Chapter 1

I sighed in relief as the clickity-clack of my Jimmy Chu heels echoed off the walls of the hallway, leading toward the country club’s exit. I was happy to be out of there. I hip bumped open the French doors and pulled my phone out of my Gucci clutch. Leaning against the stone wall of the balcony overlooking the first tee, I held down the three key. ‘Handyman Service’ appeared on the iPhone’s screen, and it speed dialed the number.

“Hi, beautiful, how’s your soiree?”

I smiled at him for saying that. Joey truly thought I was beautiful, even though I know I’m not.

“Hi, Baby, it’s boring beyond belief, I wish I was there with you.”

He chuckled and said, “Let me guess ... Michael has his nose up your father’s butt, andbutt and is completely ignoring you.”

Michael, an up and coming arbitrageur at my father’s investment firm was my long-time boyfriend, and the man everyone expected me to one day marry.

“Yeah,” I admitted, “they were discussing some Russian currency transaction. Michael just waved me away when I told him I was going out for some fresh air.”

“You deserve better, Andrea,” he said with some heat in his voice, “I’d never treat you like that.”

I frowned into the phone because he’d broached a subject I assiduously tried to avoid.

“You know all the reasons why that wouldn’t work, Joey; so let’s just be happy with what we have,” I reasoned.

“Easy for you to say, Andrea; you have it all and I only have part of you,” he grumbled.

“Yeah,” I replied, trying to lighten the mood, “but you have the best part.”

Then I changed the subject, “Can I come over tomorrow? I’m free all day, so we can go do something.”

He paused a few seconds as if he were thinking it over.

“I don’t think tomorrow will work. I’m doing chores for my grandmother,” he finally said.

I was momentarily stunned, because in the eight months I’d known him, he’d never refused to drop everything to be with me.

“Oh, okay,” I replied lamely.

We said our goodbyes then I turned around and walked back inside. I headed towards the powder room thinking about Joey. He was my dirty little secret; he was absolutely the worst and positively the best thing to ever happen to me.

I met Joey during the summer after my junior year of college. I had enrolled in a business ethics course at the local college, as part of my plan to finish my undergrad degree in two and a half years. I had dual enrolled my last two years of high school so with this course under my belt, I would be a twenty-year-old bona fide college senior with only seven courses between me and my degree. The ethics course was being taught by a prominent philosophy professor visiting from England and I was looking forward to the experience.

There was an easel outside the door of classroom 17A&B on that first Tuesday night of class that directed us to find our name on the class roster and sit at the table with the same number as one that appeared by our name. I was at table nineteen.

The classroom was fairly spacious with twenty tables in rows of four at one end and a lectern at the other. Behind the lectern a distinguished looking middle-aged man in a tweed coat with patches at the elbows stood smiling benignly. I made my way to the back row where my assigned table was located. A young guy was already seated at the table. He stood up as I approached and held out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Joey Spacey,” he said.

His voice made me tingle; it was masculine even though he spoke softly, he sounded sort of like the actor Jim Caviezel.

I felt another weird little tingle as I shook his hand and introduced myself.

“Andrea Spellman,” I said, “pleased to meet you.”

He held my chair and stood until I was seated; it was treatment I was used to receiving but surprising from a teenaged boy. I smiled to acknowledge his manners as I surreptitiously checked him out. Joey was of medium height, a few inches shorter than my six-one. He was solidly built but not overly muscular. He had that typical surfer boy look with longish, sun-streaked light brown hair and wide set green eyes. His nose was a little large but fit his square jawed face. He was cute; but in the end just an average guy, I thought, like hundreds I’d ignored in high school and during my two years at the university.

Professor Lowell made ignoring Joey impossible though when he told us how his course would work.

“During this class we are going to discuss ethics as they apply to modern life and business in the real world. Then, at the end of each class I will present a real life case to which there is no easy solution. You and your table partner will explore that case and write a paper in which you take opposing views, yet in the end hash out a solution,” he said and he sounded like Sean Connery.

