Broken Build (26 page)

Jen rubbed her hands on the bedspread. Had she been that pathetic? She’d never thought about why she stuck to Jocelyn. Sunshine, warmth, silliness. Jocelyn couldn’t help being popular, and popular girls could be selfish, but Jocelyn had also protected her and made her feel included.

Jen peered into Dave’s expectant eyes. “She never judged me and well, she was so perfect, I wanted to be around her. Maybe hoping some of it would rub off on me.”

“She might have been pretty on the outside.” His voice deepened. “But you’re beautiful on the inside. She’s gone now. And I finally see you…”

He fingered her hair and moved closer. What did he mean? His voice triggered an upwelling of wishful thinking. She met him on the way down. He had shaved, his jaw smooth and taut, he caressed her with his lips. His breath, with a hint of cinnamon, mingled with hers as he lingered over her, teasing her, his tongue gently flickering but not entering her slightly parted lips.

Questions twisted and turned, rising to the surface and retreating. Hadn’t he told her he could never love anyone but Jocelyn? Safe Jennifer Cruz. Nothing would happen. A stand-in, loyal and understanding.

Jen’s heart hammered against her sternum. She froze as he nibbled her neck and slid a hand under her shirt. Her fists clenched. She wasn’t ready for this. A squeak escaped her throat, and he withdrew his hand sharply. Lifting himself, he swung to the edge of the bed.

“Did I scare you?”

“No.” Her breath rattled in the back of her throat, and she crossed her arms over her breasts.

He backed away, a guarded look darkening his face. “Did they… the thugs, did they rape you?”

“No… but they tried.” A cry escaped her lips, and the raw memory of fear overwhelmed her.

Dave turned and left the room quickly. Shutting her eyes, she huddled behind the stuffed bear and waited for her pulse to return to normal.

Chapter 26

Dave staggered into the kitchen, his fingers numb and his heart jittery. He’d frightened her. What the hell was wrong with him?

His hands shaking, he poured himself a whiskey on the rocks.
Work, Dave, work. Think of nothing else. Shut down if you can’t control your emotions.
He woke his laptop and checked his email. Thirteen minutes before midnight. He lowered his head to the table. Memories overloaded his brain circuits. Drink. Oblivion.

He was so broken he could barely function unless living in a carefully concocted fantasy, the one where he was a captain of industry, a successful entrepreneur, an escort of beautiful, wealthy women. But Jen brought out the pain—the deep maw of need, the gaping wound in his heart. Why did she have to remind him of all he had lost?

He clicked on an online photo album. His mother and sister, Vivian, grinned from a vacation in Hawaii. His father with his new girlfriend on a South American hike. They all moved on, went on living. And here he was, alone with memories and regrets. All he wanted was a family. Was it that hard? His father had never accepted Vivian’s Down’s syndrome. He resented his mother for carrying her to term and only stayed to make a man of Dave. They had divorced his freshman year at Stanford when Vivian was seven.

The alcohol burned his throat but spread comforting fingers of heat through his body. The laptop beeped and his cell jingled at the same time. The upload had completed successfully. He dragged his hands over his cheeks, his fingers pinching his jaw. Jen had saved his company. He should be ecstatic, celebrating, but instead, he was a black well of emptiness. He raised the glass of amber liquid and sloshed it down his throat.

* * *

Dave woke with a blanket over him. Sunlight streamed through the living room curtains. Jen sat on the short leg of the sectional sofa. Her head was cradled in her elbow, and she was sound asleep, her breathing in soft puffs. He stared at her. She had probably checked the laptop and then fell asleep on the couch. His fingers tingled wanting to touch her. He put an arm around her and drew close, and his breathing quickened as he inhaled her morning scent, rainforest warm.

Jen squirmed and woke. “Wait, what’s happening?”

He pushed her hair back from her face. “It’s really you, isn’t it? Jennifer Cruz…”

She lowered her gaze to his chest. “Unfortunately.”

He couldn’t help kissing her temple. “I can’t explain it, but ever since I found out who you were, I feel closer to you.”

She shuddered as he ran his finger down the side of her head to her neck and tilted her chin toward his lips. He gazed deeply into her amber eyes, like crystallized sherry. “Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”

Her face full of disbelief, she swept her palm in front of his eyes as if checking for consciousness. “But you hate me. I’m the nanny, the idiot who ruined your life.”

