Chapter 1

Luci is what you would call petite. Standing barely five feet four inches in her stocking feet; something she is in more than not, especially in the server room where her heels would keep catching on the uneven raised floor. She couldn't even reach the top server in the rack if it was not for the aid of a small ladder we went out and got for her. Management wasn't interested in the fact she could not reach that high. We were. Luci was one of the best administrators we had and we would do almost anything for her. The fact that she was what most would describe as highly attractive did not hurt her, but she actually had a brain under her brunette curls that could work through the thorniest problem the users or the software could throw at her. Some of us found that more attractive.

Luci and I ran in different circles, both at work and outside of it. She was on the support team that kept the systems going. I was, in some ways, her superior in the chain of command, even though she did not report to me. I was responsible for creating the systems that her team managed. I have always been a nerd and never would be considered beefy. For a man, I have long fingers, and a generally thin stature that no amount of weights and cardio would ever change. But, after years of swimming, walking and hefting servers and workstations around, I am no light weight. I just look more like a nerd than a jock. Of course, several years working in men's clothing before landing my first IT job didn't hurt my wardrobe any. I just do not choose to wear a suit very often; after all, no one trusts an engineer in a suit. And since I spent most of my day talking to Google and plowing through documentation rather than dealing with my coworkers or customers, I was less than worried about my general appearance. Khakis and golf shirt were dressy for me.

The company, however, wasn't so nice. Following the bust of the dot com bubble, more and more companies were dumping their casual attire policies for more formal dress, men and women included. It was almost a complete return to the suit and tie environment of the early 1990s. The argument that IT people spend most of their day crawling under desks and the scary things there, as well as lifting machines with sharp corners and fixing printers and copiers with loose toner, fell on deaf ears, so most of the support staff had to go and buy some good clothes. I was even asked to help them "dress" by providing some suggestions on what might actually stand the riggers of the job. I was a field engineer, among many other things, in the early '90s and had to wear a suit almost all the time. When I slipped on the ice in leather shoes with a $10,000 piece of equipment in my hands is when the company I was working for at the time decided that maybe it was not such a good idea to outlaw rubber soled shoes. That coupled with the lawsuit for the damage to my body trying to protect the gear seemed to convince them. My wife was not happy to have me spend six weeks sitting at home with a cast on my arm from shoulder to wrist either.

Luci was married and lived about 30 minutes away from work in the opposite direction to my 30 minute commute, so we really had little day-to-day interaction. We worked the occasional project together, usually as I was getting ready to turn one of my creations loose on the enterprise and the support staff had to learn how to keep it alive without me, but since I only tended to release new systems about once a quarter, we didn't interact that much. This year, I had been tasked with running a bunch of little things to ground. Technology is always exciting to the folks in the board room and it was my job to evaluate all the new toys the brass raved about for their ongoing value to the company in terms of investment of resources. The latest was some gizmo that received email wirelessly from our mail servers. These devices were not new, but they were new to us and so it fell to me to procure some of them and figure out how to interface them to our email systems. No big deal right? Wrong. Seems the CEO himself was pushing this little project and my normal six to eight week turn around was unacceptable. I had to have an evaluation on his desk in less than seven days. Based on what I had to work with, I estimated it would take me seven days just to figure out the interface between the mail servers and the software that forwarded the mail.

I had just started up my PC when she stuck her head in the door.

"Hi partner," she said with a gleam in her eye as crossed her arms under her breasts and leaned against the door jam to my rather crowded office. "I would come in and sit down, but I am not quite sure where it is safe to do so." This was the truth. Besides the spare parts and stacked hardware, I had piles of paper, software boxes, printers and cables everywhere. There was a path, but it was from my desk to the door and not to one of the two guest chairs in my office, which at the moment were occupied with a monitor and a pile of books on the mail system respectively.

