Tainted Love Series Boxed Set

by Lily Zante

  “Thanks.” Nadine rushed off.

  Another normal day at the Zimmerman Group.

  ~~

  By late afternoon, Melissa had toyed many times with the idea of calling Noah, or texting him. He brightened her day, and after the way the morning had started, by her running into Matt, she needed nice things to think about.

  But she always stopped herself from doing so, not wanting to depend on him too much, not wanting to come across as needy. She put away her finished sandwich wrapper when her phone rang. It was Nadine.

  “Melissa, could you come in here please.”

  She went into Nadine’s office—to find her boss sitting at her desk, ashen faced. The moment Melissa sat down, Nadine walked over to the just-ajar door and closed it, before returning to face Melissa.

  Had the Europe trip been brought forward? Melissa wondered.

  “I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to come out with it.” Nadine sat back in her chair and rubbed her hands together, hesitating. “The memory stick you gave me wasn’t the one with the PowerPoint slides. It was your personal one, I think.” She wavered slightly as she said it.

  Melissa thought back to the morning, and her face crumbled.

  Oh.

  Shit.

  “Mine?” But even as she said it she knew exactly which memory stick she’d accidentally passed on. Heat grazed her cheeks as she bent over and placed her face in her hands. The desire to vanish into thin air, to rewind time, to disappear, took hold.

  “Nobody else saw it. I was preparing for my presentation and I caught it.”

  “I’m… so… sorry,” Melissa blubbered, her breath short and fast.

  “Melissa,” Nadine’s voice was quiet, soft. “I didn’t look through it all. I swear to you. I opened it and it just played. It was footage of you.” Nadine took a breath in and seemed to have as much trouble telling her as Melissa had in listening to her words. The horror of imagining Nadine watching her …was her worst nightmare come true.

  “I saw a glimpse. I saw enough. I saw you crying…in what I can only imagine to be the worst ordeal for you. I saw his face. And I closed it. Here.” She handed Melissa the stick.

  But Melissa was crying quiet tears, trying to hold it together. Until she burst, and the floodgates opened. In an instant Nadine had her arms around Melissa’s shoulders. She held her gently. “Shhhh. Shhhh. Nobody else knows. I’m not going to tell a soul.” Melissa held onto her and cried. Nadine said nothing as she held her. After a while, Melissa pulled away.

  Nadine handed her a tissue, then sat back down. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Melissa wiped her eyes, her nose, her cheeks. She glanced up. “What about your meeting?”

  “I’ve postponed it.”

  She took the second tissue from Nadine and blew her nose noisily.

  “Melissa,” said Nadine gently, “that looked like a crime to me. I don’t think you can let this go on any longer.”

  “He didn’t do that all the time,” said Melissa, defensively.

  “It was bad enough that it happened once. You shouldn’t feel you’re to blame. Trust me, I should know.”

  Melissa sniffed again, wiped her nose.

  “This will go no further—unless you want it to. Do you want to talk about it?”

  Now that Nadine already knew about the movie, it made sense to start there.

  Chapter 42

  “A few last minute applications came in.” Rory handed a plastic folder to Noah as he walked in for a brief about the current recruitment drive. The recent meeting with Melissa was still uppermost in his mind. She was hurting, she was hurting a lot more than he was. And he had to do something—only he was trying to pace himself, not go running headfirst into anything.

  “I particularly like the one from Matt Elliott. He knows his networks and that’s a lot of our fundamentals covered.” Noah blanched when he heard the name, which sounded so foreign coming from his boss’s mouth.

  “Matt Elliott?” Noah questioned and briefly looked down at the plastic wallet.

  “He made it. Barely. It’s a last minute entry. But he checks out good. According to his application. I’d like to bring him in for an interview.”

  Noah coughed to fight the knot of tension currently plugging his throat. “Let me take a look at these and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Ideally we need to get the first round of interviews over with this week.”

  Noah felt his facial muscles tighten. He’d tried not to help Matt out much last night, and had offered only a few tips on how to word his resume. The guy had experience, and lots of it. He knew Rory liked guys that were well rounded, but they needed the relevant network knowledge first, since Black Diamond monitored a lot of their clients’ servers remotely. This guy had all of that and more. On paper he looked good enough, thought Noah, glancing through Matt’s application form.

  Knowledge-wise the guy checked out. It was the other stuff Noah wasn’t so sure of. He returned to his desk, wondering how he could convince Rory that Matt was a bad asset to have in the company. How could he put Rory off without alluding to anything that might involve Melissa?

  In no way did Noah want the guy working at Black Diamond. Especially not, as this position warranted, reporting to him.

  ~~

  He knocked off work two hours earlier, citing some work that he could do from home—mainly going through the applicants’ forms and deciding who to shortlist. Rory trusted his judgment and didn’t bat an eye when Noah left.

  But the real reason was to get home before Matt did. It would give him time to slip the CDs back into his room and leave them in some inconspicuous space…not on the desk as Melissa had told him. That would be too obvious. Matt would know they were gone one minute and suddenly reappeared the next.

