A Game of Chance

by Emma Shortt

  “I’ve wanted to bring you here since the day I met you,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about your work, talk to you about mine, swap ideas, share interests…” He gestured around them. “Now you’re here.” He shook his head. “But I don’t know what to say to you, Blue.”

  One of the screens was running a real-time feed from the X-Tech data center. Chance had programmed it to highlight key words. X-Tech…that place was so wrapped up in him, so wrapped up in them. How could Meg even begin to pull them apart?

  “You don’t have a plan?” she eventually asked.

  Chance visibly winced. “The last one didn’t work out so well.”

  “I guess that depends what you were hoping to get from it.”

  “I never imagined I would get you.”

  Meg inhaled sharply. If she accepted that Chance was Jack, then she wouldn’t need to separate them, just accept them, but could she do that? After everything that had happened, could she get past it?

  “Chance…”

  “I would have given up my entire company to date you when I was younger,” he whispered. “And then some.”

  Meg shivered. “Would you give it up now?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  “Chance…”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I know we have a million things to discuss. I know you need answers. I know you deserve them. But right now, the most important thing I have to say to you is this: will you date me, Blue?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Meg stood, surrounded by his screens, data flashing behind her in a constant stream, and with a look stamped on her face that suggested Chance’s question was not one she had expected to hear. She placed her hands on her hips, the material of his sweater bunching around her. Chance knew that it was all kinds of pathetic, but his heart had stuttered as she’d pulled it over her head. He liked seeing her in his clothes. He liked seeing her in his apartment. He liked her, full stop.

  “Who am I dating?” she eventually asked. “Jack Chance or Jack Richards?”

  “They really are one and the same.”

  “I’m trying to believe that,” Meg said. “Trying to resolve them together in my head, but it isn’t easy. Every time I think I’m close, I think about the fact that you were the man I practically stalked through the Net when I was in college.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “Stalked might be slightly too strong a word. But I totally did follow anything you posted, anything you created. Me and a million other nerds.”

  Chance thought of the endless forums full of posts asking where he was, the emails X-Tech received every day, even the people who waited outside X-Tech Towers hoping to catch a glimpse of him. “They still do,” he said. “But then, they don’t realize that I’m not him anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Chance took the seat behind his desk. One of his screens was running a live feed of ERQ’s log. Gabe was still working on her. Chance could see the other man dragging code out to be inspected. Gabe was a good man, a good friend. Chance thought that perhaps he had forgotten that a little over the last years.

  “Did you know I stopped running the company a long time ago?” he asked.

  Meg walked across the room and perched herself on the edge of the desk. Hope shot through Chance at that action. Meg might not realize it, but by closing the distance between them she was indicating that she was willing to listen to him, willing to talk.

  “How long ago?”

  “When we built the new headquarters,” Chance said.

  “But…why…”

  What could he be but honest? He’d lied to Meg enough already. If there was any chance of taking their relationship forward, of dating, he had to give her the truth. “I had to get away from it.”

  Meg looked confused. “Get away from what?”

  “The tech world, Meg.”

  “But…you’re a genius.”

  “A genius.” Chance sighed. “I was fifteen when they first called me that. It confused me. I couldn’t understand why everyone else had trouble with the things that came so easily to me. It made me feel…separate.”

  Meg shifted slightly. Her ass nudged the coffee mugs that Chance had not cleaned up from the day before. “Well, yeah, I’ve felt that way, too, at times.”

  “Your genius is part of you, though, Blue,” Chance said. “Mine has always felt like it is me.”

  “It was overwhelming?” she asked.

  “It was all-consuming,” he said. “I sat behind this computer, and I didn’t emerge for a decade.”

  Meg ran her fingers along the top of the computer screen. Her nails were painted the same color they had been yesterday. It was slightly ridiculous, but that, too, gave Chance hope. Had she been too mad, too upset, or too hurt to change their color? Surely, that was a good sign? Strong emotions were what Chance wanted her to feel for him. Sure, he’d rather they were positive emotions, but he’d take whatever he could right now.

  “You did brilliant things, though, Jack,” she said.

  “World-changing things,” he said. “It wasn’t until I thought about that, until I gave myself time to consider it, that I started to wonder, just because I could do it, did that mean I should?” He sighed, unable to stop now that he’d started, because Meg needed to know these things, if she was going to be a part of his life—she needed to know. “Some of the ideas I had, Meg,” he said. “Some of the plans, they would, they could, change the entire world. But would they change it in the right way?”

  “It’s impossible to know that.”

  “Exactly.” Chance leaned forward and pulled up some files. He gestured to Meg to look at the screen opposite them. Each file was labeled with the problem that Chance had solved.

  Meg stood up and walked over to the screen. She ran her fingers down the list before turning to him wide-eyed. “You were going to work on these?”

  “I did work on them,” he said.

