“What does dragon and the warrior mean?”
“Silly nicknames. You know, college stuff. I was the warrior, the one who braved cleaning up Mark’s reputation and moving forward with my life despite losing my parents, that kind of stuff. And he…” He shook his head with the memory. “He was always a bit of a snake when it came to women. So we called him the dragon, but that didn’t seem strong enough, so I dubbed him dragon II, like the biggest and ugliest of all—” Jamie’s eyes widened. “Holy cow. Baby. Baby, you’ve got to get up.” He patted her hips to hurry her from his lap.
Jessica stood. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything is right.” He took her hand and dragged her inside. “Come with me. I can’t believe it. That idiot solved the bug in our search engine.”
Jessica tried to keep up as he dragged her through the living room and the dining room, and into his office. “Sorry. I’ll explain.” He booted up his computer and handed her a throw blanket from a chair. “I keep it cool in here; you may need this. When I was in grad school, I put a little Easter egg in the code for the search engine.”
She sat on the chair across from his desk and covered her legs with the blanket. “What does that mean? I’m picturing bunnies and chocolate.”
“That’s because you’re the cutest person on earth.” His fingers flew across the keyboard as he cut through miles of cyber security to access the original code. “An Easter egg. A drone. A little piece of code that I created in grad school and totally forgot about until that darn letter.” He glanced up at her with no hopes of suppressing his relieved smile or the rapid beating of his heart. “This is the thing we’re looking for on OneClick that’s pulling up military equipment when kids type in the words dragon two.”
She gathered her hair over one shoulder and nodded, but her confusion was still evident in her eyes.
Jamie continued working. “We were kids, and to a computer geek, this type of stuff is fun.” He glanced up again to catch her smile. “I put this piece of code in the program and totally forgot about it. It was a joke, you know, that one day, just by the law of large numbers, eventually it would rear its head again and we’d laugh.”
“Law of large numbers?”
“Yeah, you know. A principal of probability and statistics. As the sample size grows—or in this case, the number of people searching for certain words—its mean will get closer and closer to the average of the whole population. The more people searching, the more the bug appears.”
He looked back down at the monitor. “And it’s been so long that when it happened, we didn’t laugh, because I totally forgot about it. I have to call Mark and tell him. I can’t believe this. It might have remained there forever, and there’s no way our coders would have known where to look.”
“Dragon Two? Isn’t that the name of a kids’ movie?”
He was too excited to slow down. “You’re right. That’s exactly why it’s coming up now. A million people are searching the terms Dragon or Dragon Two on a daily basis.” He scanned the screen and typed faster. “I’m sorry, babe. I shouldn’t be working when we only have an hour or so left before our real world time starts, but this is vital.”
She came to his side and rubbed his shoulders while his fingers flew over the keyboard. “I love that you have a strong work ethic, and I love watching you work. I don’t want to take you away from any of this, Jamie.”
He slowed long enough to pat her hand, look up at her beautiful face, then went back to work. “You won’t. I can’t believe it took all of this for us to find this drone.” His hands slowed. “It took all of this.” He spun in his chair and wrapped his arms around her waist. “As much as I hate to think about it because of what happened to my parents, maybe things really do happen for a reason.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“SO THIS IS where the nonexistent Jessica Ayers lives.” Jamie parked in front of Jessica’s building. He’d been grinning ever since he’d fixed the coding issue that had mothers all over the world in a frenzy.
Having lived a life that relied so little on the Internet, it seemed odd to her that entire newspaper articles could be written about a search result error, but then again, to those who relied on the Internet, a broken cello would probably seem trivial.
“This is it. It’s not very glamorous, but I like it.” She’d changed back into her concert skirt, blouse, and heels, bringing her much closer to Jamie’s height. He looked handsome from any angle, but she liked being that much closer to his lips, and as they rode the elevator to the top floor she took full advantage. She stood between his legs and kissed him until he was aroused again, and when the elevator doors opened, she walked out with a satisfied grin on her lips.