Going Royal 01 - Some Like It Royal (7 page)

“No, Alyx likes ice-cream sundaes in the middle of the night. I want to make sure we have plenty. Theresa just sounded odd when she asked if I needed any other supplies.” Steak and ice cream were hardly supplies.

“She probably wants to know if you need condoms, but is too polite to ask directly.”

He inhaled coffee and set the mug down, coughing and sputtering. Martin couldn’t have shocked him more if he’d sucker punched him across the desk. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked her to buy me condoms.”

“Two years ago with that model from Nice. You were holed up with her for a week, working on that design-a-babe project.” Martin flipped open his laptop.

“It was a pseudo-morphing program for women who were working out to help them identify trouble areas and what exercises would help them achieve success in specific areas of their bodies.”
Design-a-babe.
Daniel snorted.
What the hell was that model’s name?

“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. You called Theresa at home, asked her to deliver some groceries—including condoms—and to take the rest of the week off.”

“Because what’s-her-name was naked while I did my scans.” Daniel straightened in the chair. “The condoms were a precaution.” He ignored Martin’s dry look. “What’s on the agenda today?”

For some reason talking about the model made him uncomfortable, particularly because he hadn’t set out to have an affair with the Nordic blonde bombshell, just work with her. But staring at her voluptuous breasts day after day had its effect. Not his proudest moment, but definitely in the past.

“The scholarship project is moving forward. We received grant status approval and I filed the tax-exemption and that’s just a waiting game. But I imagine by the first of next month we’ll be able to announce the fund—
Spherecast Technologies Scholarship
. It has a good ring to it.”

“No, it should be the Dagmar Fund for Further Education or the Princess Alyxandretta Charity—don’t put our name on it.” It was Alyx’s idea. She should get the credit. “We can hold that announcement in our pocket for an event and use it to launch her as well.”

“If you say so.” Martin’s tone indicated severe doubt.

“Spit it out before you choke on it.” Daniel sat forward. He and Martin had been friends long before he needed his legal advice. One of the few friendships he could attribute to his gaming days that translated better in real life. It was why they worked well together. The man wasn’t known for withholding his judgment and Daniel didn’t want him to start now.

“You’re trusting your company’s fiscal future to a waitress from Sonoma. If you had a board of directors they’d string you up.” Martin clenched his fingers around his coffee mug. “All you have is her word and a signature on some paperwork that says she won’t tank this for you. You’re taking one hell of a risk.”

“It’s my company. It’s my risk.” He forced himself to maintain a calm tone. Martin had his best interests at heart for one and he’d asked, for two. “She’s not going to screw me over. She is doing her best and putting a hell of a lot of effort into a charade she didn’t have to bother with.”

“You’re paying her a million dollars.”

“And I offered her five.” Daniel thumped the desk. “She could have had a blank check and she didn’t ask for it. She doesn’t want these clothes, she doesn’t want to be a princess, but she’s doing it because she accepted the job.”

“You don’t
know
her. Dammit, Daniel. You’re a dreamer, I get that. You dream big ideas and you make them happen. But those are bits and bytes of code on a computer. You can’t program this woman to be what you want her to be.”

“Not what I want, what I need. She can do this, because she is simply becoming the person she always was.” And she didn’t sleep in her damn car anymore. “Let this shit go, Martin. Get on board or get out. You think I don’t know her? I’ve been living with her for the last five days. She’s more comfortable in bare feet than shoes. She prefers pizza to haute cuisine. She actually knows the lyrics to every Madonna song ever recorded, including three I’ve never heard of. She likes to read, and she has a stuffed bear with a missing eye that she keeps in that beat-up Volvo rather than bring in the house because she’s not certain she belongs. I know a hell of a lot about her—leave her alone. Do we understand each other?”

He met his attorney’s gaze with a hard look. Whether the “damn fool” idea worked or not, his friend wasn’t going to harass Alyx. Not when she was working her ass off to accomplish in a few short weeks what it took most a lifetime to prepare for and it was only going to get worse.

“You’re falling for her.” Martin exhaled.

