“That doesn’t mean I can trust him. He made a laughingstock of me, pretending to work for me.”
“Didn’t he give you actionable intelligence about some of your father’s projects?”
A thoughtful look crossed Portia’s face. “You’re very well informed.”
Taryn smiled. “I am.”
“For a bartender, you’re showing up in the middle of Tremaine business with a concerning frequency.”
Taryn rolled with the subject change. Negotiations were delicate.
She shrugged. “I run a good bar.” Prior to the bombing, Taryn’s policy had been to stay off the corporate radar. Now here she was, voluntarily in the heart of the Tremaine Corporation.
“Right. What would I find if I sent Tremaine Security to check it out?”
Oh, goodie. Threats. “A dozen beers on tap, more by the bottle. A decent selection of booze and wine.” Taryn paused, like she’d had a sudden thought. “And a bunch of regulars who don’t take kindly to threats against their favorite place.”
She looked at Portia and continued. “Walk in the front door like any other customer, you’ll get a drink. Stick your nose where it doesn’t belong? You’ll run into trouble.”
“You really think the people in your bar will give a damn?” Portia sneered.
Last week, Taryn wouldn’t have thought so. But after the confrontation with Giselle’s former pimp and her conversation with Jed, she realized that yes, she could count on her patrons.
“Yeah, they would. They’re my people. Loyal. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Portia flinched like Taryn had struck her. “I reward loyalty,” she ground out. “I would have rewarded Ash if he’d done his damn job.”
“Really?” Taryn asked. “He’d have gotten his freedom? Or would you have continued to hold Hope over his head?”
Dammit. She was probably ruining any chance of negotiating Ash’s freedom, but Portia had pissed her off. “As far as I can tell, he did his job. He found the hacker you were looking for and turned himself in. He also stopped a hack this weekend. Remotely.”
“He let them in,” Portia said through clenched teeth.
Taryn nodded, acknowledging her point. “Yes, he did. But he could have let Caspar all the way in the system. Instead, he got him far enough in for your security measures to capture him.”
Portia sucked in a breath.
“Go ahead, check with your people. I’ll wait.” Taryn trusted that Ash had provided sufficient details to sell this story. He’d willingly let Caspar in, but he’d fought hard to keep him just at surface level and out of the important stuff.
Portia’s fingers flew over her keyboard. A few seconds later her phone rang. “Portia Tremaine.” She nodded. “What caused it?”
Taryn couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but Portia’s side was pissed. Taryn would hate to get on her bad side.
Then again, she was probably already there.
“And who stopped the attack? Why wasn’t I informed?”
Watching her, Taryn understood why Portia had taken over the business when her father disappeared.
She didn’t slam the phone down or make any other kind of move that would indicate that she was angry, but her entire body radiated tension. “My people have confirmed the attempted hack. Both how far they got in and where they were stopped.”
“Did they stop it?” Taryn knew the answer, but she wanted to know how Portia’s team had responded.
“No.”
Taryn didn’t think she was going to say anything else. Then Portia said, “They said there seemed to be another presence—besides the intruder—but they could never get a visual.”
“Are you willing to negotiate now?”
