack?”
Meg had completely forgotten that was his first name. He’d told her in KIT, the first time they’d properly met, but she’d forgotten. He was Chance to her. He had been all week long.
And yet…she stood up and looked at him. He was looking back at her, eyes wide, lips parted under the shadow of his baseball cap…and he was wearing a gray sweater. That was when it clicked. The thing that had been teasing the edges of her consciousness for days. The thought that was always on the tip of her tongue. The piece of the puzzle that she hadn’t even known she was missing. It finally clicked into place, and the moment it did, Meg gasped.
“Blue—” he began, but Meg could only shake her head.
“Jack Richards,” she said, and she couldn’t even believe that she was saying the words. “We meet at last.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
What the fuck was Meg doing here? How had she gotten into the building? Why was she talking to Gabe? What was she talking to Gabe about? Those questions raced through Chance’s mind as he stared at his best friend and the woman who was something else entirely.
She stared back, hand on her hips, body clenched tight. The look on her face…it was the look that Chance had feared seeing all along.
Confusion.
Shock.
Disappointment.
“Blue,” he said quickly. “I can explain.”
She balled her hands into fists and shook her head. Her electric hair rippled around her. Chance had run his fingers through that hair all weekend long.
“Let’s hear it,” she breathed. “Let’s hear how you are possibly going to fucking explain this one.”
Chance shifted on the spot. He could hear people whispering behind him. His staff. He’d been so desperate to find Gabe that he hadn’t even used his private elevator. He’d raced straight in, demanding the other man’s location from the confused woman at reception. He’d never even met her before.
He shut the door behind him and moved across to Meg. She took a hasty step back. “Don’t.”
“Meg, please,” he said.
“Please, what?” she demanded. “What?”
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“It is not a long story,” Meg replied. “You can cover it in seven days.”
Seven days…how had all this happened so fucking quickly? “Seven days for us,” he said. “It’s been a bit longer than that for me.”
“Since you’ve been passing yourself off as someone else?” she asked. “That is what you’ve been doing, right? Pretending to be someone else?”
“Not pretending—” he began, but she slashed her hand through the air.
“Jack Chance isn’t even real! When did you create him?” She inhaled sharply. “The night we met? You did, didn’t you? That was why your site was locked down so tight. If we’d gotten in, you knew we’d figure it out.”
“My name has been Chance for a long time,” he said quickly.
“And have you been a PI for a long time?”
“No…I…” Chance shook his head. “It just seemed the best way to approach you. I found your Magnum PI blog and—”
“The flowers…” Her eyes widened with what Chance could only describe as dawning horror. “Flowers to match my hair.” She took another step back. “Did you make the whole thing up? Did you create it based on what you found out about me?”
“Some,” Chance admitted. “But it’s not as simple as that.”
She lifted a clearly shaking hand and rubbed her forehead. “What is it then?” she demanded.
“I needed your help,” Chance said. “With the investigation. With what was happening here. It was like a puzzle.”
“And you like puzzles.”
“Yes,” Chance said, even as Gabe shot him a look that clearly said, No.
“I guess you laid it all out,” Meg said. There was something in her voice now, something that Gabe had already picked up on. “Like steps in a computer program. Input A, output B.”
“I…”
“And all along you knew what was going on. You knew. Were you ever going to tell me?” she demanded, the questions tumbling out. “How long did you think you could keep this up for? Did you think I’d never find out? Or was that not an issue? The moment you got what you wanted was Chance going to disappear?”
“No,” Chance said, and he moved forward again. Gabe grabbed his arm.
“Chance…”
“Chance?” Meg shot them both a look that promised something worse than a knee between the legs if Chance tried to get any closer. “Chance? That’s not even his real name!”
“Might not be his real name,” Gabe said. “But it is his name. Hardly anyone calls him it, true, but I’ve known him as Chance since we were kids.”
“Maybe so,” Meg said. “Maybe so. But it doesn’t change the fact that his actual name is Jack Richards. Jack Richards.”
She closed her eyes.
“Technically…” Chance began.
Her eyes snapped open. “Do. Not. Be. That. Guy.”
“Blue…”
“I can’t even…” she said. “I really can’t.”
“We have to talk this through.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Gabe let out a slow whistle. “Not sure what’s going on here,” he said. “But I think I’ll leave you guys to it. You need me, Chance, you know where I am.”
Chance shot his friend a desperate sort of look, and not just because he had absolutely no experience with arguing with women. At least, not a woman like Meg. Someone smart and sassy and angry. What the fuck was he supposed to say? What was he supposed to do to make this right?
“I’d like to say it was nice to meet you,” Meg said. “But it wasn’t.”
Gabe actually grinned. “Shot through the heart.”
Chance winced as Meg rolled her eyes. They did not need those lyrics in the context of this conversation.
“Gabe…”
“Leave already,” Meg said.
“He can’t,” Chance replied.