“Don’t be stupid.” Daniel retreated from that line of thinking. “I’m protecting an investment. We’ve discussed the scholarship, what’s next?”

Chapter Nine

A knock on the door announced the housekeeper. Alyx glanced up as Theresa entered. The older woman looked to be in her mid-forties, short dark hair styled away from her face. She didn’t wear a uniform, exactly, but she wore a variant on the crisp slacks and polo shirt favored by many of the local spas and health clubs.

“Good morning, Miss Dagmar.” Theresa pronounced her last name carefully, but added emphasis to the miss.

“Good morning, Theresa. And, please, call me Alyx.” She’d tried three times to get the woman to call her by her given name and three times she’d been politely rebuffed.

It was still early—she’d sneaked out of the bedroom while Daniel still sprawled. Barely six-thirty, almost too early to be up, but she’d rolled over to see her roommate stretched across the bed, sheet riding low over his hips and a morning erection tenting the jersey cotton.

Escape seemed the better part of valor. She’d slipped back to her own room, showered and changed into one of the myriad of morning suits Victor insisted she buy. The coffeemaker brewed in the kitchen and the scent drew her like a moth to a flame. Fresh cup in hand, she’d settled in the sitting room and rescued the book on the royal families of Europe. Victor and Daniel both said hers was listed in Chapter fourteen.

“Thank you, Miss Dagmar. Would you like some more coffee? I’m going to fix breakfast shortly, if you have any preferences.” Theresa swept around the room, adjusting the blinds, picking up yesterday’s discarded newspaper and emptying trash bins.

Daniel strode into the room on the heels of the statement. “Omelets?” A hopeful note in the request. He turned his devastating smile on her as he circled around Theresa. Alyx’s heart pounded as he came right up to the sofa and bent down. His lips brushed hers, lighter than a butterfly or the caress of a feather. His face hovered close to hers as he murmured, “Good morning.”

Mouth tingling, she could barely muster a smile with him this close. The scent of his aftershave, a light spice, tickled her nostrils. His blue eyes gleamed as though he possessed a secret and she longed to know how he did that—how he woke up cheerful and happy with the world. “Good morning.” The words rode out on a sigh.

“I will make the omelets.” Theresa cleared her throat then slipped back out of the room.

Daniel straightened, his gaze following the housekeeper’s exit before he glanced back at her. He didn’t move away, his warmth like a blanket. He was dressed in his Daniel clothes—business slacks, button-down shirt and loafers—but he’d chosen darker colors today, save for the shirt, which matched his eyes.

“How are you?” He touched her cheek, just a brush really, fingertips gliding over her skin. She could almost forget they weren’t involved.

“I’m good.” Which, surprisingly enough, she meant. “You?”

He smiled wider and walked over to the coffee service and poured his own cup. “Not bad. I hope I didn’t wake you up last night. I had two conference calls with Japan.”

“Nope. Didn’t hear a thing.” That wasn’t entirely true. She’d rolled over to see him backlit from the open bathroom door as he got ready to go to bed. The light caressing his muscles and casting his face into shadow filled her dreams for the rest of the night.

Another good reason to escape when he’d looked deliciously relaxed in bed.

“Good.” He carried his cup over and lifted her feet, sliding onto the sofa beneath them and tucking her feet against his legs. Thank God she’d chosen slacks rather than one of the skirts. She should move her feet, but he leaned back, his gaze riding up to the windows as he took a sip of coffee.

On closer examination, the faint circles beneath his eyes made him look tired.

Forgetting the book in her lap for the time being, she cradled her coffee cup. “Do you often have meetings that late?”

Surprise crossed his expression. “Unfortunately. Well, not really unfortunate. Two of my client companies lost a lot of information when their data center collapsed. I’ve been working on a program that helps them rebuild and restore what was lost. But it takes an immeasurable amount of sifting to make it happen—sifting Internet postings about their projects, internal message boards and access to their employees home computers and laptops.”