  She seemed at a loss for words. Chance did not blame her. She leaned forward and scrolled the screen down. Chance waited, knowing what she was going to find. His fingers hovered over the keys. For one moment, he considered minimizing the screen. Meg didn’t have to see this. He did not have to share it with her. Hell, he’d never shared it with anyone before but Gabe. And yet, he trusted Meg. For whatever reason, he’d trusted her since that very first night in X-Tech. He knew now that he should have acted on that trust much sooner.

  “This list goes on forever,” Meg said. “I don’t even recognize most of the problems.”

  “I always look for the most difficult ones,” Chance said. “That’s part of the fun.”

  “Including those in the Millennium Prize group,” Meg said softly. She turned back to him, the expression on her face was impossible to decipher. “You solved the traveling salesman problem, didn’t you?”

  No more lies. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I was in my early twenties,” Chance said.

  “Is that the only Millennium problem you’ve solved?”

  “No.”

  She let out a deep breath. “You solved them all, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  She walked back over to the desk, but she didn’t perch on the side this time. Instead, she moved around the table and stood in front of him. She looked so fucking cute in his sweater—her blue hair curling against the gray. If ever there was a visible metaphor of the relationship that he imagined he and Meg might have, that was it. She would be the bright spot of color in his life. He knew that. He’d experienced it. And now that he had, he didn’t want to lose it.

  “How close am I?” she whispered.

  He stood up. She did not move back. “Worryingly so.”

  “How long?”

  How would she react if he pulled her into his arms? There was only one way to find out. “A few little leaps in understanding and you’ll get there.”

  “You don’t want me to.”

  He leaned in and placed his arms on hers. He could
feel her heat through the cotton. “I want things to slow down, Meg.”

  “You can’t stop change, Chance,” she whispered.

  He tugged her forward. She didn’t resist. “I’ve tried to. These last years? That’s pretty much all I have done.”

  “And has it helped?”

  “Helped?”

  “Has it made you feel like you’re more…whole?”

  Chance pulled her against him. She was so warm, so soft. He would never get enough of her. She made him feel whole. “No.”

  She reached up and placed her palm against his face. A shudder of absolute desire ran through him. “You can’t stop the world from changing, Chance,” she said. “All you can do is help change it in the right way.”

  He closed his eyes against her touch. “Gabe has been saying that for years.”

  “Then, maybe it’s time you listened to him.”

  “And to you?” he asked.

  She let out a soft kind of sigh. Chance opened his eyes. Meg was looking up at him, and at long last he recognized that look in her eyes. It was the same look that had been there when she’d sat across from him at the bar, all nervous and excited. The same one that she’d worn as she’d welcomed him into her body. Chance thought he’d be a happy man if he could see that look on her face every single day. He resolved then, that no matter what happened between them, no matter how this played out, that he would never do anything that would change that look, that would allow the hurt, the anger, and the disappointment to return.

  “Chance, you’re like all kinds of fucked up,” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Another sigh. “I’m a little fucked up, too.”

  “Someone told me we’d make the perfect couple,” Chance said.

  “You think that someone was right?”

  “I think I want to find out.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Meg might be super smart, but, when it came right down to it, she was also super simple. Like a computer, she took the inputs she was given and responded accordingly.

  When he looked at her, did she smile?

  When he joked with her, did she laugh?

  When he held her close, did it make her happy?

  And, most importantly of all, when he spoke, did she believe what he was saying?

  Over the last week, Meg had been able to answer yes to the first three of those questions. She hadn’t known how to answer the last of them.

  She did now. Chance might have lied to her. He might have actively manipulated her. But he’d never done so with malice. Meg got that. He’d done it because he was an idiot, and because he hadn’t known what else to do. He’d seen the variables, he’d tried to control them, but he didn’t understand that they couldn’t all be controlled.

  As she looked up at him, as he held her close, she knew that there were going to be many variables in her relationship with him. Some of them she had never imagined she might experience—dating the man she’d once crushed so hard on, for instance—but some she could deal with easily. Like his penchant for stupid plans that were never going to work. She understood now why he had constructed them and why he had played them. She suspected that she understood it all a little better than he did.

  He was running scared of the things—of the puzzles—that he’d built. He needed someone to hold his hand and steer him through that fear. Meg was totally able to do that. Question was, did she want to?

  “I have something for you,” Chance said. “Will you let me show you?”

  Meg nodded even as she tried to work through her racing thoughts. He took her by the hand and led her back into the living room. Her fingers tingled from the contact. They weren’t the only things tingling. Meg suspected that if she and Chance moved forward with this, they were going to spend a lot of time making each other tingle.

  They moved into the kitchen, passing through a corridor of floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Meg recognized the spines of many of the books. She had most of them herself.

