by J. A. Dennam
“I insist that you open the door, or I’ll be forced to break it down.”
What? Grumbling over the fact this was still a free country, Brooke fumbled with the locks. Everything was out of focus since her glasses were still on the nightstand, but she was afraid to get them lest the cop went commando on her door. Oh, what the hell. It was probably better that she couldn’t get a clear view of his horrified reaction.
The last lock came undone. She opened up about five inches and stuck her face through the crack. “See? I’m still breathing.”
“Yes,” the blob in black said. “I can smell that. Your friends are concerned about you, Ms. Monroe.”
Another blob moved behind him. Brooke blinked and squinted.
“Honey, it’s me,” came a familiar voice.
“Miranda?”
“I’m sorry to do this, but if only you’d answer your phone or your door once in a while….”
Brooke forced out a half smile for her blurry visitors. “Consider it answered. I’m going back to bed now.”
“Wait a minute!” Miranda shoved her foot in the crack. “I went to a lot of trouble to check on you.”
“You probably got this guy’s phone number,” Brooke replied with a deadpan stare.
“That’s beside the point. You look and smell like something that fell out of a garbage truck. This is unhealthy behavior, Brooke.”
She peered over Miranda’s shoulder at the officer looming in the background. “Is it against the law to look and smell like a garbage truck?”
“Unless the neighbors start complaining about a strange odor, I’d say no,” he said.
Funny. Before she could argue further, Miranda muscled her way in and spun around with a smile. “Thank you, Officer Warren.”
His voice lowered to a seductive pitch. “Now, I told you to call me Shawn.”
“Mmmm, I’ll be calling alright.”
Brooke rolled her eyes and shuffled back toward the bedroom as the locks clicked into place behind her. “Nice tactic, Miranda. You could have just asked me if I was okay.”
The woman spun around again and kicked her way through the pile of belongings still littering the floor from last Friday. “How? You wouldn’t answer my calls!”
Brooke yawned. “You called?”
“Everyone’s called. Me, Amy, Roger, your parents….”
“Which is why I ignored it,” she declared hotly.
Miranda followed her into her bedroom with the persistence of a bulldog. “I get that you’re depressed, but you aren’t allowed to blow off the people who care about you the most.”
It was more like people she thought cared about her the most. “I’m going back to bed.” Brooke paused at the entrance to her bedroom. “If you insist on staying, the TV remote is in the couch somewhere and the garbage disposal is clogged.”
“Good to know,” Miranda said with a dry smile and then promptly took her by the shoulders and steered her in the direction of the bathroom. “You are not going back to bed. You’re getting in the shower where you will wash that disgusting hair and then you will brush those awful teeth. In the meantime, I’m stripping your bed sheets since I have a feeling those are the cause of my watery eyes.”
“You don’t have to take care of me,” Brooke grumbled, “I’m fine.”
Once in the bathroom, her pajama pants were yanked down to her ankles. Brooke yelped and covered her butt. “Jeez!”
“My God, these are one step away from compost.” Miranda spun her around and, with a curled lip of disgust, yanked the purple-stained top up and over her head. “Grape popsicles do not constitute a meal. You are skin and bones, and the bags under your eyes are hideous.”
“I can undress myself!” But Brooke was already naked and getting shoved into the shower stall. Miranda reached in and turned the knob. Frigid water blasted down from above. A choked scream echoed throughout the townhouse and probably across the Gulf of Mexico.
The shower door slammed shut. A towel and washcloth were flung over the panel of distorted glass. “If you even think of shutting this water off in under twenty minutes,” Miranda yelled over the noise, “I will personally drag you out to the back yard and hose you down. Got it?”
“It doesn’t take me twenty minutes—”
“Then soak! Stand under the stream and cry your eyes out like they do in the movies; just get over this damned funk already!”
