Page 47 of Dangerous Temptation

The emotions of the day were starting to wear on Elena when they finally made it back to the penthouse.

She couldn’t believe it was over, that her studies were through at last. There was still the final official paperwork and ceremony, but she’d reached her goal.

She hadn’t known if that would ever happen.

With all the drama and stress, it had become questionable.

The accusations and suspicions had beaten down her confidence.

At the very heart of it, she hadn’t been sure she was onto something, even though it had made sense to her.

She couldn’t even describe the sense of pride that had gone through her when the committee had declared that her research had merit.

Alex certainly thought there was something to it.

She rubbed her head as she sat down on the sofa. It had all been such a whirlwind. She hadn’t expected him to show up at her dissertation defence, much less drag her down to the university’s intellectual property office. She still didn’t understand what was going on.

With this licensing agreement … Or between them …

She watched as he set her laptop on the coffee table.

Contrary to her, he was bounding with energy.

He took off his suit jacket and tossed it over the loveseat.

She swallowed hard. If anything, he looked harder and leaner.

She’d forgotten the intensity of his physical presence. He was so raw, so male.

She pressed her thighs together.

She hated sleeping alone. She’d hated tearing them apart the way she had, but things had gotten toxic. All-consuming. If she hadn’t gotten out when she had, she would have drowned in them.

She tore her gaze away and clenched her hands together in her lap. She couldn’t go back to that – not now, when she was just getting her feet underneath her.

‘I need to show you something,’ he said, moving to the bar.

She bit her lip. At least he was getting out of the apartment now. That was a step in the right direction. And he seemed driven again. Back in control. The NYU licensing associates had certainly been dazed when The Ax had strode in to their little closet of an office to start negotiating.

But had things really changed?

Her stomach dipped when he pulled out a stack of familiar spiral-bound notebooks from his briefcase.

There was a spark in his eye as he stood over her, holding the rainbow of paperwork. When he sat next to her, he was so close his shoulder brushed against hers and their thighs nestled together. She felt his muscles clench, and she couldn’t stop her response.

She squirmed as warmth unfurled deep inside her.

‘Did you look at these?’ he asked, tackling the subject head on.

She wanted to cry. ‘Yes. I was curious, but I didn’t understand them – and I felt so guilty about spying I was sick.’

His chin dipped. ‘I didn’t feel right looking through your computer files, either.’

Her wet eyes snapped up to meet his gaze.

‘There were too many files,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I didn’t put it together until you did it for me at your dissertation.’

He opened the blue notebook and held it so she could see. ‘This is the last year and a half of my life.’

She hesitantly touched the narrow-ruled paper.

It still made zero sense to her. The pages were filled with gobbledygook.

His lips curled when she scrunched her nose, so he pulled out another notebook.

At least she could read some of what was in it.

The green notebook had comments in what she recognised as his tight, cropped handwriting.

Something about architecture and action scripts … ‘Were you coding in prison?’ she asked.

‘They wouldn’t give me access to a computer, so I had to do it all by hand.’

She grimaced. There were pages upon pages of chicken scratching. Reams of them. Some lines had been crossed out while others had been circled for emphasis. Were all the notebooks like this? ‘You’ve been transcribing all this?’

‘Using it as more of a guide, really. I’ve been refactoring as I go and fixing things as the quality testers send them back.’

‘Wolfe Pack is working on this.’ She remembered the meeting in the conference room with all the department heads. And Professor Walters. ‘This is Project Alpha Wolfe.’

He closed the notebook with care. ‘I should have named it The Siren Project.’

She frowned. Her brain could only take in so much, and it had already done its work for the day.

For the month, actually.

Taking a deep breath, he spread his arm over the sofa behind her. Something twirled in Elena’s chest when he began to play with her hair.

‘We’re a lot alike, you know,’ he said.

Really? She’d never thought that. He was driven and aggressive. She was motivated, but quiet. Studious. But they’d meshed well.

She locked her ankles together. Very well.

The muscle in his jaw twitched. ‘That Ponzi scheme that my grandfather and your father developed was an evil concoction. It nearly cut me off at the knees when I found out about it, but there was nothing I could do to protect anyone. The damage had already been done to the investors … to the Wolfe family … to you.’