"Partner?" I asked as I walked over to move the monitor. It was easier than moving the books, except I didn't have anywhere to move it to. I placed it gently on top of a printer, promising myself to move it later.

Luci sauntered over to the cleared chair, her heels clicking on the raised floor of my office. She was wearing a blue suit with a faint pinstripe in it, gold hoop earrings, and a simple gold necklace. I did not see a watch, but I knew she almost always wore one. The suit sounded expensive as she moved closer to me. The skirt was lined, you could hear it as she walked and it did not look like she was wearing a shell under her jacket. In fact, as I got out of her way, I know she was not wearing anything but a bra under her jacket, at least I think she was wearing a bra as the curve of her breasts seemed rather pronounced and leading the eye to the valley of her cleavage and the gentle "V" of her suit.

"Partner. Seems we get to solve this little blueberry issue in time for Friday night Happy Hour." OK, so the units were blue.

"And I haven't even had my Monday morning coffee and panic letter yet," I responded as I slipped behind my desk and scanned the morning headers. We all got a system status announcement, what we called the morning panic letter. Of late, there wasn't anything in it to panic about, but it gave me a minute to get my legs back under me. I do not do partners. Worse, Luci was good looking enough to be a distraction. I needed to get focused again.

"Nothing in the logs to panic over this morning. Everything is running like a Swiss watch," she said joyfully and with a smirk. The panic letters were my idea. I was tired of being sandbagged before I got my coat off in the morning with issues that should have been dealt with by the early team.

"Nothing around here runs like a Swiss watch," I responded, adjusting my own watch on my wrist I as I clicked the email from the CIO. "And here is the partner agreement. Doesn't say anything in here about you signing a non-disclosure and putting your first born up as collateral though," I said with a grin. Luci and several others often referred to my projects as skunk works. Probably because of the state of my office; new components smell. I had gotten used to it and tended to look at it from the military perspective; new technology that I would rather not talk about until it was ready.

"You can have Jim," her first born, "he was up half the night with a cough. Didn't get much sleep myself. In fact, I am ready for another cup of coffee," she said as she reached for my mug only to find it empty as well.

"Tell you what, why don't we walk over to the kitchen, fill our mugs and figure out how to attack this beast," I suggested, picking up my cup.

"Works. I will meet you there," she replied and headed out the door ahead of me, turning left to my right.

Ten minutes later and a cup of coffee beside me and a beautiful partner in front of me, I picked up our marching orders which I had sent to the printer.

"We are to evaluate and recommend whether or not we can implement these things for use among the 10,000 people in the company, starting with the IT staff, the CEO's staff and the COO's staff," I paraphrased as I read the email from our boss. Behind my desk was a box of handheld email machines, all needing to be powered, plugged and probed.

"So where do we start?" Luci asked with some desire to get started.

"Well, since we are in the first wave," I said as I reached behind me, "we might as well start at the top." I passed her a box of hardware and put one on my desk as well reaching for my knife to slit the cellophane wrapping it. Luci was watching me rather intently, kind of like a kid at Christmas if my daughter was a true representative of that group.

"Do you want to do the work or read the directions?" I asked as I dumped the contents of the package onto my desk.

"Well, since we all know you can't read," she said reaching for the Getting Started guide.

"I can read, I just can't write," I responded taking a quick inventory of the plastic on my desk. Fully one-third of my office was dedicated to a set of floor to ceiling bookshelves and those were loaded with a variety of manuals and such, collected over the years in the business. I was known for being more than lax in creating documentation.

"I don't know that I have ever seen you read," Luci responded flipping through the book, watching my reaction out of the corner of one eye, a coy smile on her pretty face.

"Funny lady," I responded picking up the docking station and walking across the office to my workbench, which was nothing more than a scrap desk with a bunch of systems on it.

"You're not putting it on your laptop?" Luci asked when I didn't immediately hook it up.

