Without a word, Mark tossed the manila folder on his desk and walked out of his office, closing the door too loudly behind him.
Jamie stared at the large black letters written across the front. JESSICA AYERS.
Jamie picked up the envelope and sat in his leather chair. He knew what was inside without looking. Mark had done a background check on her without Jamie’s permission. Worse than that, he’d done it when Jamie had specifically told him not to.
Between a rock and a hard place didn’t come close to describing Jamie’s position. Mark had risked their friendship and gone against his direct order—and Jamie knew he was just looking out for him and for OneClick, the way he always had.
He ran his fingers over the envelope. One read would tell him everything he wanted to know, from her work history and previous addresses all the way down to traffic citations and, knowing Mark, a list of the men she’d dated in the past twelve months. He was nothing if not efficient.
And he was a complete jerk to women.
To Jessica.
Jamie tossed the envelope on his desk and paced his large office, which was lined with windows overlooking a park and furnished with mahogany and leather. Jamie had chosen this office over the corner office that offered windows on two sides. The corner office overlooked the street, which offered nothing to Jamie other than noise and distraction. The green lawn of the park, people strolling rather than rushing from one destination to the next, offered him relaxation, inspiration, reminders that life was about more than what existed in the four walls of his office.
He breathed deeply, trying to clear his head, and gazed out the window. A young family with two small children bought food from a street vendor and then walked into the park. The mother wiped the little boy’s face, then kissed his cheek. The father put his arm around her as the kids skipped a few feet ahead, and Jamie’s mind went to Jessica. He’d never considered settling down before meeting her. He’d never met a woman who had made him feel so much, want so much—for both of them.
Did it really matter what she did for a living? She obviously played the cello, and he didn’t care if she did it professionally or for thrills and giggles. He saw the way she was carried away when she played, the blissful look that drew her eyes closed and caused her body to move through the motions of playing in an ethereal fashion. She was a beautiful woman, but when she played, she radiated happiness; her movements were fluid and even more graceful. He sighed with the memory, exhaling all of the tension that had buried itself in his muscles. He’d felt the same happiness coming from her when their bodies joined as close as two people could be, their hearts opening more to each other with every embrace, every kiss, every breath.
Jamie glanced at the envelope again and sank into his chair. She’d lied to him. Wasn’t that enough? Shouldn’t he forget her? Move on?
He thought about the issue he was working on and the long journey it had taken for him to reach the pinnacle of his career. The years spent meeting with executives, building capital, working eighty-hour weeks while everyone around him told him he was wasting his time. Spinning his wheels. Going up against an eight-hundred-pound gorilla that no one could compete with. Still he’d pushed forward, driving himself harder, working his fingers to the bone, because after all, Google had started somewhere, hadn’t it? What made the founders of Google better than Jamie Reed?
The people who had been there from the beginning and encouraged him rather than try to dissuade him were Vera, Mark, and his Seaside friends. They believed in him. They’d never doubted that he’d do what he intended. And yet the only people he’d ever spoken to about his most intimate, hurtful time, when he’d lost his parents, were Vera and Jessica. He’d sidestepped the details around even his Seaside friends. But he’d opened up to Jessica in less than a week.
That had to mean something.
The phone on his desk beeped, and Amelia’s voice came over the intercom. “Excuse me, Jamie?”
“Yes, Amelia?”
“The management team is ready to meet with you in conference room three.”
He had to pull his head together and dig deep if he was going to find the root of this issue in miles and miles of code. “Thank you.”
He scrubbed his hand down his face, still thinking about Jessica. He couldn’t reconcile the look in her eyes as being that of someone who was lying. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much the pieces weren’t fitting together in the real world, in his gut, and more than that, in his heart, he believed she’d been honest with him from day one, despite the fib about the cell phone not being hers. He smiled at the memory of her clocking him in the head with it.