From Secret Desire for My Stepbrother to Reality novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Garage

Jem tells her it's true and still is; Lindy hands over her laptop and refuses Tom's $2.1 million for silence in front of his investors, then her mother summons them both home.

The boots stopped right behind me.

I knew whose they were before I turned.

Jem had on the blue work jacket he wore to everything, even a launch with a dress code.

His key ring was still clipped to the belt loop.

He'd run down two levels of ramp, and he wasn't out of breath.

He looked past my shoulder at the laptop.

I didn't close it.

There was no point anymore.

He read the first line, then the second, then the status column.

I watched his jaw go hard under the copper beard.

"December fourth," he said.

"You were first," I said.

"I was first."

"By fifteen days."

"I know how long it was, Lindy. I thought about it every day after."

My throat closed up.

I pointed at the last field like it was a bug report.

"He hid it. Twenty-one minutes after I typed you. He sat at his desk and he hid it."

Jem didn't swear.

He put one scarred hand flat on the hood beside mine, not touching me.

"Is it true?" I asked. "The thing on the slide."

"Yes."

"Was it true then, or is it true now?"

He looked at me.

"It was true then," he said. "It still is."

A car alarm went off somewhere below us and stopped.

I laughed, because the other choice was falling down.

"Three years," I said. "I opened that list every night for three years."

"So did I."

"You could have said something."

"So could you."

That was fair, and I hated it.

The elevator dinged across the level.

Tom came out first, without his headset, with two men in black polos from event security.

Behind them came the valet line.

Not the cars. The people.

Six or seven men in vests and loafers, the investors from the front row, leaving early with their phones out.

They'd seen the livestream comments.

Everybody had.

Tom saw me, and his face rearranged itself into concern.

"Lindy. Thank God. Are you okay?"

"Don't."

"You're upset. That's fair. But that laptop has three years of user data on it."

"It has a log on it," I said. "With your name."

One of the investors looked up from his phone.

Tom didn't.

"Company property," he said, and held out his hand. "Please don't make security do this in front of people."

"You did it in front of people," Jem said.

Tom gave him a quick look, up and down, the jacket, the key ring.

"And you'd be the stepbrother. You look different in person. Shorter."

Jem was four inches taller than him.

Somebody in the valet line snorted.

I turned the laptop around so it faced Tom.

The log was still up.

"Suppressed by admin, tsedgwick," I read out loud. "December nineteenth. Eleven fifty-two p.m."

"That's a test account," Tom said smoothly.

"I'm row one. I built the table."

"Lindy's been under strain," he told the men in vests. "She's been fighting the roadmap for months. This is what I was worried about."

Then my screen went black.

The login box came up.

Session ended by administrator.

Tom smiled at me.

I closed the laptop and held it out to him.

He blinked.

He'd wanted me to fight for it.

He'd wanted the security men to pull it out of my arms on somebody's phone.

"Take it," I said. "You already took what was on it."

He took it.

He tucked it under his arm, and then he leaned in so only I could hear.

Jem heard anyway.

"Your shares vest Friday," Tom said softly. "Two point one million. Sign a non-disparagement tonight, and I'll accelerate them. Tonight, Lindy. You'll wake up rich."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you quit before your cliff, and you leave with nothing. And you'll be the girl who wanted her stepbrother for the rest of your life."

I looked at the investors.

They were all watching now.

"Tom just offered me two point one million dollars to stop talking about it," I said, loud and clear. "I said no."

The garage went dead quiet.

Tom's smile held.

"That's not what I said."

"Then say what you said. Louder."

He didn't.

One of the investors put his phone away.

Another one walked off toward his car without saying goodbye.

Tom watched him go.

Then he turned back to me, and for one second his face was the face I'd seen in the boardroom that morning.

"You were never going to be anything without me," he said.

"I wrote the engine," I said. "You wrote the slide."

He walked to the elevator with my laptop and the two men in polos.

The doors closed on him.

My knees went.

Jem caught my elbow before I hit the concrete.

He held on just long enough for me to stand, then let go.

"Two million dollars," he said.

"Two point one."

"Good speech, though."

I laughed again, and this time it was almost real.

My phone buzzed.

I expected Kath.

It was my mother.

Then Jem's phone buzzed in his jacket at the same second.

He took it out and turned the screen so I could see.

Same message. Same timestamp.

"Home. Both of you. Now."

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