LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER THREE

      A CRISP RAP on her door snapped her awake.

      Luli glanced at her alarm clock, but it wouldn’t go off for another hour. She had set it so she wouldn’t oversleep resetting the timer on the laptop.

      “Luli,” he said. “Open the door or I’m coming in.”

      She quickly rose and brushed her hands down her wrinkled dress, then opened the door to Gabriel’s glower.

      He glanced past her to the dented pillow on the single bed, the plain walls and utilitarian night table with only a clock and hairbrush upon it.

      “What are you doing?” he demanded.

      “Sleeping.”

      “You’re supposed to be eating dinner with me. Why did you tell the butler I wanted to eat with him?”

      “You said, Tell the butler to prepare us dinner. I presumed us meant him.”

      “No, you didn’t,” he said flatly.

      It had been open for interpretation and she’d been dead on her feet. Also, there was no way the butler would believe the new master of the house wanted to eat with her unless he heard it directly from Gabriel himself. He and all the rest of the staff had given her apprehensive looks, everyone asking, What did you tell him?

      And, exactly as she did when it came to her closed-door conversations with Mrs. Chen, she had given up nothing—earning zero friends in the process.

      Now she’d made Gabriel angry. She’d fallen asleep thinking about his nearly kissing her, imagining things she barely understood. What would it feel like to have his lips on hers, his hand moving to her bottom? Her breasts. Between her legs.

      Fresh heat pressed there, disconcerting her. How was it that all she had to do was think about him, stand before him, and quivers shook her abdomen and her mouth watered? It was mortifying.

      “I’m not hungry,” she tried in a voice that scraped.

      “I’m not requesting.”

      His hard tone told her that all the work she’d put into giving herself leverage had left her with virtually none.

      “Garden,” he said, stepping back to indicate she should lead the way.

      She did, self-conscious the entire time that he was right behind her. She arrived to find a table had been set with Mae’s best china on a silk cloth. One of the maids brought the first course, a small bowl of curry laksa made with shrimp and cockles. Gabriel handled the vermicelli with his golden chopsticks as adeptly as she did.

      And noticed the curious look she sent after the maid.

      “I gave the butler the night off,” he said. “After clarifying he wasn’t my date.”

      “I’m sure he appreciates a free evening.” He was going to kill her when he saw her next.

      “He didn’t offer many compliments when I asked him about you.”

      It didn’t really surprise her that he’d made those inquiries, but it made her squirm inwardly, knowing that no one would have anything very nice to say. She never dwelt on her ache of loneliness, but it was humiliating to have the staff’s contempt of her become the centerpiece of this already painful dinner.

      “I sat in on his meetings with Mae when they reviewed household expenses and raises. It was my task to prepare the performance reviews and suggest appropriate wage increases.”

      His laugh was a single cut of disbelief. “Have you made any friends here?”

      “Perhaps you’ll be my first,” she said with a smile of false hope.

      She watched for a twitch of humor in his mouth, but it held its tense line while she only wound up thinking about his rejection of her perceived advances.

      She lost her appetite and set aside her chopsticks.

      “I read your note,” he announced.

      “Which—? Oh.” She realized as she brought her gaze back up to his antagonized one.

      He must have tried to hack his way into the network while she’d been sleeping. Of course he had. And he’d found her warning against proceeding further.

      “I thought this whole thing a bluff, but those are an elegant few lines capable of doing so much damage. I have an idea how to get around it. I’ve cloned the entire thing to a testing file. I’ll crack it before I go to bed,” he said with confidence, nipping off the tail of a shrimp and setting it aside as he chewed the meat.

      “You realize there’s more?” she asked cautiously.

      “I’d be disappointed if there wasn’t.” His smile was as false as hers had been. “Where did you learn to code?”

      “We had to design our own website at school. There were a handful of standard templates to choose from. We were supposed to load basic details and a few photos, that kind of thing. I didn’t like the colors it offered and wanted a different layout. I looked up how to hack into the back end and customize it.”

      “For extra credit?”

      “To stand out from the rest. We were also required to have a hobby and volunteer hours. I chose programming and contributed to open-source projects. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had time and opportunity to become proficient in several languages. Mae liked that I could manipulate things to the way she wanted them.”

      “Coding is a skill that’s very marketable,” he pointed out.

      “That’s why I’m demonstrating my skills to you.” She pushed her bowl away. “But who will take me seriously, without a track record or credentials? Which door do I knock on when I land after being deported and have nothing in my pockets but lint? At best, I’d be recruited for click farms or phishing scams, maybe have to resort to criminal activity for my own survival. As I said before, if I wanted to break laws, I would have already.”