  Getting back from work in the late afternoon, Noah slipped into Matt’s room. It was unlocked, as he knew it would be.

  He walked over to the desk and slipped the CDs on top of one of the heavy towers under the desk. It was a simple and obvious enough place to have put them and forgotten about them. Heck, if the guy was used to checking the refrigerator for his CDs, it would be so entirely believable that he’d left them on his tower under the desk.

  He looked around, not feeling guilty at all for being in Matt’s room, trespassing; he’d lost respect for the guy days ago. Carefully, he scrutinized the surroundings and shook his head—the guy was one seriously messy dude.

  Time to get to the serious stuff.

  He had his own CDs with him. Software that would allow him to hack into passwords and gain access to machines easily. There was an obvious advantage to working for a company that offered monitoring and protection to companies who needed to secure their networks. Dealing with denial of service attacks from hackers and the like meant having to think like a hacker and acquiring the necessary skills and expertise to carry out these attacks.

  He sat at Matt’s desk and accessed his laptop. Pulling out one of his own CDS, he easily overcame the first hurdle. Matt’s password. Inserting his own CD, he was easily able to get into Matt’s PC and then he spent the next few minutes snooping around. He wasn’t sure what it was he was looking for.

  Until he found it.

  The folders, labeled as dates it looked liked. He clicked on them in order. Nothing here—a couple of girls, in various stages of undress, most smiling. This guy was a perv. He continued, rushing through the folders, his stomach churning, a gut instinct warning him that he was going to find something soon enough.

  And he did.

  Time stopped, and he ceased to blink, to breathe, to function. Pictures of Melissa in various stages of undress turned his mouth dry and his heart plummeted to his feet. She looked scared, and sad—he was careful to focus only on her face, not the rest of her. He could almost taste her fear—feel it, for her. He raced through the images, made all the more uncomfortable because Melissa’s discomfort was so evident in them. With relief he made it to the end. />
  But then he saw a movie file and his breathing slowed right down. He almost knew what this could be. With trepidation, he clicked on it, even though he knew it would only bring bad news. His face dropped, when he saw Melissa. And Matt. She was crying. And she was naked. And he was moving over her with no regard for her pain.

  On the bottom was a date. It was the date he’d seen Melissa the first time at the apartment. He’d accused her of sleeping with Matt, of cheating on him, of leading him on, and all this time she’d listened to his accusations and not told him what had actually taken place. She had only told him what she thought he could handle.

  He forced himself to watch the movie all the way through. Even though it broke his heart to see the girl he was starting to feel something for, crumble before his eyes.

  Noah wiped his hands over his face, his jaw tight, his hands fisted. He was tempted to bring his fist down on the laptop, smashing it to pieces.

  But he could do something better.

  He could wipe it clean.

  He thought about it calmly and knew what he would do. He would create a virus, and he would unleash it on Matt’s unsuspecting computer. A virus that would completely corrupt all of his images and multi-media files. He’d code it such that it would unleash late at night, once Matt had gone to bed, in this way diverting the chances of any suspicion of him or Paul.

  And he would do the same for all the other devices connected to the box. It would take a while to set it all up—but he had time.

  When he’d done that, he would go and see Melissa. He needed to know that she was all right.

  Chapter 43

  “If you want, as part of a normal work related procedure, I can ask HR to look into this. Get his PC looked at, for other possible images. It might be a way to deal with this matter and with him.” This had been Nadine’s suggestion and Melissa had to admit, it seemed to be the best way of dealing with the situation.

  Nadine had left it to Melissa to think about what she wanted to do and how or if she wanted to proceed. What Melissa didn’t want was her shame becoming public knowledge. It had been bad enough that Nadine had seen any of the footage. She would die if anyone else ever saw it.

  Nadine seemed more than eager to help her—not only because she was like a friend almost, though there was, and always would be, that boundary between them with her being so high up. But there was something else. Nadine had said she knew what it felt like to be a victim. Melissa hadn’t thought about it at the time, but now it occurred to her that even someone as high up as Nadine, in a position of power, confident and strong, could still have suffered some sort of harassment in her past.

  The thought both alarmed her, and yet made her see that it could happen to anyone. That she wasn’t weak because she’d allowed it to happen. That she hadn’t really let it happen at all. Matt had made it seem that the choice had been hers. He’d let the guilt eat at her, and paralyze her. He’d made her think she was too dumb to figure it out.

  She’d been a victim. And being a victim was sometimes harder to see when the abuse came from someone who claimed to love you.

  Nadine had gone to her meeting in the afternoon, and Melissa did what Nadine had suggested: taken the rest of the day off. She spent the rest of the afternoon curled up in bed.

  The dim beat of her cell ringing on her table disturbed her thoughts. She ignored it, trying to use this time to think of all that had happened. When the ringing stopped and then started up again, she ignored it a second time. When followed by a beep signifying that a message had been left, curiosity got the better of her.

  Noah. Her insides fluttered.

  Two missed calls.

