Page 49 of Tangled

“But it feels like we’ve known each other a long time. I knew how clever and brilliant your mind was by the iron butterfly tutorial and the other educational materials you put together. I knew your kindness from the way you calmly explained things for new people who were just starting to invest and how you protected the small fish from the Killer Whales.”

She wormed her fingers out of the blanket beside her neck and flipped them around by her shoulder, trying to mime how insubstantial those things were. She’d just typed a few answers out, and then she’d saved them and made copy-paste files to explain the basics. “Yeah, but I could have been anybody. I could have been a seventy-year-old guy sitting in the basement of his ninety-year-old mom’s house.”

Tristan nodded. “But you still would’ve been a good person, and I still would have wanted to call you my friend.”

“Okay, fine, so we’re friends. I guess you can say that we’ve known each other for over a year and that we’re friends.”

Tristan nodded. “I guess we can say that.”

They finished writing the computer program the next afternoon, and that’s when the problems began.

26

Speed

Colleen

“It’s ready,” Tristan said, watching the graph scroll across the screen.

Colleen wandered over, wrapped in a blanket and munching a wonton left over from their lunch delivery while she admired the deep dimples on the sides of his muscular, naked butt as he leaned over her computer desk. “You were right. It did take about forty-five minutes to run.”

“I have a knack for these things.”

She wrapped her arms around him from behind. “Heck, yeah, you do.”

“We have a problem. We need to talk.”

Colleen dropped her arms and inched backward. To some extent, she’d been waiting for this conversation ever since they’d had coffee at Starbucks. “Oh, okay. Do you have a girlfriend or something? I’m cool. It’s been fun.Please,tell me you’re not married.”

Tristan had twisted away from the computer screen to look at her, one side of his lip raised to expose a perfectly straight tooth.“No.”

“Because I’m cool with it, man. I can dig it. A guy likeyouhas to be taken. I didn’t know I was just a side piece, and that’s something youreallyshould’ve told me, but I’m not going to make waves. It’s fine. I can’t continue this, but I’m not going to go allFatal Attractionon you. It’s no prob.”

Tristan turned and gripped her upper arms. “I wasn’t seeing anyone before I met you, princess. And now, I’m seeingyou.”

Oh, wow.Colleen’s anxious insecurity that had popped out as a disclaimer had turned into a fishing expedition, and she’d accidentally caught a whale.

Time to joke her way of this. “Yeah, you just saw a whole lot of me,nudge-nudge.”

Tristan turned back to her computer. “The problem is your internet speed.”

“What?”

“I ran a test, and it’s slow.”

“Dude!”

“We need much faster internet than you have here to upload this version of your program, which I’m calling Anonymity Plus,” he said.

Colleen’s jaw dropped. What kind of a casual hacker did he think she was? “My internet speeds arejust fine,thank you. I have never been so insultedin all my life!”

“No, I mean, it’s a complicated program. It’s such a data hog that it’s taking up almost as much room on your drive as MS Office.”

“I don’t care. There isnothing wrongwith my speed. I mean, it’s a little slower than it would normally be because I’m running the double-VPN and the chunky firewall. But it’sfine.”

Tristan was blinking like he was a little panicky. “I completely agree. It’s fine for anything that you would want to do.Absolutely.Additionally, Anonymity Plus probably has some bloated code. I should refine it at the first available opportunity, especially since I wrote some extraneous subroutines for future endeavors.”

Even so, this was justinsulting.“Yeah, I wrote a few extra lines in there, too, just in case we need them later. But that shouldn’t be a big deal. There’snothing wrongwith my internet speeds.”