“Almost home. It was such a lovely evening. Thanks for convincing me to go.”
“I’m glad you had a good time... Did you dance with anyone twice?” he asked in amusement.
“No, but it was wonderful. I’ve never been the belle of a ball until tonight. It’s a heady feeling.”
“I think you’ll find you’ll be quite sought after at any of these events you attend. You’re the Devlin heiress. That makes you a target.”
“A target?” she asked hesitantly as the glitter went from the evening.
“For men who want to get their hands on the Devlin fortune,” Jase informed her in a blunt tone.
“God. I should have thought of that. It didn’t even enter my mind. That changes my perception of the whole evening.”
Jase reached over and took her hand. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Somehow, I don’t think I will,” she told him sadly as he let go of her hand.
The headlights shone on the opening gate. Jase drove straight through. “Are you sleepy?”
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“Not particularly.” “Want to take a swim?” “No, I think I’ll spend some time at the computer. There are a couple of things I need to look into.” “And people call me a workaholic,” he teased. “People are right. I watched you. You planted seeds for at least three deals tonight, and you have just
about convinced Richard Olsen to come to work for Devlin in the acquisitions department.”
“People tend to be more relaxed in these situations. A lot of initial discussions are done at parties. That’s the reason I go to so many of them. It never hurts to be thought very successful. People tend to seek you out.”
He parked the car in front of the garage. She opened her door and slid out of the Mercedes Coupe. “Thank you for driving me home.” “There was no sense in all of us taking our cars,” he said as he leaned on the roof of his Mercedes. “Don’t say anything to Dad yet about the offer from Westfield, or about my thinking of going back to
school. I need to make up my mind what I want to do.” Jase nodded as he walked around the car to stand beside her. “Let me know. I want to help however I
can.” “Thank you.” Jase touched her face tenderly. She closed her eyes for a moment, savoring his touch. Then she stepped
back from him. “Don’t tempt me, Jase. It just isn’t fair,” she told him, her voice hoarse. He smiled at her. “Who said life was fair?” he said as he came closer. She placed her left palm on his chest. “No one.” Jase placed his hand over hers. He smiled at her. “Are you sure you want to go inside and work?” “As opposed to?” “Going back to my apartment in town and making love for the rest of the night, possibly for the rest of
the week,” he told her. “You know how much I want you. I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that you feel the
same way towards me. Am I?” She was quiet for a moment. Deciding she couldn’t lie to him, she said, “No. You aren’t wrong.” “Then come on. Let’s go, sweetheart.” “It’s not that easy for me, Jase,” she said painfully. “It’s just not that easy for me.” “I don’t understand.” “Believe me, I know that. Have a good swim, Jase,” she said before she turned angrily away and began
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to walk towards the house. Jase caught up with her. He grabbed her arm firmly, but not so it caused pain. “Don’t walk away from
me. We still need to talk.” The next thing he knew, he was on the ground looking up at her. “I won’t be manhandled by you, or anyone else, Jason Alexander Wilton!” she announced, just before
she walked away from him. “I’ve told you that before.”
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Chapter Fifteen
Jase walked into Harry’s home office about an hour after they had arrived home from the party. He had changed into well-worn jeans and a casual shirt and his feet were bare. But his hair was still damp from his swim.
Mary Kate, having changed into jeans, a t-shirt, and running shoes, was sitting at the desk. Staring at the report displayed on the monitor before her, she tried to absorb the implications of what she had found. She had been doing a mini audit of the accounting trails when she spotted the transaction that had led her to search the databases for other similar transactions.
There was little doubt about it. Someone was cooking the books. It was subtle, but this wasn’t the only entry she had discovered. She had found that a hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been diverted electronically into someone’s pockets via a series of electronic transfer orders from one of the Devlin bank accounts to another account at the same bank, during the last month alone. And she wasn’t through looking yet. It was smooth. Too smooth. Only someone with either inside knowledge at Devlin, or a good knowledge of both computers and accounting could pull this off. Both would be much better.
The accounts balanced. So this was not something that would have been obvious, unless someone just happened to be looking closely at it. A detailed audit might catch it, but then again, it might not. These transactions looked legitimate on the surface. Whoever was doing this knew what they were doing. There was no way to trace the transactions, except maybe through the bank, but she couldn’t believe whoever had done this would have been stupid enough to have left a viable paper trail. The calls had come from outside the building on a dial-up line. The phone number where the calls had originated had been erased from the phone logs.
“Mary Kate, we need to talk about us, about where we’re going,” he told her in a firm but gentle tone. “And about what we both want.”
She looked up from the computer monitor. “Yes, we do. But that will have to wait. You’ve got to see this, Jase,” she answered. “We’ve got trouble. Big trouble.”
Jase looked at the screen for a long moment. From the set of his jaw and the anger in his eyes, she knew he understood exactly what he was looking at.
“Harry’s gone to bed. We’ll have to tell him about this tomorrow. Just how bad do you think it is?” he asked.