“You didn’t mean to. Forgive me for yelling at you? Scaring you?” He thumbed her smooth skin and focused on her beauty mark.

“It’s okay. I deserved—”

“No, you don’t deserve to be hurt.” He hauled her into his lap. “Let’s start fresh this morning. No regrets.”

“Do you mean it? Can God take us back, give us the giant undo?” Her voice held a wistful quality.

“Maybe if we pray hard enough.”

She cuddled closer to him. “Could you really forget?”

“I won’t look back if you won’t.”

“We could still have Abby, couldn’t we? I mean, we’ll find her.”

He exhaled and held her tight. She sounded so hopeful, as if Abby were within reach. If only it were so easy. He kissed her cheek. “Yes, we’ll find her, and then we’ll have more.”

“We?” She giggled.

“No, just kidding.” He threw the blanket over her head and tickled her through it, too embarrassed to admit what he’d been fantasizing.

She tried to remove the blanket, but he gripped her tighter and rolled her onto the floor. Laughter tumbled from his lips and gloom lifted from his heart.

He snatched the blanket from her face. “Well, well, well... Look what I found this morning.”

Her smile was genuine. “Dave, you’re silly.”

“And you’re beautiful, inside and out.” He launched into a volley of kisses before she could recover. The plastic Jen Jones had attracted his CEO image, but it was the real Jennifer Cruz, the woman who loved Abby and suffered like he did, the woman who knew guilt and sorrow who captured his heart.

She relaxed in his arms and kissed him back. The sweet release of forgiveness was more blissful than any sexual act he could have imagined. Dave broke from the kiss and stared into her leonine eyes. Was he in love? Should he tell her? Could he truly forget what she’d done?

The strident bell of the telephone zipped through their bodies. His muscles tensed and Jen froze, her breathing suddenly shallow. He covered her protectively. The ringing stopped and went to the answering machine.

“Hey, sorry to bother you, but we’re a big hit!” It was Marty from Marketing.

Dave rose and pressed the speaker button. “I’m here.”

“Have you gone online? We’ve been up and running since midnight. The shoppers have flocked to the system, and Mississippi is having a blowout Black Friday. They’re getting more than sixty percent of all internet sales. Millions of people are glued to their smartphones and snagging sales without fighting crowds.”

Dave high fived Jen. “Sixty percent!”

“My phone’s ringing off the hook. All of Mississippi’s competitors want to rebrand their own social shopping networks with our software, but Mississippi wants an exclusive. Oh, and Lystra wants to increase their stake. But OgleNet might make a counter.”

“Great. Let’s meet at the office this afternoon and go over the offers. I’ll take financing immediately, but I’m not selling.” It figured Claire’s and Melissa’s husbands would want to call in their chips.

“No, I didn’t think you would. This is big, man. Big. And oh, Craig Pearson’s not too happy. He thought your data center fire ended you. But Lystra took out a full pager in the
Wall Street Journal:
Virtual Servers Save Shopahol
. And I’m fielding media requests to interview your photogenic build engineer. Is she with you, by any chance?”

“Uh… I want to keep her away from the media.”

“You can’t. Go to OgleNews. Her mug shot is there, and a video of your fight with her kidnapper, photos of the burnt hulk of your bombed rental car. Everything. Oh, you’re not going to like it, but there’s a shot of you kissing her. Think you better slip her the rock. There are rumors you’re going to do a Bill and Melinda Gates style merger.”

Dave cleared his throat. “I’ll see you at two o’clock. Thanks.” He hung up and pinched the bridge of his nose, not daring to look at Jen. Instead, he picked up the remote and switched on the stereo to his dad’s playlist of eighties rock: Foreigner, Phil Collins, John Cougar Mellencamp, Springsteen.

Jen came up behind him and put her arms around his waist, rubbing her face into his back. “I knew it would work. When we replace the data center, we should get Lystra bladeservers and switches. They integrate the storage, network and server fabric into a single management entity. It’s a scalable, unified, policy-driven computing environment for applications, automated provisioning of compute power with the privacy of VLANs, VSANs, Virtual firewalls, combined with the benefits of Lystra network services, QOS, load balancing and SSL tunneling.”

