Chapter 9

My office. Even though the door was closed, we could still hear them coming.

“Don’t forget this time,” I said hastily. “You’re Alexis.”

“I know. Sorry. I won’t forget.” I’d quickly prepared Mia for what was about to happen.

Sean and Patrick burst through the door, their faces masks of rage.

“What in bloody hell was that fecking shite in there, Ryan?” Sean thundered. The veins in his temples pulsed with every word. “No existential threat! Did you really say that?”

“Why haven’t you been answering your fecking phone?” Patrick demanded, equally incensed. “Or our emails? We’ve been calling you all fecking morning!”

I casually put my hand on Mia’s shoulder. “Sean, Patrick, this is my daughter, Alexis. Alexis, Sean and Patrick Butler.”

“How do you do,” she greeted in a soft, quiet voice, with a coquettish bat of her eyelashes. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

The two enraged men pulled up short, and immediately capitulated to their instinctual Irish decorum by straightening their backs, buttoning their blazers, and straightening their ties.

“Lass,” Patrick said, with the tiniest nod of his head.

“Your daughter?” Sean asked.

“That’s right. She’ll be handling some administrative tasks for me, while I work to figure out what the fuck is going on with this new competitor of ours.”

“Competitor?” Patrick asked. “How can you be so sure it’s a competitor?”

“What the fuck else could it be?” I asked, my tone impertinent, knowing that he had no fucking clue how to answer the question.

The two brothers shared a worried look. Then Sean approached my desk. “Ryan, can we talk?” His eyes flicked to Mia. “In private?”

I stood. “Are you ready, sweetie?”

Mia gathered her bag and stood with me. “Yep.”

To Sean I said, “Look, I’d love to sit around and shoot the shit, guys, but now’s just about the worst fucking time for that. Don’t you agree?” I checked my watch. “I have to run my daughter back home, and then I’m anticipating being in meetings all fucking day with my team to analyze this situation. After that, I need to sit down and figure out a plan for how we’re going to unfuck ourselves if this turns out to be real.”

Patrick’s earlier bluster had entirely evaporated, replaced by palpable dread. “How fucked could we be?” he asked.

I came around the desk and put my hand on his shoulder. “The kind of fucked that’ll prolapse this company’s asshole, Pat.” His mouth opened and a tiny squeak escaped his lips. “I’ll keep you in the loop, buddy. Gotta run.”

Gabe met us at the door holding Mia’s laptop and a charger. Perfect timing. “Thanks, Gabe,” I said, and snatched it from his hands as we walked past.

The moment we shut the doors to my Mercedes in the parking garage, Mia gripped the AMG GT’s oddly shaped leather steering wheel with both hands and doubled over laughing.

“Oh my god! That was amazing! Did you see their faces when you said that?”

“Hurry up,” I said, pulling out my phone to check Slack. Lexical’s dev channels were blowing up with frantic and alarmed conversation. I grinned. “Get us the fuck out of here.”

Mia surveyed the luxury sport sedan’s well-appointed but surprisingly tight interior, and tried to familiarize herself with the multitude of buttons and steering column controls. “Sure ... no problem. Just gimme one second.” She had no idea how to even start the car.

“Step on the brake,” I said, then pressed the start button when she did. The aggressive exhaust note startled her.

“Oh god!” she cried when she tapped the accelerator, throwing the tach needle into the red. “I don’t think I can drive this.”

“Figure it out, Mia,” I said with my nose in my phone. “Just take it slow and easy.”

“Alright. Okay. I got this. How much does this car cost, anyway?” she asked, sounding decidedly nervous as she delicately pushed the electronically controlled shifter forward to put the car into reverse.

“I don’t remember,” I muttered. “Hundred eighty, hundred ninety.” My head flew forward, then snapped back and bounced off the headrest as she hit the accelerator and brake in rapid succession. “Hey, take it easy!”

“Sorry! Sorry. I got it. A hundred ninety? Like, thousand?”

I returned to my phone. “Something like that.”

“That’s insane. I paid five hundred for mine.”

“You got ripped off.”

“Where are we going, anyway?” she asked, ignoring the jab. She turned to face the back window as she eased out of the parking spot, barely able to keep the car’s eight-hundred horsepower under control.

“There’s a backup camera, you know,” I said.

“I feel better looking with my own eyes,” she said quietly, her face a mask of concentration.

With her body turned and her arm outstretched across the back of my seat, her shirt pulled tight across her chest, straining, and pulling against the small, cheap buttons holding it closed. The padded cups of her flesh-toned bra were clearly visible through the gaps, as were the tops of her breasts, which were larger than I realized.

Then I glanced at her face, and saw Alexis in her profile. My face flushed. I averted my eyes to focus back to my phone.

“Whatever. We’re going to work from my home office today. But first, we have to do something about your apparel.”

After nearly a minute of careful maneuvering, Mia finally had the car out of the parking stall and pointed toward the exit. She rolled us forward at a snail’s pace, white knuckling the steering wheel with both hands in a viselike grip that would put death’s to shame. At the gate, I handed her my badge to open it, and soon we were out onto surface streets and cruising.

“Alright. This isn’t so bad,” Mia said as we waited at a light, feeling more confident. “Where to, boss?”

“Head to The Providence,” I said.

“You got it.”

A gunmetal blue Impreza WRX pulled up next to us. The car’s driver, a young man in his mid-twenties wearing a straight-billed hat, looked over at Mia and revved his engine. The high-pitched whine of twin turbos spinning up was quickly followed by an obnoxious ratatat from his custom exhaust. He tossed his head in challenge.

“Check out this douchebag,” Mia grumbled.

The light turned green. The douche bro mashed the accelerator, spinning his low profile, Z-rated tires in a plume of white smoke as he slithered across the intersection. Mia tightened her grip on the steering wheel and stomped on the gas, launching the Merc like a bullet from a rifle, throwing me backwards into my seat.

She screamed and shouted, “Woohoo!”

In less than three seconds, we hit sixty and rocketed past the noisy rice burner.

“Mia!”

She lifted off the accelerator and tapped the brakes to bleed off speed. The Subaru caught up and then shot past, only to have to slam on the brakes at the next light. As we coasted to a stop next to him, Mia couldn’t stop laughing.

“H-holy shit, this car’s insane! Did you see that? It was like he was standing still!”

I bent to retrieve my phone from the foot well and glared at her. Her cheeks were flushed and she had a huge grin on her face, breathing heavily like she’d sprinted the distance instead of driving it. The douchebag next to us stared straight ahead, too embarrassed to acknowledge the teenaged girl who’d so effortlessly smoked his ass in a sedan.