“I don’t know. This could be it, or this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Everything has to be gone through very carefully and double checked. I don’t even want to think about how much work that’s going to
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be.” “I wish Thea wasn’t leaving in the morning on her client service trip,” Jase said . “We could use her here for this.”
“She’s just finished the quarterly review. Some of these transactions were part of that. She didn’t find them then. I doubt she’d be any help now,” Mary Kate replied. “I’m going back to the office. It’s a bit like locking the barn after the horses have been stolen, but I’m going to disable the remote facility, except for this terminal.”
“I’ll come with you.” “You don’t have to.” “Yes. I do.” “Fine. I’d appreciate the company. I’m taking my car.” Jase nodded. “I’ll ride along.”
It was all Jase could do not to clinch his fists as she drove, hurled would be a more appropriate term, the little Jag down the road. Her motions were sure and fully in control. It’s just that she drove as though she were a soul escaping from perdition. She looked over at him, briefly as she drove.
“You have a problem?” “Nothing that arriving alive and in one piece won’t solve,” Jase told her with feeling. She laughed. “This is one reason why I bought the VW. If I have the horsepower, I use it. I might not
be nineteen anymore Jase, but I still like powerful cars. And I’m still more than a little reckless.” Jase looked at her animated face in the dim lights of the car. He smiled at her. “Only in some ways.” “There are some areas in which it is too dangerous to be reckless.” “I see,” Jase replied with satisfaction in his voice. “So there are some areas in which you refuse to take
risks?” She glanced at him, then returned her eyes to the road. “Let’s not talk around the subject, Jase. What
are you getting at?” “Twice, you’ve let me know you don’t like me touching you.” “I wouldn’t say that,” she replied. Jase touched her arm.
“Then what were you saying when you forced my face into your door, and
dumped me on the ground?” Jase watched as her face flamed. “I think if you want to arrive in one piece, we had better delay this conversation,” she replied, her voice
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tight.
The night guard looked up from his college textbook as Jase and Mary Kate walked in. “Evening, Roger,” Jase greeted him. “Mr. Wilton, Miss Devlin,” the young man replied. “You’re here late. Or rather, early. Something
wrong?” Mary Kate smiled at Roger. “Nothing for you to worry about. Mr. Wilton and I will be going into the
computer center, just in case I trip one of your alarms.” Roger smiled at her. “You have your card keys?” “Absolutely.” “Then there should be no problem,” Roger told her.
Jase stood and watched her work. He didn’t say a word, he just watched her. She looked up at him from the monitor. “What’s on your mind, Jase? Beside the obvious, I mean.” “I suppose that would depend on what you call the obvious, now wouldn’t it? What is obvious to me,
right now, is that you are exhausted and need to get some rest,” he told her gently. “Instead, you climb into
your car and drive like the devil into work to lock the thief out of the system.” “It needed to be done,” she told him. “Protecting the company from further losses is important.” “It could have been done later this morning. You didn’t need to come down here at oh dark thirty.” “I could use a cup of coffee, Jase. Could you?” “Definitely,” he agreed. “Come on, Jase. I’m sure it’s not the first all nighter you’ve ever pulled,” she told him. “No. But I usually have a lot more fun than the last couple of hours have proven,” he replied in a
wicked tone. She blushed boldly and returned her attention to the monitor before her. “Just go get some coffee, Jase,
please.” It was only a matter of minutes when Jase returned with two foam cups of steaming black coffee. Mary Kate pushed her chair back from the console. She took the coffee from him and sipped it.
“Hmm...I need this.” Jase nodded. He looked at the clock on the wall. “How much longer are you going to work?” “As long as it takes,” she told him. “I’ve just programmed a search on the data for this year which is
looking for all electronic transfer activities originated on a dial-up line in which the originating number was
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suppressed or incomplete and cross referencing them to the project on which they were related. I should have
the reports in a while. Then I’ll want to manually cross reference those to paper records on each project.”
“That’s a lot of work,” Jase told her.
“I know. But it’s been too easy to get access to the computer network. The next time that someone tries to get inside from a modem, they’ll be surprised.”
“You think it goes back a while?”
“I don’t know how far it goes back. But I’m going to find out,” she said. “If anything shows up in January or February, I’ll run the previous year. I think I’ll run the previous year, anyway. I’ll take it back as far as necessary. We’ve got to know how bad this really is.”
Jase sighed. “Harry isn’t going to like this.”
“I don’t like it either,” Mary Kate replied. “But it has to be done.”
“And you’ve never shied away from doing that which needed to be done, have you?”
She finished her coffee and threw away the cup. “‘Never’ is a hard word to use, Jase...” She yawned. “Look, there’s no sense in both of us losing sleep over this. Why don’t you go home? Bring me back a business suit for tomorrow. Missy will know what to bring. This is going to take the rest of the night.”
“I’m not leaving you here all alone, Mary Kate. Missy can bring both of us clothes in the morning,” Jase told her. “You haven’t disabled the local area network, have you?”
“Not the workstations in the building, no. Those are still fully usable.”
“Then I’m going to my office and do some looking as well. Maybe, I’ll find something that you’ve missed.”