He grabbed her wrist and swung her around to face him. “I love it when you talk shop. You sound like a Lystra commercial.”

“Actually, we could rent the virtual servers, it’s called cloud computing. No more smoke and fire, broken security cameras and pallets raising your workman’s comp insurance. Just a set of conference rooms, work centers, and virtual desktop infrastructure.”

He kissed her. “Virtual.” Kissed her again. “Virtual.” And again. “Virtual.”

“Yes, remote access, remote conferencing, remote collaboration. Lystra sells—”

“No remote nothing. I want you up close and physical.” He cranked up the stereo. “Let me chill the champagne and take a shower. Then, I have a business proposal for you.”

* * *

Jen stepped out of the shower and spritzed herself with Jennifer Lopez
Glow
. A business proposal? Her hand shook while she pressed her contact lenses into her eyes and applied her mascara. From almost getting fired to a promotion? Would he make her head of engineering? She’d redo the build system and replace it with continuous integration.

Every engineer would have a virtual Shopahol powered online commerce system with a simulated social network complete with flocks of bidders. No code would be integrated without a set of automated tests that would run as soon as that module was built. These tests would be provisioned automatically by the build system on a virtual server.

If a test failed, she’d roll back that module while allowing the build to continue to the next section of the code. The build would run continuously without manual intervention and pick up the fixes automatically at its next iteration.

Broken builds would be a thing of the past, a relic of the days of hand-crafted build scripts, a single build system and shared testbeds where a single failure stopped the entire system.

Jen pulled on a long skirt and a soft cashmere sweater. The prepaid cell rang, and she flipped it open.

The gender ambiguous voice said, “Bitch, the stakes just went up. Tell your boyfriend to deposit stock or we blow up the company.”

Cold sweat popped over her brow, but she composed herself. “Try something newer. With virtual servers you can blow up our entire building, but our code will resurrect.”

“We’ll hurt his daughter.”

Jen collapsed onto the bed as the blood drained from her head. She closed her eyes and steeled her voice. “He thinks his daughter’s dead, so that won’t work. Unless you provide me DNA, he won’t listen.”

She shut the phone and turned it off. If they truly had Abby, let them show their hand. She’d give them her stock options and her share of the company to get Abby back. She knelt and laid her head on the bed, her shoulders heaving.
Dear God, don’t let them hurt Abby. They won’t hurt her, would they? Please keep her safe. Amen.

Dave knocked on the door. “Are you presentable?”

“Just a minute.” She stuffed the phone under the pillow and took calming breaths. But nothing worked. He knocked again, and she opened the door, rushing into his open arms. He laughed and spun her around into the living room. Then he popped a champagne bottle and handed her a flute. Hope bubbled in her chest. She’d get Abby back, he’d forgive her, and they’d live happily ever after, or so it went in romance novels.

And there he was, staring at her, his grey eyes warm and focused at the same time. He lowered his eyelids and kissed her knuckles. Jen’s mouth opened slightly as his gaze swept her face slowly. He moved closer. The song by Foreigner “I Want to Know What Love Is” played on the stereo.

Jen held her breath. If he would allow it, she’d love him to the depths of her soul. Helpless under his gaze, she leaned forward.

He brushed her lips lightly as if she would break, then tucked his hand around her neck, caressing in slow motion. Jen’s fingers traveled through his hair and explored the muscles on his shoulders. He stroked her temple and massaged her neck, but did not move further down. His hands comforted and excited her like spiced cider with rum. He stayed respectful, as if proving his honorable intent. Was it business he hinted about? Or something more?

She lost herself in the sensation of being loved, flowing where he led, giving without expectation. The song ended. He touched her face and looked in her eyes. “I’ve waited so long to live again. I want—”

Smash. The sound of breaking glass was followed by shots. Dave pushed her to the floor, covering her. The cathedral windows shattered from ceiling to floor, and wetness trickled onto her cheek.

Chapter 27

“Dave, Dave.” Jen squirmed from under him. She shook him, but he didn’t move. A black-purple mark swiped the side of his temple and a jagged line of blood trailed down his face.

“D-Dave, wake up.”