Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Georgia has been dancing around the kitchen for the last two hours, baking what I believe to be sugar cookies, wearing one of my shirts, knee-high socks, and nothing else, all the while listening to Christmas music. The next song comes on, and Alice gives a bark.
“I know,” Georgia exclaims, doing a little shimmy to the upbeat, croony voice of whoever is singing. “This is one of my favorites too.”
I groan as I lift my gaze away from my laptop.
I’ve been sitting at the breakfast bar watching her while needing to get work done.
I could go to my office. I could lock myself away.
But the view is just too damn good for me to even attempt to put one foot in front of the other.
Over in the great room, I have the television on mute as I casually watch the football games.
Asher is playing in the four o’clock game, and he already texted me this morning to tell me that he’ll miss me at the game.
During football season, I do try to go to as many of his home games as I can, but between Georgia and the snow, that didn’t happen this week.
Still… “Georgia, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”
She throws me a menacing glare. “Uh, next week is, and it’s a blizzard outside,” she states in such a way that suggests this is standard blizzard protocol.
“So? It’s Maine. A blizzard isn’t exactly uncommon up here. We get them through April.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “April?!”
I shrug. “Sometimes, yeah.”
She shakes her head. “How am I going to deal with that?”
That gives me a moment of pause. Because while I chose Maine for several reasons, she didn’t. She is a self-admitted city girl. “Would you rather move back to Boston?”
She freezes and does a swivel in her socks to fully face me. “But you live here.”
I nod, watching her carefully.
She tilts her head. “I can’t tell if you’re asking if I want to move back to Boston without you or if you’re offering to move with me back to Boston. Sometimes your short answers, silent demeanor, and stoic expressions make it difficult to glean your full meaning.”
My lips twitch. “You’re not living anywhere I’m not.”
“Okayyy.” She drags out the Y sound. “So, you’re offering to move there?”
I shrug and she rolls her eyes.
“No wonder you’ve been single since me. If you weren’t a totally hot nerd and didn’t know how to fuck like a porn star, women would never bother with you.”
I bark out a laugh.
“Women talk too much.”
“It’s so true. We do. But in answer to your question, I don’t know.”
“Women do that too. Give vague responses.”
“Agreed.”
The timer goes off on the oven, and Georgia immediately springs into action, throwing on her oven mitts and pulling out the third tray of sugar cookies.
How or when we’ll ever eat all of these, I have no idea.
She removes them from the tray, and places them with care onto the cooling rack so she can frost them later like she did the first two batches.
Once that’s done, she turns back to me. “Do I have to decide now?”
“No,” I tell her. “Of course not. I just didn’t want you to think we had to stay here indefinitely if it’s not where your heart is. We can stay or go or do both, however or whenever you like.”
She gives me a flirty smile. “You’re going to make me wet again with talk like that.”
“You’re not warning me against anything I don’t always want.”
“My vagina needs a minute to recuperate after the workout you gave her this morning.” Yeah, I might have pounded her a little rough while I had her blindfolded and tied to the bed.
“Don’t worry, your pretty pussy is safe for a little while longer. I’m getting work done.”
She laughs, seeing through me, and goes back to icing the already-cooled cookies. “Speaking of Thanksgiving, are we doing it here or going to Boston? My mom has already informed me she’s going on a solo cruise, which I think is fantastic.”
“Boston,” I tell her, watching as Alfie tries to pull some shit with the bogus financials I gave him access to.
“Probably Zax’s, though it might be Asher’s since he’s not playing on Thanksgiving.
Fallon was saying she might be on call, so she didn’t want to do it at her and Grey’s warehouse.
” Which is where we had it last year, though Fallon wasn’t back in the picture yet.
“When do you want to tell Grey and Zax?”
“I was thinking somewhere between the turkey and pumpkin pie, but only after they’ve had the vat of expensive bourbon I plan to bring them,” I answer distractedly as I hit the command then wait, watching carefully to see if Alfie notices that I just disabled his antivirus.
The thing with hackers is that you can’t just penetrate their systems the way you would a standard person.
We have alarms and are constantly checking for things like that.
Paranoia over getting doxxed is real, not to mention hackers love to go up against other hackers.