Mary Kate nodded. “Two heads are better than one on this.”
“I don’t understand why Thea didn’t catch this,” Jase remarked.
Mary Kate shrugged. “I don’t know how detailed a review she does. On the surface, everything looks fine. It’s only when I looked at the audit trails and noticed that the telephone number on all these transactions had been suppressed or was incomplete, that I got suspicious and began looking harder. It’s not something most people would have looked at.”
“So why did you?”
“The business is still new to me. I’m trying to learn. I was curious about the area from which calls were being placed into the network. I was thinking of putting in a different handling routine for calls that came from outside of the local calling area to expedite the handling and cut down on the phone charges. But I needed to have a feel for just how many toll calls were coming in, before I could know if it was worth the effort to implement, so I searched the files. When I saw the suppressed numbers and realized the only records I was
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seeing with suppressed numbers contained electronic funds transfer orders, a red flag went up in my mind.”
Jase nodded. “You know, we both could have had a more pleasant evening if you had taken me up on my earlier offer.”
She glared at him. “You still don’t know me, do you, Jase?” she asked with a certain amount of bitterness in her voice, then added in a sad tone, “You still don’t know me, at all.”
“I want to.”
She laughed. “I think we both know what you want, Jase. And the knowledge level is biblical. Period. I’ve seen you with Alice. She’s the one everyone expects you to marry. You’re just playing with me, Jase. It isn’t fair to me and it certainly isn’t fair to her.”
“Is that what you really think?”
“When have you gone out of your way to just sit and talk with me? Aside from when you went through my things and tried to bribe me to leave?”
“I thought we had a very good conversation tonight on the way back from Alice’s,” Jase stated calmly. “And we talked quite nicely at the golf course.”
“Because we were trapped in a car or a golf cart.”
He cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea of how hard I had to twist my sister’s arm to get her to set that up? Missy’s so protective of you.”
Mary Kate looked at him questioningly.
“You’re so damned skittish that the only times we really talk are when we’re thrown together and you can’t, with good grace, walk away from me. I had to twist Harry’s arm to get him to let me partner with you on the golf date with Norman Richter. Harry wanted to play with you. I’m at the end of my rope, woman. What do I have to do to get you to spend time with me?”
She looked up at him. Reading only truth on his face, she smiled. “Oh...Well, you could try asking.”
He laughed nervously as he ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I suppose I could at that.”
“Jase, let’s not rush things, okay? We’ll have lunch today and talk.”
“If either one of us is still awake.”
“Like I said before, I doubt this is the first time you’ve pulled an all nighter.”
Jase laughed, then became very serious. “Do you have any idea how it tore my gut to see Steve touch you, hold you, and to see you so at ease with him? He’s my best friend. But the way he was holding you on the dance floor at the club made me want to punch his face in.”
“You know there’s nothing between Steve and me.”
“Yeah. Nothing. Except that you love him enough to set him free for the sake of his career. Yeah,
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that’s nothing.”
“Steve’s a good man. I didn’t ask for the proposal. I didn’t encourage it. And I didn’t accept it,” she responded sharply as she stood and crossed over to stand just in front of
him. “So, don’t you go telling me how I feel about people,” she added as she poked the front of his shirt with her index finger. “You haven’t a clue.”
He caught her hand and pulled her into his arms. His mouth covered hers. He wanted to be gentle with her. He wanted to be tender. But the fierceness of his need for her made that impossible. In the portion of his mind that still functioned, he noted that her response was equal to his.
She wasn’t sure who was kissing whom. All she knew was that she was glad he was holding her. She didn’t think her legs would support her.
His mouth moved its ministrations from her mouth to her ear and then to her neck. She heard a soft, keening, cry, and realized it had come from her.
The evidence of his desire for her was clear and undeniable as he held her.
“Jase,” she moaned his name. “Oh, Jase...”
“Oh, Mary Kate...” he whispered. “We have perfect timing, don’t we?”
“Just superb.”
“No. This isn’t how I want to be with you,” he agreed. “We need candlelight, roses, a bridal suite with satin sheets, Mozart, and all the time in the world.”
“We’ll talk about that, Jase. We’ll talk about it.”
He kissed her again, hard. “Get to work, woman. We’ll talk privately at lunch. I know this little place, quiet, and good food. You’ll love it.”
“So,” Harry stated, the next morning, in the executive meeting in his office, “someone is stealing from me.”
Harry, Mary Kate, Missy, and Jase were all in the room.
“It looks that way, Dad,” Mary Kate said.
Harry sighed and grimaced. “I want a stop put to this.”
“The first thing I’ve done is to disable the dial-up facility. The only access to the computer should be from the terminals on-line within the building. The website is unaffected,” Mary Kate said firmly. “The workstation in your office at home is still active. And I’ve tightened up the security on it. The people in the field can just e-mail their reports in.”
“It’s time enough to exercise some damage control,” Jase replied firmly after he hung up the telephone. “The account that the latest money was transferred into is a business account in the name of Edward Douglas
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