Page 66 of Pressure

He leaned against the fireplace mantle and watched her, knowing he needed to handle his response with care.

"Why did you keep it from me?"

"I thought you had enough on your plate, and it seemed mostly harmless. I figured I would tell you when we had finished the work at Solitaire. Please don't hate me," she said again.

He sighed and motioned for her to come to him. His hands rested on her waist. "I could never hate you. I'm irritated though."

"Do you want to punish me?" she asked, still chewing on her lip.

"Stop biting your lip. You'll make it bleed. I'm the only one that's allowed to make you bleed," he teased.

She just stared at him. "Yes. I want to punish you. But I'm not going to. We're not at that stage in rebuilding our relationship."

She nodded and rested her forehead on his bare chest.

"I'm really sorry. I know I should have told you right away."

He kissed the crown of her head. "I'm just glad you told me now." The chime sounded, alerting him that he should buzz up the food delivery driver.

"Let's eat and you can tell me what you're doing with the information you found," he said as he pulled away and walked to the door to grant the driver access to his elevator.

Twenty minutes later, they sat on barstools in his kitchen dining on Thai food and beer.

"I'm really sorry," Marissa said again.

He picked up her hand. "Stop apologizing, Riss. Has the information been useful?"

She gave a little shrug. "It's hard to say. The chatroom was definitely a shrine to Sebastian, so I have no doubt they were somehow rounded up by him. A lot of them are just your typical anti-capitalist anarchist hackers who want to take down all the billionaire tech companies, but a few felt like they could be genuine threats. So I've started looking for their signatures in the hack. Your head of development on that app is a bit of an ass but he's got some top-notch coders and we were able to isolate and deal with most of the problem. Your client's app users shouldn't be getting bombarded with porn anymore, but there's a chance that some of that porn had trackers and malware in it so we're working to hunt that down and quarantine it as quickly as possible."

Lance smiled around his beer. "Now do you see why I want you on my team?"

She blushed and twirled Pad Thai noodles onto her fork. "I'll think about it," she promised. "What's our plan for tomorrow?"

"I have an early morning meeting but then we'll be heading back to Solitaire for the weekend. Do you still think it's safe to have the weekend parties?"

Marissa nodded. "That was the interesting thing about the chatroom. There was no mention of the club. It was all focused on you and your company. You may want to alert the police because some of the threats were physical. There was mention of burning the building down, but it all sounded like hyperbole to me."

He nodded. "I'll increase security."

Marissa swallowed the last of her beer and stood. "I'm really sorry again."

"Riss," he said as he stood and pulled her to him. "Don't apologize again or you'll make me regret already agreeing to not punish you. Now come on. Let's go back to bed. I don't think I'm through marking you yet."

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