I feel Georgia move in beside me, and I lean back in my chair so she can climb on my lap. “What is all that?”
I wrap my arms around her, still waiting, still watching, a silent mouse hiding in the wall, not yet ready to sneak out and go searching around for crumbs.
“That is Alfie.” I point over to the window on the right of my computer. “He’s trying to fuck with my banking.”
Georgia gasps, and I kiss her neck reassuringly.
“It’s not my real banking. I set up a completely fake computer and phone system that he believes is my real one that he’s gained access to.
He’s been weeding through work emails and banking and other nonsense but keeps getting locked out of doing much with it, which I can tell is frustrating hm by the frequency that he returns.
And this”—I point to the other window—“is Alfie’s computer.
I’ve had access to it since he ‘hacked me.’” I put air quotes around that since he only hacked what I allowed him to.
“But I just enacted my first command since setting up a rootkit on his computer last week. I was letting him grow comfortable in my system, but now I’m done letting him feel comfortable. ”
“Rootkit?”
“It basically means I have the highest privilege in his system. I can do anything I want with it.”
“Will he know it’s you?”
“No.” I trail kisses up and down her neck.
“He thinks I’m as dumb as a sack of bricks, and everything I’ve shown him has increased that belief.
He’s gotten an eyeful of my bogus searches.
Everything from workouts to protein shakes to sports podcasts to tattoo groups and forums. I even threw in some basic porn. ”
She laughs. “Really? Porn?”
“Georgia, I think it’s something like over ninety percent of males, regardless of their sexual preference or desires, search for some form of porn at least once a month.”
“I believe it.” She leans back against me, and I take a deep inhale of her. She smells even more like cookies than she normally does, and I can’t help my body as it stirs against her.
“What will you do now that you’re in his world?”
“Depends on what I find. I turned off his anti-virus, and I will do something with that, but I’d like to look around first. Discover his true demons.
Alfie doesn’t strike me as the sort to give up, but he also has a very public image and job he wants to protect.
He’s the CEO, making plenty of money, and truthfully, he wasn’t going to get access to your shares or money.
His sniveling, rodent of a son was ,and now that Ezra has been arrested and some of his skeletons have been brought to the light of day, Alfie needs to save face and not do anything stupid. ”
“Like stalk and threaten the chairwoman of the board.”
“Like that.”
“You mentioned the other day that they’re no longer trying to have the validity of our marriage called into question, right?”
“No. Their attorney told them they have no case.”
“Do you think this is all behind us? I mean, do you think they’ll officially let it all go?”
“I don’t know, Georgie. I’d love to tell you yes, but in my experience, men like them don’t like to lose at any cost. But where their egos and pride lead their charge, it’s ultimately their biggest weakness and what we can use to our advantage.”
I get an elbow jab for calling her Georgie, which makes me chuckle, and then I nip at her bare shoulder that’s slipped out of the side of my oversized shirt she’s wearing.
“I haven’t heard a peep from them since Ezra got arrested.
Not one. The board meeting is the week after Thanksgiving.
Maybe they’re waiting for that, but I honestly can’t think of anything else they can do at this point.
They have no legs to stand on. It’s why I married you.
” She pivots on my lap and gives me a cheeky smirk and wink.
“I’m not saying they’re going to try to get you to marry Ezra anymore. But I don’t trust that their fight is over. Alfie is poking around your stuff too.”
“So you said the other day. ”
I hold her tighter against me, dragging her back right up against my chest. “He won’t get anything we don’t want him to have.
I’ve gone through your stuff and locked it all down.
He’s good, but I’m a lot better. He’s searching for vulnerabilities, the same way I did with Ezra, but he won’t find anything he can use to discount you or me. ”
She sighs. “How have you not had the FBI or NSA knocking on your door?”
“Because I have nothing to prove to anyone. I’m not a hacktivist, and I don’t have a master plan to overthrow the government.
I don’t need to hack something just to prove I can, or do it simply because I can.
My father always told me not to hack something for pride or arrogance because that’s how you get in trouble. Like our friends here.”
“But what you do is still illegal.”
I stiffen because we’ve never directly talked about this. “Yes,” I hedge and clear my throat. “Does that bother you?”