"Are you kidding? I just finished getting it rebuilt after that worm got loose in here," I responded. I lost the better part of a week rebuilding my production machine. I wasn't going to risk it to some pet project of the CEO.

"Besides, this way we have a complete system and don't have to worry about dumping the corporate email if these things do work as advertised," I continued tipping up a workstation to get to the ports in the back.

"OK. Makes sense I guess," Luci responded. "You need to load the software before hooking up the USB though," she went on.

"All right, then I guess I better pull the power up from the floor for the cradle first," I said kneeling down and sticking my head under the desk to plug the brick into the power strip. "If I pass the cord up behind the desk, can you pull it up?" I asked making room in the bundle that ran up behind the desk.

"Sure," she said and I could hear her move over to the desk, "move your legs so I can get in."

I moved to the left, right into her legs.

"Actually, leave them there; I can stand on your calves to reach the back."

I said she was petit. "You are kidding right?" I asked. My calves are strong, but I didn't think they would support the weight of a woman, no matter how small.

"Nope," and with that she stepped onto my calves, her shoes clattering on the floor, one hand on my belt to steady herself as she reached across for the cable I was sticking up. I will not tell you it was comfortable, but I cannot say I minded much.

She stepped back into her shoes and was standing holding the cable when I got back onto my feet. I tried not to stare as I stood back up, but it was not easy. She had a very nice body. Her calves were toned and it looked like her thighs were as well. Her jacket fell to her hip, but I got the sense that her waist was narrow in proportion to her hips, which were not larger than her chest and coming up from below and much closer than I have been to her, her chest looked larger than it had just that morning.

She was smirking as she handed me the power cord and I plugged it into the cradle. I popped the CD in the machine and logged in while it spun.

"Install the software from the CD by selecting setup.exe in the root of the CD, then reboot the machine. After it has restarted..."

"Connect the cradle, and put the unit in the cradle to charge," I continued. "Does it say how long to let them charge before using them?" I asked.

"Hmmm, nope... oh, here. Let the unit charge for 24 hours before initial use," she sing-songed from the instructions. "How did you know to connect the cradle?" she asked as I watched the software load.

"Pretty typical for these sorts of units," I responded while clicking the reboot button and ejecting the CD. "Want to connect yours while this reboots?" I asked.

"Sure... only, I can't connect to your mail system?" she half-asked, half-said as she walked over to pick up her unit.

"Normally, no, you couldn't. But since these things have to send the forwarded mail to the Internet to get it to their WAP site, I have to tinker with my router and open it up to the outside a little, so you will be able to have a mailbox on the system and reach it from your desk. Besides, I don't have a spare machine in here that is ready to go as a workstation."

"How would you know?" she teased, skipping out just ahead of my raised hand.

Luci shared space with another other tech who was out on the floor somewhere. Like most technicians offices, it was one level above a mess. Just clean enough not to attract the attention of the HR staff that insisted all offices had to be presentable and ready to receive visitors, but not somewhere that was welcoming, at least not to non-engineers. Luci's desk faced the back wall. She had been working at the plastic wrap on the short walk from my office and had the box open and spilling onto her desk as we got there. She deftly picked up the wall wart and crawled under her desk to plug it in.

"I don't know how you ladies manage crawling around under desks in skirts. How many pairs of pantyhose do you go through a month?" I asked as she started pushing the power cord up through the hole in the desk designed for it.

"I don't wear pantyhose. Got it?" Oh.

"Yup, got it," I responded, pulling the cable up far enough to plug in the cradle.

"Pass me the CD," she asked as she hit the eject button on her machine.

I passed her the CD and took a quick look at her legs. I was not loosing my mind, she was wearing nylons. Stockings I mentally corrected myself. She put out a hand and I helped her to her feet, gentleman that I was.

"Actually the skirts aren't too bad generally," she continued, "although I really would like to go back to wearing jeans. Or at least khakis like the guys can wear. Especially when I have to work upstairs."