And Brooke spent not twenty but thirty minutes following her friend’s orders. Hot steam rolled upward and along the ceiling. As she washed and thought about her troubles, the tears started to flow. Then they came down in torrents. Now unemployed and no longer caring if the hack was caught, she considered the possibility of joining her parents in Texas. The thought of being pampered and babied for a few months wasn’t such a bad one, though she was so damned mad at her father.
How could every single man in her life turn on her like that? Even Sid had lost his shine, since Brooke expected no less heartache from him. It was a given. The rebellious thought of becoming a lesbian briefly entered her mind. Girls were pretty, kind, and compassionate and weren’t prone to bouts of chauvinistic cruelty.
But then she’d eventually be expected to sleep with one, which held absolutely no appeal for her whatsoever.
By the time she left the shower, Brooke’s skin was pink and raw. Her eyes were the same, and her wet hair needed something industrial-strength to get the tangles out. Since all she had was a simple brush, she sat down at her vanity and spent another twenty minutes working at her hair until it was restored to its original, glossy shine. The humidity in there was stifling, and Brooke knew the moisture dripping from her body was as much sweat as it was water. But she wasn’t ready to leave the confines of her bathroom. Miranda would force her to do some other healthy task like eating.
Actually, the thought wasn’t as unappealing as before. Still wrapped in a towel, she got up and opened the bathroom door. Her stomach grumbled as the smell of butter and seared vegetables reached her nose.
Please, Lord, let that be an omelet.
“Get out here and eat some protein!” Miranda called from the kitchen. “Don’t bother fighting it. I can almost hear you salivating in there.”
Brooke emerged in a set of clean pajamas. “Nothing you say or do will get me in a pair of shoes today, so don’t even try.”
She ate her omelet alone at the kitchen’s island with her laptop and coffee while Miranda cleaned her house from top to bottom. The washing machine was churning, the dishwasher was humming, and the surfaces had been cleared of the cumulative debris that was a mockery of Brooke’s life. It was only 9:30 A.M., almost a respectable breakfast hour. She checked her emails with halfhearted interest. The first to be deleted were the handful from Roger with headings like “Call me” and “R U okay?” That and the fact that there was still no word from Ethan made her want to vomit the first real meal she’d eaten in days.
For the second time that morning, the doorbell rang. Brooke picked at her food and ignored it. It rang again. The stairs echoed with footsteps. “You and your closed-door policy are over,” Miranda said.
Brooke frowned as she looked up. She was pretty sure that Roger had come by at least twice before to check on her. “Don’t answer it! I don’t care who—”
But the door was opened anyway. Voices soon came from the entryway, one of them painfully familiar.
23
IT WAS HIM. NOT THE TRAITOR WHO STOLE HER future, but the corner office bandit who stole her heart. If Ethan had decided not to use her program, what had possessed him to come over? Certainly not for a random booty call with the woman who’d left a bad taste in his mouth.
As she thought about it, Miranda came around the corner with Ethan in tow. “Look who it is, Brooke? Now aren’t you glad I got here first?”
Brooke dropped her fork to her plate, swallowed, and tried not to notice how much she’d missed him. In his crisp suit and tie, Ethan was a picture of success, health, and abundant good
looks. Even in a T-shirt and jeans, he exuded the self-confidence of a born leader.
Though she wanted to look away, his blue-gray eyes held her captive. His wavy hair begged to be touched. His mouth looked charming enough to eat. But his glare told her that he hadn’t come for pleasure. With a jerk of his head, he indicated the need for a private word.
As she slowly rose from the table, she crossed her arms over her chest, painfully aware that she had no bra on beneath the thin pajama top. The state of her nipples may as well have been an advertisement of her desire for him.
“Miranda, do you mind?”
The woman looked back and forth between them for a moment and then barely suppressed a knowing smile. “I think I’ll go tackle those sheets now.”
The insinuation that they would have any use for the bed made Brooke’s cheeks burn. Ethan, however, didn’t waste a minute. Before Miranda was even fully out of sight, he grabbed her by the wrist and marched her up the stairs.