  What interests do we have in common? Had she really asked herself that just a couple of days ago? Had she really worried that there wasn’t much there at all? She’d been so stupid. If anything, Meg realized now that they had too many shared interests—the sci-fi, the manga, the computer games, the computer programming, and then, the math, the beautiful math. From that perspective, they really did make a perfect couple.

  “Through here,” Chance said.

  The kitchen was nothing like she had expected. The space was huge, and if the tools and gadgets were anything to go by, Chance really did like to cook. Meg ran her fingers over the marble counter, wondering what it would be like to spend time with him now that she knew who he really was, now that there were no secrets or lies between them.

  She glanced up at him. He was watching her with a very slight smile on his face. He looked hopeful. Meg’s heart clenched. Again, she couldn’t stop thinking how much of a contradiction he was. He looked like he should be beyond confident, but he absolutely was not.

  Realization dawned. Those were the two parts of him. The Chance part and the Richards part. They did fit together. It had been right there in front of her all along.

  “I had to take care of all this earlier today,” he said as he moved around to the other side of the counter. “It was why I was a little late coming to see you. Well, that and tangling with ERQ.”

  “She’s making you work hard?”

  “She’ll make me work very hard,” he said. A pause and then, “She’s not the only one. I know that.”

  He reached down and lifted up a bouquet of flowers from below the counter. They were multicolored. The petals dyed a riot of pinks, greens, yellows, and blues. Meg couldn’t help but smile.

  “Where do you get them to dye the petals?”

  His smile turned a little more hopeful. “A man has to have some secrets.”

  “Flowers to match my hair.”

  “You’ve had lots of hair colors,” he said.

  Meg had indeed posted many multicolored hair photos on her blog. Chance must have spent hours reading each post to see them. “I can’t believe you read that entire Mills and Boon blog,” she said. “You’re such a stalker.”

  “Here’s your lemon cake.”

  It was beautifully presented in a rainbow-colored box. Meg decided then that she was never going to tell him that she really did prefer chocolate. If they were going to do this, and she was starting to think that they were, she’d accept every lemon cake he gave her with a smile.

  “And then there’s this.”

  He leaned down and picked up something off the floor. It was clearly heavy, as even he, bulging muscles and all, struggled a little with it. Meg blinked once and then again. A horrible feeling of familiarity ran through her.

  “It’s an ant colony.”

  “It’s your ant colony.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I’m giving you back the ants,” he said. “If you’re going to solve the problem, and one day you will, it should be with X-Tech.”

  Of all the things that Chance had said to her over the last week, each comment, each thought, nothing thrilled Meg more than his obvious confidence in her work. Because he was Jack Richards, and he had always been someone she had admired, someone who she’d wanted to admire her.

  She felt the last of her resistance begin to crumble. No, it wasn’t resistance, it was the last of the annoyance and anger that she’d felt in the breakout space inside X-Tech. She finally realized that some hidden part of her probably had known that he was Jack Richards. It was why she had responded to him so instantly. Why she had trusted him. He was the man she had wanted from the very beginning, only she had never imagined that he would come in a Chance-shaped wrapping that made her weak at the knees.

  “You’re offering me a job?” she asked softly.

  “How does head of the Golden Group sound?” he asked.

  His Golden Group…the very thing he had worked so hard on for years. The very thing he did
n’t want to be worked on. He was offering it to her. That he was willing to even try… It blew Meg away. Was it enough to make up for his deceitful ways over the last week? Absolutely not. Meg was going to make him pay for that, and then some, in various creative ways. Still, it was a damn good start.

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’m nervous,” he said. “Letting this happen… It’s going to be very difficult for me.”

  “For me, too, Chance,” Meg said, her mind racing at the possibilities. “And I won’t even be able to come across to X-Tech full-time. I have KIT as well. Kate still needs me there.”

  “Kate should be working for X-Tech, too,” Chance said. “We can talk about that. Make some plans. All I need to know is if this is something that would interest you.”

  “You know it does,” she said. “It’s why I went to that stupid competition in the first place.”

  He nudged the ant colony onto the counter as he moved back around so that he was in front of her. Meg could see them crawling around inside their little burrows.

  “If you can do it, I can,” he said. “I’m going to need time. We have to be careful—”

  “I’m always careful,” Meg said.

  He sighed. “You are never careful.”

  He pulled her into his arms. For the first time since Meg had realized that Chance was Jack, she responded by wrapping her arms around his neck. She ran her fingers along the nape of his neck. The hair was curling. Would she be able to convince him to let the whole thing grow out? She was certainly going to try.

  “Chance…”

  A shiver ran through her as he pressed their bodies together. That scratchy feeling? It was gone now. Meg suspected that so long as Chance was pressing up against her it always would be.

  “You are brilliant, Dr. Marlowe,” he said.

  “I’m not the only one.”

  “My brilliance is…something we need to be cautious with,” he said.

  “Cautious?” Meg pulled a face. “Not sure if I’m your girl there. That’s why I have Kate.”