I nodded at the inequity of it. The women in the company could wear pants, but not khakis, except on Fridays. The guys in IT could wear khakis, but the rest of the company couldn't. For some reason the policy that let the men in IT wear khakis had not been extended to the women. I would like to have said it had something to do with us not having any women when the policy shifted, but besides Luci, Nikki and Janice were part of the staff at the time. It was unfair, and she had my full sympathy. The fifteenth floor, what we called upstairs was the executive suite and some of the senior VPs were know to be lecherous. And that was being polite. When I first started, I did some of the task assignments and it took about a week before I stopped assigning the women to work issues there. If I had to send them, I sent another tech with them, ostensibly to learn from the experts. I know the ladies appreciated my forethought. I had several cards in my personal collection to prove it including one that went so far as to proposition me. It was unsigned.

"I wish I could bend the rules. Actually, I probably could, but someone would complain, even if you aren't on the floor this week," I was thinking out loud.

"It's OK, I appreciate the thought," Luci responded, ejecting the CD and rebooting her machine. "Shall we wait for the reboot?"

"Sure," I said, glancing around her desk. It was covered with the standard things you find in any office. A picture of her with her two sons and her husband, hardcopy of trouble tickets and what had been done, a manual for one of the applications that blew up the week before and some geek toys. I liked the fish tank with the artificial fish it.

"Have you got enough ports?" I asked, surveying the items on her desk.

"Good question." She ducked back under her desk and I had a moment to study the curve of her ass as the fabric on her skirt pulled tighter. Definitely lined, but no slip, or one so short that it did not show was what I was thinking when I was interrupted.

"Nope, I am out of ports. Any suggestions?"

"Let me check the black hole. Back in a second."

The black hole was a filing cabinet in the middle of our area where good parts went to await the next coming. It was filled with everything from mice to network cables and some things that only a handful of us have ever seen before, much less know what to do with them. I did not remember seeing any USB hubs, but it was worth the look. You never know what would show up. Two minutes and a couple of scratches later I was back in Luci's office.

"It would seem that we have not sucked a USB hub into our sphere yet. Road trip?" I asked.

"Let me get my coat."

Around the corner from the office was a computer store. "Do you walk or do you want to drive?" I asked. I normally walked. It was about a mile round trip but not a hard walk. However I was wearing sturdy shoes and Luci had on leather pumps.

"You're kidding right?" she responding, raising an eyebrow. It had been snowing for a couple of days and most of the horizontal surfaces were covered with snow and ice.

"Sort of," I responded as I steered her towards my car. "Don't mind the mess. Other than Ellen, I am the only passenger and I don't know who is messier." It wasn't far from the truth. I only kept two seats clear. The one I sat in and Ellen's in the back seat. The rest had things on them. Just clutter really - headphones, boxes of parts, spare batteries, radio parts etc.

"It cannot be any worse than the minivan," Luci said with a laugh. "You should have seen what we pulled out of it this weekend. I was afraid we would have to call in the hazmat team."

It was a beautiful day for a drive. Not warm, but sunny; and the first nice day in a week of constant snowstorms and ice covering the roads. Ice was melting back to water and there were puddles here and there as we made our way through the parking lot. In no time we were on our way.

"So how did you get tapped to work on this with me?" I asked as we pulled out of the parking lot.

"Probably because I know the mail system better than everyone else," she replied looking straight ahead.

"I guess that makes sense," I responded, pulling into traffic. I had designed the system that passed the spam around the company, but it had been almost a year since I was last inside of it. We had a full time postmaster who took care of keeping the mail moving and Luci fixed it when it broke. I was getting ready for a complete upgrade, something that would have to be done sooner if these devices panned out. I was planning a new OS and management software, along with the core software that moved the mail and checked for viruses and such. It would not be pretty, but the users would not notice anything, except maybe better response.

"At some point this week, you will have to run me through it again. If these things work, we have to do an upgrade," I said.