  It was only four o’clock. He’d still be at work, she guessed. What did he want? She opened his text message:

  Hope ur ok

  R u?

  Disappointment curled over her. She’d thought that he might be arranging to meet her, maybe later, after work. She put her hand on her heart. At least he’d called to see if she was okay. That meant something. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have bothered. He’d called her twice.

  Ruminating about his motivations, she called him back, not even stopping to think it through.

  “Hey. Sorry I missed your call.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m…okay.”

  “Good. That’s good. It’s good that you’re okay.” His voice rang with a touch of uncertainty. As though he wanted to say more, but was deliberately holding back.

  She sat down on her bed, one arm folded across her stomach, as she listened for the hidden words he kept to himself. “You sound a little…I don’t know—different.” She told him.

  The silence boomed between them.

  “Noah?”

  “Melissa, do you want to meet up today?” She heard the tightness in his voice. He was going to tell her that he didn’t want to see her again. She frantically thought back to their earlier conversation. How had she left it? She hadn’t asked for an ultimatum. Or hinted that she wanted more. What, she wondered, had prompted this? He sounded strange.

  “Uh—sure.” It would mean traipsing back towards work again, assuming he wanted to meet her at the coffee shop again. But it would be worth it. To see him again.

  “We could meet at mine—no, we can’t,” he said almost as suddenly.

  “No, we can’t” she agreed.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I thought it might make a change to meet someplace else other than the coffee shop.”

  “You could always come over to mine.”

  A split second pause and then, “Sure.”

  He was coming over. The prospects for the remainder of the day had suddenly improved—until he got her thinking.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, panicked by the idea of what and why he might want to come over.

  “I wanted to see you. To talk. That’s all. What time do you get back? I could meet you somewhere after work.”

  “I’m at home already,” she confessed.

  “Why? What happened?” She noted the concern in his voice.

  “We can talk when you get here,” she said, deciding in that moment, to own up to everything and come clean. She gave him her address and then freshened up. Not because she expected anything to happen between them, but because she looked as if she’d been hit by a trolley.

  Chapter 44

  She had been right. It was so close to downtown—the location was ideal. In fact, making his way from his apartment to hers had taken longer. Noah surveyed the outside of the whitewashed front façade of the condo Melissa lived in with admiration.

  He rang the doorbell and wondered how much this gorgeous little place set them back in monthly rent. His recent move paled in comparison. Living with Matt was going to cause huge problems, and working with Matt—could never happen.

  “Hi!” Melissa greeted him with a smile and tired eyes. “Come on in.” She led him through the wide-open hallway and into the living room. “You found it okay?” she asked him, as she walked.

  “Yeah,” he replied and took a good look all around him as he entered the open plan living area. “Nice place,” he said admiringly. “So close to work and so central.” He put down his backpack and walked over to sit on the sofa next to the one where she had sat.

  “We were lucky with this. Our landlord is always away, and it feels as though it’s just me and Heather here. Most of the time.” He noticed she was wearing casual clothes. A tee and lounge pants. Images lashed in front of him—images of her in one of her most vulnerable and darkest moments. He felt like a voyeur and tried to replace those sordid images with her now.

  Despite her cheery exterior, he knew she was hurting. It killed him that he couldn’t make her feel better without admitting that he knew something she did not want him to know.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, drinking in her features, examining her as if this was the first time he’d ever clapped eyes on her. He assumed she’d been under the weather, her reason
for staying at home today.

  “I could be better.”

  He leaned forward, sitting on the edge of the couch, not feeling totally at ease. The thing he needed to say stuck in his throat like a thorn from a rosebush. “What’s up, Melissa?”

  She hitched her legs up on the couch, curling them to the side and looked at her hands, unwilling to meet his gaze. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said slowly. “I feel I owe you the truth, but there are some things…” She shook her head and paused.

  She seemed more open now, but he wasn’t sure if this was because they were meeting away from the coffee shop and imaginary barriers had lifted—or whether she was all battered and bruised from recent events. He debated about telling her what he’d seen. Perhaps for now it would be better to keep it to himself. She needed time, to get whatever it was that was buried inside her to the fore.

  “I returned the CDs,” he said.

  “Already?” she asked, surprised. “I only gave them to you this morning?”

  “I went home early,” he confessed. “He was looking for them yesterday, the CDs. I didn’t want to risk putting them back this evening while he was around.”

  “Thank you,” she said, quietly.

  “And I had work which I needed to do at home.” It wasn’t technically true, though breaking into Matt’s computer and corrupting his files counted as necessary work in his eyes. He wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the aftershocks of hearing about it when he got home.

  Melissa arched an eyebrow at him. “That’s pretty cool—working from home. I don’t think Nadine would allow it.” Her face lifted as she smiled and the awkwardness lifted a little.

  “How come you’re home?” He was curious to know.

  She looked at him then, as if she were considering a major decision. “I saw him earlier—as I got into work after we met. He caught me in the elevator.”

  Noah felt his body start to sweat. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, for the longest time. He stared at me and then before he left he said ‘I’ll be watching you, Melissa.’”