She quietly went along, her apprehension building as they entered the studio. Finally she asked, “What’s this about, Ethan?”
He reached into his breast pocket and took out a piece of paper. “This.” He handed it to her.
When she unfolded it, she saw a printed screenshot of a computer desktop. In the middle was a pop-up warning highlighting a discovery of suspicious activity. As soon as she realized what she held, it was as if the heavens opened up and rained joy down on her.
“It came up this morning,” he said. “I know you wanted me to email it to you, but I wanted to be here when you traced it.”
She looked at him in surprise. “I was sure you’d decided not to use it.”
“I almost didn’t.”
But she could swear that his eyes said something different. They were dark as if a storm was brewing behind them. He was experiencing the same turmoil as she, but he was determined not to show it.
A bubble of insane laughter welled up at the thought that Ethan Wolf, no longer hampered by rules against office romance, would not touch her. Brooke turned away from him and focused on the task at hand: busting the hack.
Putting on her game face, she sat down at her desk and brought up her computer’s home screen. She felt Ethan hovering. Excitement over finally getting the proof she needed to bring Monroe’s hack to justice quickened her breath. She looked down at the highlighted area on the warning message Ethan had given her and began typing in the series of numbers. Halfway through it, her fingers paused in mid-air.
“What’s wrong?” Ethan asked.
Brooke’s heart was flip-flopping inside her chest. “When did you say this came up?” she asked.
“Look at the time.” He pointed to the bottom right of the screen-shot. “Eight forty-five this morning. Shannon whispered in my ear, I took the screenshot, printed it out, and came right over.”
But it couldn’t be! “This doesn’t make sense,” Brooke cried in a state of panic.
“What doesn’t make sense?” He knelt down to get a better look at the screen.
She turned to him with wide eyes. “This internal IP address doesn’t belong to a computer inside Monroe Graphics. It belongs to mine.” As she said it, her hands jerked away from the keyboard as if it was hot.
“But you haven’t finished entering it in yet.”
“I know it’s mine, Ethan. What I don’t get is how this could happen when I wasn’t even up here at 8:45, I was downstairs taking a shower.”
With an increasing sense of dread, Brooke finished her thoughts in silence. She wasn’t up here…but Miranda could have been. Was it just coincidence that this warning waited to pop up the first time she’d let anyone walk through her front door?
Her computer system, with its rootkit programs to keep it stealthy, had been left on—an open invitation for any spy.
“Hey,” Ethan touched her shoulder. “Talk to me. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
When his voice brought her back to reality, Brooke found it suddenly hard to breathe. A friend had betrayed her, alright, but it wasn’t Roger. “It was Miranda,” she said out loud.
Sensing a presence behind her, Brooke turned around to find the woman of her thoughts in the doorway. Ethan rose up to his full height. They both watched as Miranda’s chest rose and fell in dramatic breaths. “What are you two talking about?” she asked, her voice higher than usual.
Brooke got up from her chair. The stink of guilt was growing stronger with each step she took toward the woman. Unable to hold back, she slapped Miranda hard across her beautiful cheek. “How long have you been selling me out? “ she ground out.”Coming here under the pretense of being my friend?”
Miranda’s hair fell aside to reveal a face haggard with anxiety. “Brooke…what are you talking about—”
“Don’t even think of lying to me! I can see it in your eyes!”
Very slowly, Miranda’s face changed. Though still visibly shaken, she gathered her emotions behind a mask of hope. “I did it for you, Brooke. Everyone had just lost their jobs, and we all wanted to see you get that VP position.” Her attention turned toward Ethan. “You can’t blame me for helping a friend.”
“But you weren’t helping me,” Brooke spat out through her misery. “You were helping yourself. And don’t use my competition with Ethan as an excuse; this goes way back before Ken Stevens even entered the picture.”
“That’s not true!”
“What do you mean by that?” Ethan asked.