“Can’t?” The word practically dripped off her tongue, but she looked so fucking pretty. Chance wanted to reach out and pull her into his arms. She’d probably break his nose if he tried. And yet, there was so much worse to come…
“Gabe needs to stay for this.”
Gabe’s grin widened even as he said, “Seems like a personal thing.”
“It’s beyond that,” Chance admitted. “It’s beyond anything I expected…I…” He swallowed against the lump in his throat. “Blue, I stole your work.”
She started. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve stolen dozens of people’s work,” Chance whispered. “Dozens.”
Gabe turned to look at him. He wasn’t grinning anymore. “Jack…what the fuck are you talking about?”
“It’s me,” Chance said. “The thefts? The stolen codes? The stolen solutions? It was all me.” He paused, shaking his head. “I mean, it’s ERQ, but she’s me, I created her.”
“ERQ? What are you even talking about,” Meg demanded.
So Chance told them. He told them everything. About his last weeks in Tokyo when he’d known that the only way he could possibly come back to X-Tech was if he took some kind of control over what was happening. Of their advances, their rapid advances, and it was all too much, too fast, and he didn’t know how to stop it. So, he’d created her to help him. To alert him the moment anyone began to make progress on the Golden Group.
“I’m in the Golden Group,” Meg whispered.
“Yes,” Chance said.
“But…” Gabe had sunk back into one of the chairs. “If you created her to search…”
“Et reditus quaerere.”
“Search and return,” Gabe breathed. “But return what?”
“I wrote some code,” Chance admitted. “It was designed to trace back and delete anything it found in the Golden Group.”
Gabe’s eyes widened. “You were going to delete other people’s res
earch?”
“It was an ethical dilemma,” Chance said. “I knew it was. I wrote it, I incorporated it, but then, at the last minute, when I couldn’t resolve the dilemma, I deleted it. It didn’t seem to matter,” he added. “No one was even close back then. At least, it didn’t look like it, not based on what ERQ was telling me.”
“Where was she looking?” Meg whispered.
“Everywhere,” Chance said.
“Everywhere?”
“The Web,” Chance said. “All of it. And…” He paused. “She was designed to learn, so before long she was finding her way into places I hadn’t strictly designed her to go. Something obviously went wrong then because she didn’t stop at ‘searching.’ She started to ‘return’ anything she found on the Golden Group, and she returned it here, to X-Tech. She incorporated the data she found into our work so seamlessly that no one could ever have noticed.”
“Jesus Christ, Chance,” Gabe said. “She was hacking into other systems and stealing their work for us?”
“It looks like it.”
“She hacked into mine?” Meg asked.
“Thirty-seven seconds,” Chance admitted. “It took me almost five minutes.”
“Oh my God.”
“I don’t know how she incorporated the code,” Chance said. “I wrote it. I added it. But I deleted it.” He shook his head. “She must have saved a copy, or it was a backup version, or something. I don’t know.”
“Jesus, Jack.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“This is…” Gabe shook his head. “If the world finds out…”
“That I created the perfect weapon of industrial espionage?”
“Not just industrial,” Gabe whispered. “ERQ could do so much more than that. The possibilities…”
“She’s world changing,” Meg whispered.
A shudder ran through Chance. “Don’t say that.”
“She is, though,” Meg replied. “Is that what you’ve been doing? Why you’ve been hiding away? Working on ERQ?”
“No. I created her years ago.” He shook his head. “I created her to stop things from being world changing.”
“I don’t understand…”
Gabe stood up. “This is the part where I leave.”
“Gabe—”
“I know,” he said. “We need to talk. We need a long talk.” He gave Chance a sharp glance. “You put her in hibernation mode?”
“Yeah.”
“You have a log of her movements?”
“I already uploaded it to your account.”
“Then, I’ll go look through it. We need to find every scrap of data that she added to our work. Figure out what the fuck we’re going to do about it. How we’re possibly going to explain it to the people we stole it from.”
“I’m sorry, Gabe,” Chance whispered.
“For being a genius?” Gabe shook his head and sighed. “I’m used to it, Chance. I’ve had more than a decade to get used to it.”
He clasped Chance on the shoulder and hurried from the room. Chance and Meg were alone, then. Chance wanted to reach out to her so badly, but she did not look like she would welcome any such action.
“Blue…”
“You lied to me.”
The words hurt. Chance felt them. “You knew I was lying,” he said.
“Yes, but not about this,” she said.
“I didn’t realize I was the thief we were looking for until this afternoon,” Chance said quickly.
“Yeah, I got that,” Meg replied. “I knew something was wrong. I could see it written all over your face. Why do you think I came here? Because I knew, I knew you weren’t going to give me any answers.” She visibly swallowed. “I thought you’d been hired by Jack Richards. I thought you were lying to me because he’d told you to.”
“Blue…”
“And I was right,” she whispered. “He had hired you. He is you.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Chance admitted.
But it almost seemed like Meg hadn’t heard him. “Jack Richards,” she muttered. “Jack Richards…” She lifted her head. Jack didn’t know what to make of the expression on her face. “You’re Jack Richards.”