His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his fingers tangled in her hair.

‘There was no avoiding it. No explaining it. No stopping it or turning it around. That nearly drove me crazy.’

She heard the rasp in his voice, and she laid her hand on his thigh. His muscles bunched, but she didn’t pull back. His gaze met hers, and she could see right to his soul.

‘When they put me in that cell, I knew I had to find a way to fill my time or I would lose it.’

She stroked his leg, hating to think of him being held down that way. The vision of those scratches on the closet door still made her want to howl.

He shook his head. ‘I realised that the only way to settle matters in my own mind was to find a way to turn everything around. Power needed to be given back to investors. They needed financial software that could protect them. It’s always been an elusive thing in the industry.

Companies self-report. The SEC has become much more powerful, but not even it has the tools to detect the kind of activity our family members conducted.

So I started building that tool – useless as it was at the time. There was only one problem.’

‘No computer?’

‘No you .’

She smiled gently. ‘Alex, I’m glad I inspire you, but –’

He gave a short laugh. ‘You inspire me in other ways, Siren.’ His gaze touched on the necklace nestled between her breasts. ‘What I needed at the time was your beautiful brain.’

She looked at the notebooks and then to her laptop on the table in front of them. Was there a connection? ‘My research?’

He laid his hand over hers and threaded their fingers together.

‘I had everything mapped out. I knew how the software would function. I even designed the user interface, but I kept banging into the same brick wall. I’m not an economist. I couldn’t come up with the way to detect when conditions are questionable.

That dizzying equation you had on slide eighteen of your presentation? That, baby, is the golden bullet.’

He tossed the notebooks onto the table, and they landed on top of her computer bag. Two combining.

Her weary brain finally started firing. ‘My algorithm. You needed that to make your software work.’

‘And I nearly fell off my chair when you handed it to me today on a silver platter.’

She twisted on the sofa, tucking her leg up underneath her. ‘So all the time when I was in the lake house working on this …’

‘I was up in the manor coding my fingers off.’

The possibilities were making her pulse rush. ‘So we … we can help people.’

‘The financial industry has been looking for something like this for a long time. People need to know if and when their money isn’t safe so they can move it.

With the combination of our innovations, we can put control back into investors’ hands.

’ He shrugged. ‘The SEC will probably be interested in it, too, but I think we’ll have to charge them more. A lot more.’

After what the regulators had done to him, the way they’d gone through his life with a fine-toothed comb, she could understand why. ‘People will actually buy this?’

‘In droves.’

‘But …’ Her thoughts were now flying by at light speed. No wonder he’d been so aggressive back in Dr Walters’s office. ‘Shouldn’t we give it away? Seeing how …’

His jaw tightened, his stubborn streak showing. ‘I didn’t get where I am today by giving things away. People will pay, and we will profit.’

She couldn’t help it, she cringed. Her stomach actually flipped at the thought. The press would go rabid if they were to produce software that benefited again from their families’ crimes. Hundreds of millions of dollars were still missing.

Seeing the look on her face, he caught her chin. ‘What I would like to do is donate a portion of the proceeds back to those who were robbed – starting with your mother.’

Pay people back.

The light bulb dawned inside her head with the brilliance of a beacon. He’d said that before. He’d talked about it as being the only way to get people off their backs. She knew how they hounded him. They went after him like rats in a sewer.

But … ‘Is this to improve your image? Our images?’

Sighing, he leaned his forehead against hers. ‘It’s to make us feel like we’ve done all we can. You and me. You were right. We can’t make up for our families’ mistakes. We need to live our own lives, no matter what people think.’

He looked at her almost cautiously. ‘I’d like to collaborate with you on this.’

She cupped his bristled chin. It felt prickly and sexy. She’d thought of him once as being calloused and detached, but those were just protective mechanisms he’d built. His feelings went deep.

‘I want to work with you, at the very least. I need more, but if that’s all you can do, I’ll take it.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry I chased you away.’

‘You were just trying to protect me.’