It touched her, because she knew it meant they cared. She’d gotten so used to riding the bike that, other than rainstorms and lovebug season, she really didn’t notice that it wasn’t a car.
They must have been expecting her, because the large garage door was up when she pulled in. Before she could shut the bike off, Trace had stepped into the garage and waved her in, his intent clear.
So she drove into the garage.
He hit the button to lower the door and she didn’t miss there was a dark and thunderous expression on his face.
“Thanks,” she said after she removed her helmet.
“Don’t you think it’s time you get a car?” His tone sounded a little…almost snippy.
She had gone to great lengths not to discuss finances with them, or her living arrangements, or anything like that. They had her personal info so they’d likely run a credit check on her, which would show she had none. Not bad or good—just non-existent, because she’d been very careful not to get into debt like that.
“Nothing wrong with a bike.” She removed her rain jacket, shaking the rain off it and hanging it from one handlebar.
“This slop is supposed to go on all day. It’s like a massive blob sitting right over us. You can’t ride home in this. The temps are supposed to drop twenty degrees by the end of the day, and it’s gusty as hell.”
Butterscotch.
She hadn’t brought leggings or anything like that for extra layers. Usually this time of year she was worried about striking a balance between protection, and roasting like a chicken in an InstaPot, not staying warm.
But it was spring in Florida, meaning the temperatures could sometimes wildly fluctuate if a strong enough cold front moved through.
I really need to pay better attention to the weather.
She forced a smile to hopefully reassure him as she skimmed off her rain gear bottoms and hung them on the other handlebar. “I’ll be okay, Trace. Honestly. This is kinda what I do.”
He stood with his arms crossed over his chest and doggoned if he didn’t use Dom-tone on her. “I’m pulling boss rank. One of us will drive you home tonight.”
She removed her riding jacket and draped it over the seat. “That isn’t necessary.”
“Not arguing the point with you, Denny. We’ve already decided that is what’s going to happen.” He turned and headed inside.
Well, sugar.
At least her boots and jeans were dry. She’d invested in good rain gear, not cheap stuff, knowing she’d need to stretch her money a loooong way, and the Gold Wing was the best way to do that. She grabbed her backpack from the trunk, unwrapped it, and headed inside.
Hal and Ken stood talking in the kitchen, both sipping coffee. Hal wore a dark expression and Ken just flat looked amused.
“What?” she asked. She set her backpack down and reached past Hal for a mug to get her coffee.
“I think I’m going car shopping tomorrow to buy a company car,” Hal said. Usually Hal was the jokester, the smiling one, the guy who laughed first and loudest, even at himself.
Today he looked like he had to attend a funeral.
“A company car?”
“Yeah.” He pointed at her with his coffee mug. “So our AA can drive it when she needs to and not risk her damn neck in this bullshit weather.”
She’d thought she’d gotten a handle on her blushing, but now her face flamed again. “It’s fine,” she mumbled.
“Nah, it ain’t,” Ken said, the amusement fading from his face. “We had the Sarasota channel on earlier, and there was breaking news about a motorcyclist getting hit and killed here in Sarasota this morning. Fortunately, they showed it was a crotch rocket, not the blue deathtrap. You know, we were about thirty seconds from heading out in all four vehicles to go look for you and bring you here.”
She suddenly couldn’t find her voice.
Then Steve raced into the kitchen, practically skidding to a stop. “Oh, thank god!” He threw his arms around her in a bear-trap of a hug, nearly making her spill her coffee. “You are not riding that fucking thing anymore!”
“Guys—”
“I already told her one of us will be driving her home,” Trace said from the kitchen doorway.
“I have classes in the morning. How am I supposed to get there?”
“You give us the schedule before we take you home tonight. One of us will be there to pick you up in the morning and take you to school, then we’ll pick you up when you’re finished. If the weather’s good, we’ll consider letting you ride home on the bike.”
“Consider?” She set her mug down and stepped over to Trace. “Letting me? You can’t order me around!”
One eyebrow slid up over a killer blue eye. “You’re right—we can’t.” He propped his hands on his hips, his feet shoulder-width apart, and seemed to grow a foot in height before her eyes. “So safeword,” he softly said. “It’s that easy.”
Her mouth went dry as something deep inside her curled up, happy and content and taking her will to protest with it.
Someone—ones—cared about her. Worried about her.
Wanted to protect her and take care of her.
Sure, they were her bosses and friends, but it wasn’t like they were broke, or she was begging them to do it.
They were insisting.
And one thing she’d learned about all four men during her time working for them was they didn’t say or do things they didn’t mean. They didn’t play games when it was about serious shit, about work or life. Teasing and joking around was one thing.
But when they set their minds to something, it happened.
Case in point? Collidezkope.
Behind her, she was aware of Ken and Steve and Hal watching and in full agreement with Trace. She knew if she turned and looked at them, they’d all be wearing pretty much the same expression, and trying to reason with any of them now would be like hitting a brick wall.