“The day Ken fired me,” Brooke explained without taking her eyes off Miranda, “I called my father to tell him what had happened. He told me the reason the business had failed was because we’d been slowly losing our biggest accounts to a more competitive market. When he looked into it, he and Roger had come up with a pattern of high-end bids that had been beaten out by mere dollars and cents. The evidence pointed to a leak. I thought it was awfully strange that the leak had survived the takeover.”
Ethan stepped into her peripheral vision. “So, naturally, you suspected Roger.”
“Is that what you counted on, Miranda?” Brooke added, her eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. “To throw me and Roger under the bus in case someone caught on to what you were doing?”
The woman backed up a step, shaking her head in emphatic denial. “No, I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Of course, it was easy for you to steal from us when you worked there. It wasn’t until your access was cut off that you helped yourself to my computer system, my home, my friendship, all in order to accomplish the same thing. My father trusted you,” Brooke ranted in all-out rage. “But you took advantage of that kindness. You used it against him, and against me!”
“Oh, stop it!” The hurt was gone from Miranda’s face, replaced by a look of righteous indignation. “So I sold some information. Don’t blame me for taking advantage of an opportunity. This is fucking Florida, Brooke. The cost of living here bleeds the average working person dry, not that you would know anything about that. You have the luxury of hibernating in a fancy townhouse that your parents bought for you. Tell me one time you’ve ever had to scrape for a penny.”
Angry disbelief clouded Brooke’s vision. “You lost almost thirty hard-working people their jobs all to earn an extra buck for yourself,” she spat out. “Tell them your sob story.”
Miranda tightened her lips as she fought some internal battle, but she must have realized there was no point in arguing. With a sad slant to her mouth, she turned toward the stairs and paused to say, “Despite what you think, I’ve always valued our friendship, Brooke. I hope you can forgive me someday.”
When Brooke remained rooted to the spot, Ethan passed by her and followed Miranda downstairs. Words were exchanged, and the front door opened and closed.
Brooke hugged her arms and turned away before Ethan reappeared. She didn’t want to see him, especially now.
“How are you holding up?” he asked her.
Having taken yet another monumental hit, she feared that she
could very well be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Not so good,” she whispered. “I’d like you to leave, please.”
Instead of doing what she asked, he came closer until she felt the warmth of his body against her back. “It isn’t your fault, you know,” he said.
A choked sob escaped from her throat. It absolutely was her fault. She’d left her computer running and unsupervised while another person had been in her house. Furthermore, she’d accused Roger. He had been the most logical culprit. Oh, how wrong she’d been, and the guilt she felt for essentially betraying him was nearly too much to bear.
“Brooke…,” Ethan struggled for words. “You’re allowed to trust your friends.”
But she didn’t want a pep talk right now. The heavy weight in her chest simply wouldn’t allow it. She turned to him with as much poise as she could muster. “Thank you for bringing this to me. You should get back to work now.”
Ethan’s eyes filled with doubt. “I don’t think you should be alone right now.”
Her frazzled nerves instantly revolted against the patronizing tone in his voice. “It’s my house. I get to do what I want, and once again you’re standing in my way.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Is that how you see it?”
“I don’t want to fight,” she retorted in panic. “I just want you to leave.”
“I’m not leaving.”
How dare he bring that lord-and-master bullshit into her home! “Why not, Ethan? You don’t want to miss yet another opportunity to throw my naïveté in my face?”
He released a frustrated breath. “I was wrong to do that. Right now, I just want to help you.”
“Ha!” she scoffed. “How original. Tell you what, I may or may not email you in a week and let you know if I’ve decided to accept it or not.”
“Brooke—”
“Just get out!” She felt a flood of tears coming and needed him to be gone before it started. When he reached for her instead, she pushed hard against his chest, but he caught her in his arms as she made a dash for the door. They fell down on their knees together, and he held her tightly against him as she completely broke apart.
