Roman frowned as he looked up at her but he patted the edge of the bed for her to sit beside him. “Wouldn’t Neal have already locked you out of the system?”
She snorted and sat next to Roman, subtly inhaling that masculine, woodsy scent that seemed stronger in his room. As if the air and sheets were permeated with it. “I’m sure he did but I’ve got multiple backdoors into the entire system. I work closely with the IT department but even they don’t know about this.”
Roman’s eyebrows raised but he handed her the laptop. “What exactly do you do for Powers Group?”
“I don’t really have one set thing that I do,” she said, pulling up a browser and typing in the website she needed. She felt so level-headed this morning and couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this yesterday. Well, she could believe it considering she’d seen her friend die and she’d been shot—and she’d gone on the run. “This won’t come back on you, by the way. No one will be able to trace what I’ve done. Not that it’ll matter because I’m taking the money Neal stole once I track it down and diverting it to a secure company account. It’ll just sit there until the police figure out everything.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she talked. “As far as what I do, I have a Masters in Computer Science and I do a lot of design for the company, but…I really do a lot of investigations for Hugh. Or, I did.”
She swallowed hard, shaking away the dark path her mind wanted to take. She refused to get sucked into depression. Not when she had a chance to take back what that bastard Neal had stolen and clear Hugh’s name. Because she didn’t think Neal was above trying to say Hugh had stolen from the company and attacked him or some crap. It would be a stupid defense considering he’d shot her, but she wasn’t going to let him even try to drag Hugh’s name through the mud.
“Anyway, I look into any company that Powers Group might do business with, including owners’ personal finances or personal anything. For the most part Hugh was all business, pretty cutthroat when he needed to be, but he also had a huge heart. When I found out this construction mogul had a bunch of arrests for domestic violence, Hugh refused to do business with him.”
“Damn.” Roman sounded impressed.
“I know, right. Hugh was…he was just a good guy.” Her throat tightened again and she stopped talking, unable to go on.
“You loved him.” His voice was quiet, speculative.
Taylor paused and glanced at Roman to find him watching her intently. “Well, yeah. Not romantically or anything but he was like a dad to me. He never had kids and he took me under his wing right out of college.” Taylor was pretty certain Hugh had viewed her as a daughter. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking, but she knew he’d loved her too. And it broke her heart to be thinking of him in the past tense. Well, she was going to get justice for him no matter what.
Looking away from Roman before she started crying, she focused on her task, infiltrating Neal’s multiple email accounts and files he thought he’d hidden. She nearly snorted at his stupidity and saved them all to a secret company Cloud account only she and Hugh had access to. Well, just her now.
After finding those files it was just a matter of time before tracing the trail of diverted money. She wasn’t able to guess his password, but she was able to reset it using one of his email accounts. The bank sent a ‘reset password’ email to him and she reset it all right. She laughed to herself as she did it, feeling insanely pleased that she was able to do this much to Neal. A man like him only cared about money and she was taking all of this away from him. Sure, he had personal accounts but he was stealing for a reason. He needed the cash because of his gambling debts. She wasn’t sure who he owed money to and she didn’t particularly care. She just cared that he wasn’t going to hurt the company or take anything else that didn’t belong to him. As soon as she’d transferred all the money, she changed the passwords in all his accounts to different ones, effectively locking him out of everything. She wanted him to know exactly what she’d done. Even if he called his bank and got back into his account online, all his money was still gone.
Next she locked him out of the Powers Group system.
“And fuck you,” she muttered as she finished the last keystrokes. When she was done, she closed everything down and gently shut the laptop. She looked up to find Roman watching her with a mixture of humor and something else. It was almost like he was impressed. “What?” she asked self-consciously, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.