And no way could she bring herself to safeword for this.
For caring about her.
“Fine,” she whispered, grabbing her backpack and coffee mug and heading to her desk.
* * * *
One wall of the war room was nothing but whiteboards. They made thorough use of project management software, but frequently they needed to brainstorm stuff and that went on the boards for a majority opinion before it made it into the project management software, usually after they took pictures of the boards before wiping them clean so they’d have a record.
Written in teal green, a large box currently took up one section of the whiteboard closest to her desk. Labelled FOCUS, it was a list of their potential ideas.
Music was already listed there and crossed out, as if they needed a reminder. So were several other options already well-served by other sites and not likely an inroad.
There were also a few sub-heads listed, like Dating, Collectors, and Pets with more specific ideas below them.
She was waiting for her work laptop to finish booting as she stared at the list, the first thing she did every morning. Some of the ideas on the wall were hers.
Then her phone dinged with an alert. She pulled it out to find she had a FetLife friend request. She ended up deleting more of those than she ever responded to, because she wasn’t on Fet for dating, mostly to stay up-to-date on local events.
As she deleted the notification and set her phone to silent, she had an epiphany and started searching with her personal laptop.
The men were still in the kitchen, softly talking. Ten minutes later, feeling like she’d just stumbled upon a pot of gold, she walked over to the whiteboard. She picked up the teal marker and wrote KINKY SOCIAL MEDIA SITE, then circled it.
Ken, who stood closest to the kitchen doorway, cleared his throat.
She turned. “That’s it. That’s the idea.”
“I know we agreed not to discuss kinky things, but ever heard of FetLife?”
“Yeah, but they’re ten years in and look at all the issues they’ve never add
ressed.” She grabbed a pink marker and stepped sideways, where a blank section of whiteboard lay ready. There, she listed off the top of her head a multitude of issues both FetLife and Facebook had.
Then she turned to them. “We can make it so industry fetish models and content producers can easily utilize it and buy advertising or premium placement. Some of those ideas, you guys addressed with Collidezkope in later iterations. Let’s hammer out all the issues right now and build them into the core code. Because if you sell the software as a networking site for car collectors, or as a dating site for Danish chefs with one eye, these are still valid issues. Set it up so all the features can be toggled on or off on the backend.”
All four men had watched her compose her list. Trace sat on the edge of his desk. “Copypasta trolls PMing people are a huge problem on Fet, but legit event organizers wanting to cross-post their event info get slapped by the system bot after three posts. I’ve always thought that was backwards and stupid. We could build in a switch to allow group owners to toggle on and off allowing copy-pasta posts, with a pop-up warning if it’s off so the poster knows why it’s flagged. Or an option to send them to moderation by default for review.”
She pointed at him. “And Facebook, you get all these reaction emoticons, but you can’t prevent people from adding you to a group without your permission.”
“And on Fet,” Steve said, “you can’t control the privacy of a group’s membership, postings, or prevent people from joining. You can only boot and ban them after the fact. There’s no privacy or secrecy options for groups.”
“Exactly.” She put the marker down. “We could set regional filters for people, so if they only want to accept PMs from people, or even only be visible to people, say, within a hundred miles of them, boom. Or if they only wanted people within their friends list, or friends-of-friends. Or event organizers. Or genders or BDSM roles, or ages—anything. They could define personal networks and maybe have an optional catch-all bin for requests outside that network that people could weed through, if they wanted to be visible outside the network but not necessarily ‘open’ past it. Why do you think so many people pick Antarctica as their home? Because it takes them out of a local search. We set a toggle on the user end if they want to be visible in search results or not, or again, set parameters they control. Or they can toggle the visibility of their profile details.”
Ken ran a hand over his bare skull, his brow furrowed in what she now knew meant he was deep into the potential code in his brain and running it through. “Neither site allows people to customize the UI. I hear a lot of complaints about that. We set up Collidezkope with a few options for that, but we could go even farther. I don’t mean MySpacing it, but we could allow pre-set color schemas, high-vis options for visually impaired users, or even a screen-reader option for people who use those. Flexible stylesheets and portability to mobile devices is a must. In fact, we need to design the front-end of it from a mobile standpoint. If you can read it on a phone, you can read it on a laptop.”
The men were off and running, spending the next hour adding to her list and starting new ones as they all brainstormed various features, front- and back-end.
Trace walked over to the focus list and erased it all, rewriting it in the upper corner of the whiteboard as FOCUS: Lifestyle-friendly social media site. Then he drew a box around it, turned to her, and offered her a fist-bump, which she returned.
“Still driving you home tonight,” he said before returning to the kitchen with his coffee mug.
Dang it.
* * * *
At lunchtime, Ken cornered her alone in the kitchen. She’d once seen a black guy on an insurance commercial who made her do a double-take because at first glance she’d thought he was Ken…and then the reason why Ken had struck her as so familiar upon their first meeting hit home. She’d researched the actor, because Ken could have been the man’s bigger, beefier, even hunkier-looking twin. Leslie Odom, Jr. was a talented singer and actor who’d starred in Hamilton on Broadway, playing Aaron Burr, and had guest-starred on an episode of Supernatural, among many other appearances.