“I’m not sure what you mean about sifting.” Frankly, she’d never been a fan of computers. She’d never owned one, nor had she used them outside of the school library. By the time she could afford one, it’d seemed pointless. She sipped the coffee. Daniel shifted sideways. He still had her feet, but he faced her and stretched one arm out along the back of the sofa.

“Everything you do on a computer is reflected in the machine’s active memory. When you add the Internet, whether it’s a closed intranet or not, it leaves a footprint. Data can be stored in RAM cache—” He paused. “You don’t know what that is, do you?”

She shook her head slowly, but he seemed awfully excited about the “cash” prospects. “Sorry.”

“Okay, you remember how with an old camera you could take a picture and you had to develop the negatives first and then you used the negative to get a picture? If you wanted more prints, all you needed was the negative?”

“Yes.” Digital cameras were the rage, but she’d actually studied photography for one semester at a high school in Woodland. That was her favorite foster home and best school. Unfortunately, when Pete—her foster father—lost his job, she had to move on. Pushing aside that dismal thought, she focused on Daniel’s grin.

“Great. Ram cache is like a negative or snapshot of the information they looked at most recently. If you write the program correctly, it can match parameters—digital edges of one piece of information—with another.” He took a swallow of coffee, then set the cup on the table. “Imagine that my right hand is one computer and my left hand is another.” He snagged her coffee cup and sat it next to his.

She gave him a gimlet eye, but couldn’t suppress a smile at his excitement. “Each of your hands are computers too.” He caught her wrists and held her hands up. “Each of our fingers represents a piece of digital data. Let’s say that on your right hand computer you were reviewing the company’s spreadsheets, available on that intranet, the last page you looked at is your pinkie.”

Awareness swarmed up her arm and back down as he wiggled the finger in question. “Your ring and middle fingers were the last two pages of this spreadsheet you reviewed, but your forefinger and thumb are just your login and the bookstore Web site you were reading before you got back to work.”

She giggled as he wagged a finger at her thumb. “Bad thumb.”

Daniel winked. “My left hand is the computer that your coworker was reviewing the same file on. My thumb and forefinger were the pizza we ordered for lunch and the movie tickets I wanted to buy, but my middle finger matches the same sheet your ring finger looked at, while my ring and pinkies are the next two in the sequence before your pinkie.” He threaded his fingers through hers, lining them up until they were in the order he described. “My program sifts those negatives to get these pages and organizes them until they are in the most logical and correct sequence with the most recent views being used.”

He covered their joined hands with his free one. “It’s time consuming and sometimes there are holes—gaps in the data stream—but we can identify because—”

“Negatives can be time stamped if the camera had that capability. You can see when it was opened, what was the last view time and extrapolate?”

“Exactly.” He squeezed her hand. “We may not be able to retrieve all of their data, but I’ve found a lot of the pieces of the puzzle. We’ve just arranged for a shipment of their defective laptops—damaged by flood or crushing—back here and we’re going to see what, if any, data we can recover and then we’ll use the sifting program to manage what we find.”

“That’s amazing.” Warmth stole up her arm, the strength in his hands buffeting her, and she squeezed his hand lightly where their fingers intertwined. “You can really ‘rebuild’ them?”

“Yeah. Like I said, it won’t be perfect and there will be holes they have to fill in the gaps for, but they do a lot of business in the United States and have to file finance reports here. We’re investigating how much of the missing information might be in those reports. They’ve also networked their back up servers and if they back up data in Japan, it’s mirrored here in the States to prevent future disaster.”

“And I thought you made advanced versions of Pong.” She may not understand the intricacies of programming, but she could appreciate the attention to detail and amount of review it would take to sort through every single piece of data.

“We do that too.”

“Omelets are ready in the dining room.” Theresa stood in the doorway, a wistful, watchful expression on her face as she looked at their joined hands. Alyx would have pulled away at the intrusion, discomfort sliding through her, but Daniel tightened his fingers.

“Thank you, Theresa.” He slid Alyx’s feet off his lap and stood, tugging her to her own feet and still, he held on to her hand. “Shall we?”

“Sure.” She fought the discomfort and pasted a smile on. “I have another question about the data.”