"I was thinking something similar. How far behind are we?"

"Two versions on the OS, which isn't a big deal, but the mail software is three revisions behind and there were major changes between version 9 and version 12. I am still trying to wrap my arms around them based on my notes from the last installation." I responded, thinking about the tasks at hand.

"Has it been up that long," Luci was looking at me with a bit of incredulity on her face.

"No, but we were on the end of the version when it finally went into production. It sat around the 'works for six months before Jerry could get it approved." Jerry was our CIO, but the company was very conservative. Some of my projects required more than his say so, especially when they relied on Open Source software instead of commercial stuff. We talked about inconsequential stuff until I pulled into the parking lot.

We spent the better part of an hour strolling through the store picking up components and other parts I needed from the to-do list that each of us carries in our head.

"The company is picking up the tab, right?" Luci asked as we headed for the check out.

"You bet, I have the account," I responded as we put our toys on the counter.

Twenty minutes later we were back in Luci's office unpacking a new hub and moving devices around so she could plug everything into it.

"So what's next?" she asked as we returned to my office.

"Look behind my desk and you should find a software box. Break it open and let's see what we need to do to get it up and running. That is really the heart of the system, these things are just end nodes," I responded as I plugged my own unit into my test work station and started waking up the rest of the monster that was my test and development environment. I had spent the better part of the year gathering hardware and installing software to resemble, if only loosely, the corporate network. I opened a session to the router as Luci walked over with the parts of a box in her hand.

"A couple of CDs, a manual and the license agreement," she remarked as she stood next to me. "Does that couch work?" she asked looking at the other piece of furniture in my office. Of course, it was home to its own piles.

"Depends on what you want it for. Makes a great table," I was focusing on the configuration and not thinking about the implications of a clean couch.

"Well, if I have to work in here, at least I am going to be comfortable," Luci replied putting the software on the workbench. "Where do you want all that stuff?"

"I don't know. Where you can find room I guess. The floor works. Just don't put it on the window sill," I replied. The windows had a tendency to sweat in the winter, with the water on the inside and it would collect in little pools. One of the reasons I had towels there now.

Luci started the process of moving the piles of book and papers and other debris of the couch while I picked up the manual.

"Gary, when was the last time you cleaned up in here?" Luci asked me as something hit the floor with a thump.

"Last week I think," I responded not really listening.

"You have instructions here with dates of sometime last year. Heck you have manuals here for software we don't even use." She sounded a little like my wife at that point.

"Actually, we have a field site that uses that stuff for remote access and their system died a month ago and I had to figure out how to get it back up and running because they are too cheap to by new gear." She was right, though, the place did need some organizing. Maybe I would start next month if I actually could find the time to get around to it.

With the couch now clear of papers and parts, Luci made a show of fluffing the pillow and plopped herself down, sitting against the arm, pillows behind her, stocking feet crossed at the ankles, skirt neatly resting at her knees. She had her hands behind her head with pulled her jacket up a little without really ruining the over all impression of a very lovely lady.

"Well, if that's all it would take to get you on my couch, we should have done this long ago," I joked passing her the manual and heading for my desk.

"If I had known you wanted me on your couch, I would have done it long ago," she responded with a grin as she took the book from me. "What's next?"

"The manual is just how to install the software. There is another manual or so on the document CD and it has all the good stuff. At least I hope it does, otherwise we are working in the dark."

Sitting the way she was she had her back to me as I put the CD in my laptop and started searching for the other documents.

"Do you have a sniffer and other monitoring tools on that beast over there," she asked, flipping through the pages."

"Yes. It runs on the box in the middle. Damn."

"What?" She half turned so that she was sitting on her hip, her elbows on the arm of the couch and her jacket flaring open to reveal the curve of her breast and edge of what looked like a white bra supporting its weight.

"This software requires a GUI interface," I responded, trying to look into her eyes rather than at the soft curve of skin.