Which, being one of her favorite shows, that was likely why she’d pinged on him, at first.
And other than the fact that Ken was taller, broader, and couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket if his life depended on it, he could have passed for the actor.
I get an even better real-life version to secretly drool over every day.
Not many women were that lucky.
“I need to ask a big favor of you,” he began. “And let me start out by saying that no is a perfectly acceptable answer, and I won’t hold it against you.”
“This sounds big.”
“It…kinda is.”
“Okay.”
“I have to go to my sister’s wedding in a couple of months. Up in New York.”
“Congratulations!”
“Yeah, well, this is where it gets…sticky.”
“Why?”
“Because my family does not and cannot ever know I am gay.”
“Um, ooookaaaay?”
“If I don’t take a date, they’re going to harass me all weekend and ask me uncomfortable questions, try to fix me up with friends, and I’ll spend the next several months doing damage control trying to fend off people and making excuses. If I say I have a girlfriend, or at least someone I’m dating, and she couldn’t come, then I’m going to face months of Momma and my siblings making snarky comments that she must think she’s too good to socialize or meet my family. I can’t use the excuse that she couldn’t afford to fly up, because, duh, they know I can pay her way.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Now, in the past, the boys have always arranged someone to go with me when I needed to attend an event, but that was when we were living up there, and it was usually just one evening or afternoon, a couple of hours. This will be a whole weekend thing. And it wouldn’t make sense for me to take someone from New York since I’m living in Florida.”
She was starting to understand where this was going. “I can’t afford to—”
“I’d pay for everything, including wardrobe for you. We’d need to share a hotel room to sell the act.”
Well, there went her only excuse.
He watched her, waiting.
“They won’t have a problem with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“That I’m white?”
An evilly playful smile curved his lips. “At first, probably, but that’s nothing.” The smile faded. “I seriously will lose my family if they learn I’m gay. Very likely it would turn violent if I was near my brothers or some of my cousins. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. I can’t lose my family. They might drive me up a wall and I don’t agree with them on a lot of things, but they’re my family, and I love them. Please?”
She nodded. “Okay.” Heck, they’d insisted on her going to her graduation so they could attend. The least she could do was this.
His smile returned. “Thank you, Denny-girl!” He swept her up into a hug, quickly releasing her like she’d shocked him. “Oh, man, I’m sorry—”
She laughed. She’d hugged all of them before, plenty of times, but they usually waited for her to initiate it. “It’s okay.” She opened her arms to him and he hugged her again.
Besides, she used it as fantasy fodder for when she was alone at night.
“You have no idea how much this means to me, seriously.”
“Well, it’s not like I have a boyfriend to object.”
He looked like he started to say something and stopped himself, then smiled. “Any boyfriend you do ever have will have to make it through the four of us first to make sure he’s good enough for our Denny-girl.”
And on that note, which left her wide-eyed and totally brain-scrambled, he left the kitchen.
Holy sugarballs.
Chapter Fourteen
Trace knew Arden wasn’t happy about them insisting on driving her home, but the fact that it was even
windier than it had been that morning, still raining, and was now much colder helped win that battle for them.
He’d already plugged her address into his phone to map it and realized he wished he’d looked at her neighborhood with Google Earth before now. He knew she was renting from a friend and former co-worker of hers, but they didn’t know anything about her living arrangements beyond that.
In some ways, she was extremely closed-mouthed. He tried not to pry because he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable or shift things into territory that would put them in a vulnerable position for a lawsuit.
But Saturday night had changed a few things, and the way he’d laid down the law to her earlier meant she was willing to at least listen to them. He wouldn’t push her too hard or fast, but little tiny nudges in the direction they wanted her to go wouldn’t hurt, right?
That’s what he told himself.
It was pouring when they pulled up in front of the house.
“Pull around the side,” she said, pointing to a gravel driveway he’d thought was for the house next door.
When he rounded the back of the house, he spotted the huge RV.
“You can pull up under the pole barn,” she said. “I park the bike there.”
“This is where you’re living?”
“Yeah. It’s really nice. Allie likes having me here because it means her in-laws can’t come down and visit.”
“It’s an RV!”
“It’s a really nice RV.”
“But how do you go to the bathroom and take a shower?”
“It has its own septic tank system. I have a key to the utility room so I can do my laundry there. This is the nicest place I’ve ever lived in. Want to come in and see it?”
The Airstream did look to be high-dollar. “Sure.”
She unlocked the side door and let him in. Sure enough, it was definitely a premium coach.
She set her things on the dinette table. “Her parents gave it to them after her dad had a heart attack. Her husband doesn’t like to drive it, says it’s too nice. So they built the pad and pole barn and parked it to use as a guest house.”
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