1
KYLE
“Your nine o’clock is here.”
“Send him in,” I said.
Adrenaline hit like a live wire as I hung up and rose from behind my desk, tugging my jacket closed. Reed Baxter thought he could steal from me and skate by. Today, he’d find out he was wrong.
The latch clicked. I squared up, ready for the six-foot-five slab of muscle in a suit. But when the door opened, my gaze dropped—and my jaw followed.
Not Reed.
A woman stepped through—young and blonde with curves that made her charcoal skirt suit look like it had been tailored by someone with a dangerous sense of humor. The fabric hugged her waist and hips in a way that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with my suddenly malfunctioning brain.
I forced my eyes up. Professional. I needed to stay professional.
Her face didn’t help. Wide blue eyes, lips painted a soft pink, and a bone structure that belonged on a magazine cover, not inmy office at nine a.m. on a Tuesday. Not when I was supposed to be eviscerating her boss.
She extended a hand, and I noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Not that it mattered.
“Mr. Ashbrook? I’m Avery Craig. I’m on the product development team at Ultra Bright Technologies.” Her voice was warm, confident. The smile didn’t waver. “I’m here to discuss your concerns about our ClimaGlow technology.”
I stared at her outstretched hand for half a second too long before taking it. Her grip was firm, no-nonsense. My palm heated where our skin touched, and I dropped her hand like it burned.
“Reed couldn’t make it to the meeting?” The words came out harsher than I intended, but I didn’t take them back.
Her smile sharpened. Just a fraction, but I caught it—the glint of steel beneath the polish.
“Mr. Baxter felt this was best handled at the development level. Since I work on the team that designed the ClimaGlow system, he thought I’d be equipped to address your technical questions.”
I gestured curtly to the chair across from my desk. “Sit.”
She moved with easy confidence, settling into the leather chair and crossing one leg over the other. The hem of her skirt rode up just slightly, and I jerked my gaze to the windows behind her. Snow was falling in thick, silent flakes over Pleasure Valley. The mountains beyond were white-capped, pristine.
I needed to focus.
I rounded the desk and sat, pulling up the file on my monitor. “Let’s cut to the chase, Ms. Craig. You’re using weather-adaptive lighting technology—sensors that adjust brightness, color temperature, and animation speed based on temperature, precipitation, and time of day.”
“That’s correct.” She pulled a tablet from her bag, fingers moving across the screen with ease.
“That technology is patented. By me. Patent number US10492875B205, filed three years ago, granted eighteen months ago.” I turned the monitor so she could see the documentation. “Your system behaves identically to mine during snow and rain events. Same algorithm. Same response patterns. You stole it.”
I waited for her to flinch, to stammer, to pull out some PR-approved non-answer about seeking legal counsel. Instead, she met my eyes dead-on, and I felt the impact low in my gut.
“With respect, Mr. Ashbrook, our system doesn’t violate your patent.” She tapped her tablet, then slid it across the desk. “Your patent covers adaptive lighting based on real-time sensor input from proprietary meteorological hardware—specifically, the WeatherSync 3000 array you developed. The algorithm is optimized for that specific hardware configuration.”
I glanced at her tablet. It showed my patent with key sections highlighted.
“Our ClimaGlow system,” she continued, her voice steady and precise, “uses a completely different approach. We pull data from the National Weather Service API and cross-reference it with localized IoT sensor networks that monitor ambient light levels and precipitation via optical sensors, not meteorological hardware. The algorithm that processes that data was developed in-house over the past eighteen months.”
She paused, and I watched her choose her next words carefully.
“I joined the development team six months ago, fresh out of college, so I’ve been working with ClimaGlow since day one of my employment. It’s also the first holiday season ClimaGlow’s been deployed at scale, so I’m extremely familiar with every line of code, every sensor calibration, every edge case we tested.”
Six months. Fresh out of college. Reed had sent me a rookie to handle intellectual property theft accusations. The insult burned. But the way she’d laid out the technical specs—clean and precise, with no hesitation—that was something else entirely.
I pulled the tablet closer, scrolling through the documentation she’d loaded. The architecture was different—I could see that now. Similar outputs, completely different inputs. A different processing model.
