“Shit,” he muttered as he broke into a jog. He needed that payday to go and find his sexy surfer—
The arm caught him across the chest as he rounded the corner and hit him hard enough that he went down like a bowling pin. He saw the sky spin over him, and then he hit the pavement with a grunt. When he looked up and blinked away swimming dots of impact, he saw a man in a worryingly nice suit shove a limply unresponsive Harry into the back of a low-slung, smoke-windowed black car.
“Bring him,” a man said. “We don’t want anyone asking questions.”
A swarthy man built like a small wall grabbed Jacob, hauled him to his feet, and jabbed something hard into the small of his back when he struggled.That was not a cock.Jacob sucked in a strangled breath through a bruised chest. Under the circumstances, a cock wouldn’t beideal—but better than the alternative. Fear ran down Jacob’s back and clotted unpleasantly in his stomach.
“We need your mouth, not your legs,” the man holding him growled in his ear. His breath was sour with cheap coffee. “So behave, and you might get out of this alive.”
Chapter Four
THE MEETINGwith the board was heated enough that some words filtered through the wood-and-glass doors. Simon leaned against the wall, arms crossed, and listened.
“Gross misconduct.”
“Serious cause for concern.”
“We trust that this will be resolved without further incident.”
“—revisit the decision to accept DOD funding.”
Dev stalked out of the board meeting in a black mood and yanked the tie loose at his throat as though the thing were trying to strangle him. Most of the employees waiting to buttonhole him about some pressing bit of paperwork took one look at his face and realized there was something else they needed to deal with first. Simon and Nora were the only two who stuck around and followed along a pace behind him.
“What?” Dev pulled his tie off and shoved it into his pocket. The end of it dangled against his coat. He nodded down at Nora’s feet in shiny designer shoes. “And how the hell do you move that fast in those shoes?”
“Practice,” Nora said, answering his second question first. “And pain.”
“You never used to wear them.”
“People expect Syntech’s chief operations officer to wear heels,” she said. “You made me COO. I learned to wear heels. And to deal with the board.”
“I deal with the board.” Dev stalked down the hall to his office, pushed the door open, and absently held it for her.
“No,” Simon said dryly. “You don’t. You yell at the board.”
“It’s my company.” He stripped his jacket off and tossed it over the back of a chair, feeling a bit less constrained once he was free of it. “Something they need to remember. They’ve been getting away with too much.”
It was a low blow. Nora grimaced through it, and Dev didn’t notice as he slouched into his chair and scowled at his computer. Simon winced for him and gave Nora a twist of his lips that tried to be both sympathetic and apologetic.
He hadn’t been here when his sister died. It hadn’t been his choice. He’d been in the desert killing people while the doctors tried to poison his sister just enough to save her life. Maybe he could have gotten a leave of absence, if he’d asked. He hadn’t. So it had been Nora—Becca’s best friend since the day they’d turned up at college and found out they were sharing a room—who took Becca to hospital appointments, let Callie cry on her shoulder, and took over running Dev’s company for him while he was chasing a cure that nobody but him believed in.
It was the sort of thing you knew you should appreciate, but also couldn’t help but resent. Especially when you were Dev Porter, a man who thought asking for help was the same thing as showing belly.
“If they want me to resign…,” Simon started to offer again.
Dev scowled, and his heavy brows beetled over his sharp gray eyes. “You bring that up again, I’ll fucking fire you myself,” he said. “This wasn’t your fault.”
Nora sat down, crossed her legs, and laced her hands around her knee. “He could take some time off, save faceandplacate the board?”
“It won’t save face. The minute he takes an extra-long lunch break, they’ll be muttering about me backstabbing my loyalists.” Dev impatiently swiped his hand through the air. “He can take a holiday when he finds my missing data. Buy me a geographically themed T-shirt.”
There was rarely any point in arguing with Dev when he started to glower. Simon sighed his acceptance. “In that case,” he said, “I want to put Icarus in quarantine—suspend work and contain all the files related to the project on an isolated server.”
Nora unlaced her fingers and leaned forward. “Is that really necessary?” she protested. “Without Icarus our whole research team is hobbled. My autopsy of the systems didn’t show any signs of the thief approaching the sectors housing Icarus.”
Icarus was a bioengineering program that would use nanotechnology, climatology, and oceanography in a synergistic environmental improvement program. Or as Callie had explained it to Simon, her dad was going to save the world by using tiny machines to replace clouds and fix the ozone layer. Eventually. For now it was a money sink that had sired a bunch of unexpectedly profitable corporate projects.
“Without Icarus, whatever they stole won’t replicate the effects they want,” Simon said. “And if… our thief… wasn’t their only operative, we want it safe.”
