Page 45 of Dangerous Temptation

Alex smoothed his face and put a lockdown on the snake slithering inside his chest. Not-so-sweet Caroline was not going to rile him today. He sat down beside her in the hard wooden chair.

‘Mr Wolfe,’ she said gleefully.

‘Ms Woodward.’

The head of the committee raised her voice. ‘Silence, please. We’re ready to get started. Ms Bardot, if you would.’

Elena nodded politely and gestured to the screen where her presentation was showing.

She began to talk and Alex eased back. The chair was rigid and uncomfortable.

Trying to find a more relaxed position, he hooked an ankle over the opposite knee.

He drummed his fingers against his thigh as she got started and felt Caroline’s gaze take in the nervous gesture.

He couldn’t help it. Elena was nervous. She was talking too fast and her voice sounded high and tight.

Her blank stare was skittering along the audience and off the back wall.

He finally caught her eye. Their gazes locked and he took a deep breath.

She did the same. He nodded at her and her shoulders relaxed. She slowed down. Gathered herself.

Addressing her audience, she finally got into her flow.

She began going through slides, and his pride in her grew.

The subject was dry, but she was doing what she could to spice it up.

Some reporters took notes, but others just watched.

The sexy suit was probably the reason for that.

It was black, with a modern edge, yet so professional the edges looked like they could cut steel.

The fit was tailored and the style didn’t require a blouse underneath.

It emphasized the black diamonds that lay nestled between her curves.

Curves that were supported by some kind of sexy lingerie, he was sure. Was it the black lace? The innocent pink? He shifted on the hard seat. Whatever it was, he’d bought it for her. That thought alone was enough to make him rock hard.

From that point on, the crowd of reporters just disappeared. They didn’t matter now.

‘I began by looking at Case A, which followed market trends,’ she was saying.

So this was what she’d been doing all those hours she’d spent alone in the lake house. He ground his teeth together. Would they still be together if they hadn’t left the manor? Or would he have driven her away from there, too?

‘I tracked all the known market indicators,’ she continued.

She’d said she loved him.

The snake that always sat inside his chest hissed. It was impatient. It wanted him to make things right.

He wanted her back.

She loved him, but she’d left him. If he could just come to grips with the way things were, could he convince her to give him another chance? The world might just see the rotten image they’d created of him, but she’d dug beneath the surface once.

She pulled up another colourful chart. ‘I then turned to Case B, the Wolfe Financial scenario.’

Alex’s ears perked up and his attention focused like a laser. He read the chart more closely, and his long body unfolded. He planted both feet on the floor and gripped the arms of the chair.

Next to him, Caroline started taking notes furiously.

‘I tracked the very same indicators,’ Elena said, her enthusiasm mounting.

She was addressing the evaluation committee directly now.

It wasn’t a student trying to impress her teachers.

She’d gone beyond that and was so immersed in her subject, she’d become the expert.

‘You’ll notice the trend is the same, however the variance is more pronounced.

This made me question if the deviation was something that could be quantified. ’

Alex’s heart began to beat a bit faster. She hadn’t just been reading textbooks down at her lake house office and thinking in hypotheticals, she’d dug into a real-life scenario.

Her life.

And his.

He looked at the chart on the screen. Unlike most of the reporters in the room, he understood exactly what it meant. She’d analysed the scandal that had put him in a cell and knocked her to the ground.

He homed in on the sound of her voice until the room felt hollow around him.

Every muscle in his body was clenched until his bones ached.

His brain raced as he listened to the theory behind her work.

She was more advanced than he was in the area.

Hell, the committee was looking at her with stunned expressions.

‘The data proved problematic, however,’ she confessed. ‘The algorithm I developed here didn’t accurately predict the fraudulent reporting of Case B.’

She pointed out the difference between the predicted and the actual values, offering up the limitations of the results freely. ‘I struggled with this until I realised that I needed to account for parallax.’

She moved to the next slide of her presentation and Alex’s mouth dropped open. It was a shot of Wolfe Lake.

‘It’s like when you look into water and see a shiny rock,’ she explained.

‘I could calculate the position of the rock, but that calculation assumes that sunlight is moving through air. If you turn around and consider the rock, it’s looking up to the sky through water.