It annoyed me slightly that Lowell didn’t allow us to pick our own partners but, since I didn’t know anyone in the class, I figured that Joey was as good as anyone else. At least he was respectful and had manners.

At the break, half way through the class, Joey and I exchanged phone numbers and made plans to meet Thursday evening to work on our assignment. As we leaned against the wall chatting, my natural curiosity got the better of me.

“So, Joey, are you a full time student here?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“Nah, I’m here because it’s part of the terms of my probation. I just turned eighteen, passed my GED and finished my community service, so if I pass this course my record gets expunged.”

“Oh,” I squeaked and shied away from him, “what did you do?”

He smiled and held up his hands in a placating gesture.

“I signed an agreement not to talk about it in exchange for some of the charges being dropped, but don’t worry, it was nothing violent.”

I did worry about it, of course; who wouldn’t? So as soon as I returned home I called my stepbrother George. I’m the only daughter in my family, but I have two stepbrothers from my father’s first marriage. George is the oldest; he was thirty-four and a prosecutor in the States Attorney’s office. George picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, Princess, how’s it going?”

I rolled my eyes at being called Princess, but it didn’t really bother me. That’s what Daddy and my brothers teasingly called me.

“I need a favor, Georgie. I need you to check out the study partner my ethics professor stuck me with. He said he was on probation but wouldn’t tell me the reason.”

This was one time I didn’t mind having over-protective brothers. I gave George Joey’s name and description and he took it from there.

“I’m on it Drea,” George said. “I’ll have something for you tomorrow. Meanwhile stay away from him, okay?”

Drea was the only nickname I tolerated, and that was only because I pronounced my name Ahn-dray-ah instead of the usual An-dree-ah. So at least Drea inflected the right syllables. I know it’s vain but hey, I figure it’s my name and my prerogative, right?

“No problem,” I replied, “and thanks big brother, you’re the best.”

Snuggled in my bed that night, I thought about Joey Spacey, which was really weird. It was weird because we weren’t just from different worlds; it was more like different universes. Yet, he seemed like a nice, smart guy and he made me laugh, good traits for a study partner. Provided, of course he wasn’t some sort of Ted Bundy wanna-be.

My brother George called me the next afternoon while I was working at my summer intern job at my father’s company.

“Hey, Princess, I have some information for you about your study partner and he is quite the desperado.”

The way George said it made me think Joey must have been an axe murderer or something.

“What did he do?” I asked anxiously.

George laughed and said, “Relax, I’m kidding. Actually, young Mr. Spacey pulled a pretty cool prank on the Bank of All America. Seems he got into a beef with them because they weren’t crediting his grandmother’s social security direct deposit on the day it was received. Banks typically do that so they can invest the money in the overnight currency float. After his grandmother spent a long weekend waiting for her money, Spacey used a computer at his high school and hacked into BoAA’s computer network. He tweaked their programming so everyone receiving a direct deposit had their account credited the minute the deposit hit the bank.”

That didn’t sound so bad to me and I told George so.

“Yeah, but there’s more,” George continued. “Spacey also inserted a subroutine into their system that took all of the fractions of a cent from transactions and deposited them into the account of a homeless shelter. Believe it or not, for a bank the size of BoAA, that amounted to thousands of dollars a month. The bank really went after him over that, they even got the FBI involved because they are federally insured.”

“Doing that took some serious skill and Joey doesn’t come across as a computer geek,” I observed.

“The Feds don’t think so either, they think some of his friends in the Computer Club actually wrote the code and hacked the bank’s server. Spacey swears he acted alone though, and the only digital trail anyone could find led back to him. That admission got him expelled from school under the zero tolerance rules.

“So anyway, the bank wanted him under the jail until Spacey’s pro bono attorney pointed out how bad the bank would look when word got out that a sixteen-year-old high school student could hack their computer system. In the end the bank dropped the charges in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. The county charged him with criminal mischief and the juvenile court sentenced him to probation until he was eighteen, had a GED and completed the ethics course.”

I thanked George and disconnected the call, my mind much relieved that my study partner was not some violent gangster or drug dealer.