It clicked a moment later. He’d seen that expression on the face of so many people. The people who had surrounded him in the early days, the people who had sought him out in the years that followed. And, even now, the people who came to X-Tech hoping to get a glimpse of him, to speak with him, expecting something that Jack couldn’t give them.
“Jack Richards is just a man.”
“He’s a genius. He’s the genius.” Meg shook her head. “And he’s you. I can see it now. Your eyes. It was always the eyes. I must have remembered them from the images that used to be on the Net. They disappeared a long time ago, but somehow I remembered. And your hair. That’s why you cut it so short, because of the curls.”
“I prefer it short,” Chance said.
“All the times when I said you wouldn’t understand what I was talking about.” She visibly winced. “You understand it all better than I do. Better than anyone does.”
Unease trickled down Chance’s spine. “Blue, stop this.”
“Stop what?”
“This…treating me like…”
“Like the man that every nerd fantasizes about being in a room with?” she asked. “Like the man that I would have given anything to spend just ten minutes with when I was younger?”
“You’ve spent a lot longer than that with me,” Chance said.
Her eyes widened. “Oh my God, we’ve had sex.”
Confusion joined the unease. Chance didn’t know what to say, what to do. “Yes…”
“I’ve had sex with Jack Richards.”
The tone to her voice, the look in her eyes, Chance acted without even thinking. He stepped forward and pulled her into his arms. She didn’t stop him, but she didn’t wrap her arms around him, either.
“Meg, stop this,” he said. “It’s me. This is me. Chance.”
“You’re not Chance,” she whispered. “You’ve never been Chance.”
“I was Chance every minute I spent with you,” he said. “When I held you. When I kissed you. When I was inside of you.”
“When you were stealing from me?”
He pulled her closer. She was so warm…and so tense…there was no give to her at all. “That was a mistake,” he said. “I’ll fix it. I’ll fix her.” He paused. “I see where I went wrong now. I didn’t give her enough time. I was so fixated on getting her finished that I rushed through it. I was sloppy.”
“How long?”
“Sorry?”
“How long did it take you to create ERQ?” Meg demanded.
Chance shifted slightly. He looked down into her eyes. She looked right back into his. He wished he knew what she was thinking, what she was feeling.
“A couple of months.”
Her eyes fluttered closed. “To create something that goes out into the world and brings you back whatever you desire. A couple of months…”
“Blue—”
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Just don’t. I can’t deal with this. I don’t even know where to start.”
“Blue, please…”
She pushed out of his arms and twisted herself around. There was no knee to his groin this time, but Chance was reminded forcibly of how she had done the exact same thing a week ago…at the very top of the tower…the start of all of this. But they couldn’t be at the end, could they? Not yet…not yet…
“Blue,” he said again, holding out a hand to her. Was his shaking? Chance wasn’t sure, but he felt shaky, his head, his heart…
Meg barely gave his hand a second glance. Instead, she moved next to the door, palms on it. “I need…I need time…I need space…I need to think,” she whispered. “I need you to leave me alone for a while, Chance. Leave me to work this out.” She reached down and gripped the door handle, shaking her head. “You’re him…he’s you…I can’t…”
; “How much time?” Chance demanded. “How much?”
She shook her. “I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe you could ask ERQ. She could probably tell you.”
“She was a mistake,” Chance said.
Meg pushed the door open, shooting him a look as she did so. He stared right back at her, into those beautiful eyes. Anger. Hurt. Disappointment. It was all there, flashing across her features. Chance did not know how he was going to make it better, how he was going to bring back the happiness that had been there this morning. And not just happiness but the affection, the desire.
“A mistake, Meg,” he said as he lowered his hand. “Just a mistake.”
“Maybe she was a mistake,” Meg said slowly. “Maybe we were, too.”
“You don’t mean that,” Chance breathed.
“I have no idea what I mean, Jack,” she said. “I’ve been working from an incomplete dataset all along.”
“You’ve had the only data that matters,” Chance said.
“And what would that be?” Meg asked.
“That you make me happy,” Chance replied. “That I make you happy.”
“Not right now you don’t,” Meg whispered.
Her whisper joined that of the others in the lobby. Chance became aware of them at the same moment Meg did. They both turned to look at his staff, their fellow nerds, and there were significantly more of them now. How long before one of them posted this on one of the forums? Until the world knew that Jack Richards had been dumped by a doctor with electric-blue hair?
“I have to go,” Blue said quickly.
“How long?” Chance demanded again.
She simply shook her head. “As long as it takes.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Meg went to Kate’s. Where else was she going to go? It was either that or back to her folks, and they’d probably dress her in active wear and hike her up the mountain. That had always been their solution to Meg’s broken hearts.
“There’s nothing exercise can’t fix,” her mother had always said.
Meg had never agreed. And even if she had, she knew that exercise could not fix this. She had no idea what could.