The two environments don’t jibe, even though the rock hasn’t moved. ’

She was energetic now, walking right up to the professors’ table. She wanted them to understand. She wanted verification of her work.

Alex looked to them, wondering the same thing.

Was she right?

She directed a laser pointer at the screen. ‘I needed to combine both views. I needed to look through air and water. Or, in this case, I needed to determine the variance using both macroeconomic and microeconomic principles.’

With a flourish, she pulled up an advanced mathematical formula. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you my findings on how to determine if a fund is achieving questionable results.’

One professor squinted while another ran numbers on his notes. A woman with her hair in a bun pointed a pen at the screen. ‘So this is from the microeconomic side of the pond, so to say.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Said simply, using this formula, investors can determine if their investment results in a stock or fund are “too good to be true”.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Caroline Woodward piped up from her seat. She raised her microphone. ‘Are you showing people how to play the market?’

The crowd started tittering.

That was stopped fast.

‘Security,’ the head of the committee snapped. ‘Please remove this person from the building.’

‘No,’ Elena said sharply.

Heads turned towards her.

She didn’t flinch. ‘In answer to Ms Woodward’s question, the answer is no. This is not a “how to” guide. Think of it as a mine detector, not the mine.’

Caroline gestured belligerently at the screen. ‘But couldn’t someone reverse engineer –’

‘Enough,’ the committee chairwoman said, rising to her feet. ‘Get this woman off of campus property.’

The reporter’s eyes narrowed behind her black-rimmed glasses. ‘This presentation is open to the public, and freedom of the press –’

‘Does not allow you to disrupt the proceedings. You were given the rules of participation, and you broke them.’ The chairwoman was radiating power in all her glory. She pointed at the door with the authority only a schoolmarm could pull off. ‘Out.’

The university cops took over from there.

Standing over the fuming reporter, they waited impatiently for her to collect her things.

When she stood, one took her arm. She ripped it out of his hold.

She signalled to her cameraman to stay. When the security team realised she wasn’t alone, one of the bigger men cocked his head.

The intimidation was enough to make the cameraman jump out of his chair to follow, too.

Alex felt the muscles of his face pulling in an unfamiliar direction, but then he caught the look of horror on Elena’s face. She was looking at the evaluation committee with trepidation. The urge to smile left him. They’d better not count this against her.

The crowd was still shifting and the committee looked discomposed.

Professor Walters adjusted his glasses. His hair was ruffled from where he’d tugged on it, and his cheeks were rosy. ‘So if I may summarise, Ms Bardot, you’re talking about determining fraudulency in real time – that is, Ponzi schemes?’

She lifted her chin. Everyone in the room knew who she was. ‘Yes, sir. I am.’

The crowd of reporters couldn’t help themselves. A gasp went up and pens began scratching fast against paper.

Alex dropped his head, his breath leaving his body. Holy. Shit. She’d been doing all this right under his nose.

‘Are there any more questions?’ the committee chairwoman asked.

Elena waited with bated breath.

Seeing there were none, the woman nodded at her. ‘Thank you, Ms Bardot.’

The professor stood and turned to the crowd. More than one reporter cowered in his seat.

‘Thank you for your attendance. We’ll be going into closed session now. Please leave the room in an orderly fashion.’

Elena caught the woeful looks aimed in her direction. The reporters had more questions for her, but they knew better than to ask her now. She felt as if she were stepping off a rollercoaster ride as they started to disperse.

She knew they wouldn’t be going far. They’d be waiting when she left.

Bowing her head, she concentrated on collecting her things. She’d just gone through the most intense interview of her life. Her knees were wobbly and her stomach was tight, yet the thrill in her chest was near euphoric. She’d done it. It was over. One way or the other, she’d given it her all.

She had to be happy with that, but she had a feeling things had gone well. She hadn’t let even Caroline Woodward rattle her.

She took her first deep breath of the day.

‘Elena?’ Professor Walters said.

She raised her chin. Did he have more questions? What more could she tell him?

‘If you’ve collected your things …’ Seeing that she had, he gestured to another door at the end of the room. ‘You can wait in my office if you’d like.’