"And that is bad," she shifted a little, and more light seemed to illuminate that gentle globe. It was definitely a lace bra.

"It may mean a separate gateway box rather than being able to run on the mail servers directly," I was trying to keep my mind on business rather than undressing her with my eyes and mind, which had already undone the buttons on her jacket.

"Oh. Well from a performance standpoint, that should be a good thing," she replied returning to her sitting position and continuing to peruse the manual.

"Maybe, maybe not," I responded, willing my hormones to return to normal, along with other parts of my body. I found the files I needed and sent them to print. My coffee was cold and I needed a stiff drink.

"It will take a couple of minutes for the stuff to print. I am going for water. Do you want anything?" I asked coming around my desk.

"Water would be good. Might as well check my email, too. What do I need to know to connect to this thing?" she asked waving her hand at the workbench.

I wrote the settings down and she preceded me out the door as we went in opposite directions again. I headed for the restroom first, running into one of our other techs along the way.

"Hey, someone hit the lottery!" It was an open secret that Eric had the hots for Luci. Eric was barely out of college and was a sharp technician. He had the ability to soak up new stuff, but did not have the experience to spit it all back yet or make the leaps of logic that the more senior folks could. But he was a crack programmer and that alone made him valuable.

"Morning Eric," I responded. "Who hit?" I continued walking towards him.

"I hear you and Luci are working a project together."

"And?"

"And? You don't think she's the hottest babe in this place?"

I made it look like I was thinking. Eric was not one of my people, so while I could remind him to watch his mouth, it wasn't the same as his supervisor telling him. Unfortunately, his supervisor was Nikki and he didn't have any respect for her. Pity that.

"Personally, I think she is attractive, but that has nothing to do with the job at hand Eric," I responded, hoping he would take the clue.

"Man, you must be gay or something," Eric retorted.

I knew he didn't mean anything by it, but I could not let it slide. I had been in his position and nearly cited for sexual harassment. The fact the lady filing the complaint did not like me because I rebuffed her advances was the mitigating factor, but I did not stay with that company long after that and promised myself I would not get into that position again.

"Eric, as a friend, I am going to tell you that that sort of language is inappropriate in this company. You have been to the training, you know the rules." I used my manager voice.

I watched his face flinch a little. We were saved by the bell or in this case his pager.

"Looks like we are getting that new VP today. I have to head upstairs and finish that machine," he was all professional again as he holstered his pager.

"Get to it. You know Jerry hates to answer his phone," I replied as I continued on to the restrooms.

This was going to be a challenge I thought to myself as I entered the restroom. Eric was voicing what I suspected half the department felt and it would not be long before tongues were wagging in the rest of the building. The rumor mill had been quiet of late, so even something as innocent as this was fodder, especially since I did most of my projects solo.

I was washing my hands when Jerry walked it.

"How are things going this morning, Gary?"

"Not bad skipper. I have only spent $300 so far this week and nothing has blown up yet." It was not unusual for my projects to run in to big money. I had a budget for parts and such. Every year I spent through it, usually by returning the cash to the general pool for some last minute item that the company needed. I also had fried a couple of systems to the point that the fire alarms had triggered and the fire department had shown up. So I had a reputation.

"You and Luci getting along?"

"She started dusting the office about three minutes after she walked in and is picking out curtains at the moment, I think," I responded with a grin.

Jerry paused for a second then broke up laughing. Luci is stylish and beautiful, but we had all been to her house for a party a while back and we both knew she was not into home arts. That she left to her husband, Andrew, who was an artist. OK, technically he was an illustrator, but I had several of his original pencils. He had done them as a favor for me for a magazine I help put together as a volunteer and they were stunning. I had seen some of his oils and had an option on a couple of them. He could hang it up and be very rich. But he liked working for the ad agency he worked for and that was that. Luci had trouble drawing a straight line with a ruler.