“Hit me.” He pulled her hand up and tucked into the crook of his elbow, holding it captive. They walked side by side, the raw heat of him pushing against her with every step. The contact’s disconcerting effect on her equilibrium was hard to ignore.

“Okay, you said the data on the ring fingers were two pages in the same sequence, but what if a fingernail is missing?” She grimaced at the mental image. “If that makes any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense.” In the dining room, he released her hand only long enough to pull out her chair. It was set for two—omelets, fresh biscuits and crispy home-fried potatoes filled each plate. Glasses of water and orange juice sat on the upper right while a fresh coffee-filled carafe sat perfectly between two empty, clean mugs.

He waited until he sat down and shook out his napkin to finish. “The fingernail may represent two or three lines of data that was not present in the information we found on my ring finger or on yours, but if the data is consecutive enough, they can figure out the missing pieces. If not, we look for alternate images on other machines, and filter for those missing cells.”

Unfolding her own napkin slowly, she frowned. “Do you have to review each piece of data to know what to look for?”

“Not exactly. The program does it. It can catalog and identify the cell numbers, every piece has a unique identifier that we can enter as an
if-then
statement.” He salted his potatoes before cutting into the omelet.

“Okay, that means if you want blue shoes, and three inch heels come after one inch heels, you know that two inch heels have to come between them or are missing when you review the final product?” Not everything came down to shoes, but it was the first analogy she could think of. The scent of peppers, onions, ham and cheese teased her nostrils and her stomach growled. She took the time to cut into the omelet and steal a bite. Her mouth watered.

Perfect.

She caught him staring at her, a small smile on his lips. “Exactly.”

Okay, maybe computers weren’t that hard after all. She grinned.

“Thank you,” he murmured and took another bite.

She washed down hers with a drink of orange juice. The cold, tart liquid braced her against the flip-flop of her heart. “For what?”

“For being curious. Not a lot of people ask what I do or when they do, they glaze over if I explain it. So, thank you.”

“Well, you’re very welcome. I may not understand it all, but you explain it very well.”

“Shoe analogies and all?” he teased and she couldn’t help laughing.

“I like shoes.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” He picked up his glass. “To shoes.”

Her laughter bubbled up. “To bits and bytes and fingertips and all the other missing pieces you bring home.”

Their glasses clinked together and she relaxed. The day seemed a bit brighter too.

* * *

A book slammed into the floor with a thump and her
son of a bitch
echoed through the hall. Curious, he stood and stretched. The program code he tried to debug wasn’t cooperating. Neck cracking as he rolled it from side to side, he crossed his office to glance out at the living room where Alyx stood in the center of the room, an encyclopedia in her hands. She faced off against Victor, her expression a grimace of distaste.

“It’s going to break my foot if it keeps falling.” She’d changed since the morning and wore a halter-topped dress and sling-back heels, both in a forest-green shade. The color accented her golden tan and brought out the highlights in her reddish-brown hair.

“Then don’t drop it. When a princess walks, she floats with a casual grace that must seem effortless. You can’t roll your hips or shake your assets, but rather draw the eye with ethereal grace.”

Daniel’s gaze roamed over her. She looked more likely to hit Victor with the book in question than to float with grace.

“Again,” Victor ordered in a tone that brooked no argument. She sighed, but set the book back on her head. Her shoulders pushed back, her chin came up and she began to walk. He knew the moment she became aware of him. Her soft brown eyes widened, and a falter hitched her step. The book wobbled and Daniel held his breath.

She walked toward him—no. She
glided
forward. Her shoes barely clicked against the tile, each step floating a little more than the last. He locked his jaw, fingers crossing mentally, but when she paused in front of him he grinned. “Very nice.”

“Acceptable.” But this time, Victor sounded pleased.

She ducked her head and caught the book as it slid off her hair, mussing the strands falling toward her eyes. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He folded his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. His palms itched to stroke her face.

Or at least give her a hug.

Better to stand his ground and not do either. He teetered close to breaking their contract far more than he liked. It was one thing to play a role, but a part of him didn’t feel like he was pretending anymore. “Do I get to see you walk away the same?”