Chapter One

Roddy Morgan slipped his hand inside my skirt while I was at the water cooler. Warm on my tepid skin, his palm raised goose bumps on the flesh, and a quiver that ran from the nape of my neck to the groped cheek below. I was getting a drink. He was getting into my panties. I scooted away, while trying to fend off the curious glances of three power executives walking the corridor looking seriously glum, a little offended by what they thought they saw, but too busy to bother with Roddy’s mischief and my blushing face. As a rule, I make it a point to avoid the glances of self-important men, to stay on the sidelines, lost in the shuffle of the frantic office. I also took my life leisurely, remaining most of the time buried in a back corner of the research department, beyond rows and rows of rickety wooden file shelves eight feet high, where my cluttered desk sat like a tribute to an independent thinker. At the moment of the three men’s passing, I did catch a pair of dark and steamy eyes focused almost cruelly on me, but I don’t remember who they belonged to. Those eyes were as effective as Roddy’s hand on my derriere was for making me have sexual thoughts, but they were gone too soon for me to connect them with identifying details such as a face, or a tie, or a pressed suit, or a distinctive body shape.

Back at my desk, I turned on my ancient monitor—the pixel count was bad and the color fading—but it generally did the trick. There were precious few funds for the equipment I needed, given the job I was supposed to do, part of which was surfing the Internet for information the advertising agents needed for clients, for marketing strategies and for sales leads, for verbiage required to make the ‘Big’ sell. I was supposed to know it all, find anything anyone needed at a glance. And once the faceless souls had what they wanted and left my stuffy cubicle for the wider world of their fancy offices, I was ignored. That’s exactly how I liked it then; suited me to a tee. No one got into my private business and I didn’t care about anyone else’s. I was saved from the secretarial pool chatter in my corner behind the office files—they really didn’t plan on my position when they arranged offices and desks, but the isolation was my salvation.

My only real contact with humanity other than the string of assignments that justified my being here was with Roddy, a quirky computer technician, who was in my spac