I might want to keep some distance between Ronan and me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t tease him mercilessly, if only for my own entertainment.
“Since you’re obviously capable of a lot more than data entry, you might as well make yourself useful.”
“You really do have a way with words.” I open up the laptop.
A spreadsheet is already open with hundreds of rows and columns that look to be simple payment logs. But I know that nothing about the Sullivan empire is simple.
Ronan leans back in his seat and folds his arms as he spreads his powerful thighs. His biceps look as if they’re about to burst out of his shirt, and my fingers itch to touch the hard muscles.
I need to get a grip before I do something stupid like climb onto his lap and ride him right here in his father’s office.
“There are patterns among these logs.” He snaps me out of my thoughts. “The amounts and dates repeat every month, but not in the way that the other payments do.”
“Encrypted?” I scroll slowly through the entries.
“Yeah, but that’s the thing. My father never encrypted any other payments, especially not personal transfers or business expenses. But these are locked down so tight that even my tech guy can’t seem to make sense of them.”
I can’t help but smirk. “Maybe you need a new tech guy.”
I lift my gaze to meet Ronan’s.
His dark eyes flick to my lips, and heat floods my cheeks under the intensity of his gaze. He looks at me as if he wants to devour me, and knowing what it feels like to have him do just that creates a dull ache between my thighs.
“It’s definitely suspicious.” I lower my eyes back to the screen as I scan through the document.
Sure enough, I see what Ronan means as I spy a familiar pattern of entries on the first of every month, all of which are unnamed.
“Leave it with me, and I’ll see what I can uncover.”
Ronan grunts before getting to his feet. He picks up his coffee and leaves the office without sparing me another glance, though I’m pretty sure I spy him adjusting himself as he leaves.
I dive straight into the task he left me in the hopes that it will distract me from my growing arousal. I move to sit in the enormous leather chair, sighing at the warmth left behind from Ronan’s body, and set up my laptop beside the main monitor so I can work between the two.
I scan the spreadsheets until my eyes sting, making notes of any similarities and repetitions in the entries, no matter how small. I also cross-reference the amounts and the dates as well as the internal codes attached to each transaction. Some of them lead to dummy corporations, but most of them lead to nowhere which, in itself, is a kind of lead.
Seamus Sullivan was a clever bastard, I’ll give him that. He was smart enough to hide things in plain sight, and from the looks of it, was paranoid enough to cover his tracks.
“What were you hiding?” I mutter as I take another sip of my coffee and double-click on one of the payment logs.
The regularity of the payments is what intrigues me. They’re too quiet and controlled, and from the looks of it, no bribes were made, which for this world is very unusual. So, there must be something else going on…
I start peeling back the data like layers of an onion, cursing under my breath when I find even more hidden payments buried underneath than even Ronan realized.
All of a sudden, there’s a cluster of them, all for fifteen thousand dollars, paid on the same day of each month.
I double-check the timestamps and cross-reference them against the family’s business calendar as well as old press coverage of Seamus's appearances to try and make sense of them, but nothing lines up.
It’s as if Seamus had a whole other life tucked away neatly into the margins, and it’s up to me to find out why.
But no matter what I do, I can’t seem to get past the encryption. I know just enough about this kind of thing to realize I’m in over my head, but I’m also too stubborn to stop now. I told Ronan I could do this, and I’m not about to go crawling back to him and admit I was wrong. So, I buckle down and work until my neck aches from hunching over my laptop and my eyes are so dry from staring at the screen that the numbers all start to blur together.
When Ronan finally checks up on me, I’m halfway through trying a new decoding script, which I’m having just as little luck with.
“Well?” He stalks over to the desk.
I don’t look up from the screen, though my pulse quickens as his footsteps draw closer to me.
“Well, what?”
