Bradley, page 2
part #4 of Romance & Revolutions Series
“Asshole.” It was my turn to stretch back in my chair. “You know you feel guilty because you’ve been ignoring my messages for days.”
Eddie might not admit it, but I had a feeling that holding so many secrets stressed him out sometimes.
He scoffed, playing it off. “I’ve been busy. You’re not the only friend I’ve got who’s been having a kink crisis.”
Then the asshole hacker grinned. “Besides, it sounds like everything is working out just fine.”
“Bullshit.” My fingers itched to throw something at him just to get rid of that stupid grin. “This has not been the easiest few weeks.”
Overall it hadn’t turned out badly, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. On one hand, I would’ve loved to have been able to have more friends in the lifestyle sooner, but on the other…they were Shane and his boss’s friends.
I’d always been careful to keep my explorations in the lifestyle well away from family and my more vanilla friends. It wasn’t anyone’s business what I did in my own bedroom or in a friend’s playroom…especially family.
After seeing the mess Graham was having with his mother and the insanity of listening to mine ask endless weird questions about what two alphas did in the bedroom, I wasn’t in any hurry to get noticed by the rest of the family. But I wasn’t sure if they’d let me gracefully bow out at this point.
I’d enjoyed bugging Shane in the past about all kinds of random things, but now Austin was texting me a dozen times a day. He’d fallen down the porn rabbit hole more than once lately and wanted someone else to poke with crazy questions.
I wasn’t sure why he didn’t just ask Silas, but I had a feeling it was more about pulling me into their circle of friends than odd sex questions he didn’t want to ask his alpha about.
“Come on, Austin said you’re fabulously fun to talk to.” Eddie snickered when I groaned.
“Why didn’t you tell him about all the porn that’s out there?” I snorted when Eddie shrugged. “He knows about all kinds of sex toys but not the good porn.”
“We’ve talked more in the past month than we have in the entire time I’ve known him.” Eddie started out relaxed and then sat up, the teasing smirk falling away. “He didn’t even know my name until recently. We met through a friend of a friend when he needed a little help cleaning up something off the internet.”
That could be anything from erasing dirty pictures to someone’s entire life history, so I didn’t ask.
“Can I ask what changed?” I wasn’t surprised when Eddie shook his head.
“Not yet, but keep bribing Austin with good porn and he’ll probably tell you himself.” Eddie grinned when I rolled my eyes. “No, I’m serious.”
I wasn’t that curious.
“They’re my brother’s friends. I don’t need to know all the weird things about them.” They overshared naturally, so I wasn’t about to deliberately stir up questions.
Eddie shook his head, giving me a disappointed look. “They’re all nice guys. It’s hard for omegas who don’t fit the mold to find friends. Shit. It’s hard for anyone who doesn’t fit the mold to find friends if they don’t have specialized computer skills.”
I shook my head. “You’re the one with specialized skills.” I wanted to laugh at that understatement. “I’m just a regular old computer programmer who leads a terribly boring life. And you know I don’t care about what they’re up to. They’re Shane’s friends…or at least they’re something to him since he’s dating Tanner. I’m not going to butt in on his life. That would just be weird.”
He grinned, ignoring most of my response. “I’ll give you old, but your skills are boring only because you refuse to come to the dark side and play.”
Because I didn’t have his lust for adrenaline and my mother would’ve killed me if I’d gotten thrown in jail for hacking. She still hadn’t forgiven me for tattling to Shane about the matchmaker.
But Eddie wouldn’t understand that side of things. From what he’d said over the years, he and his biological family had parted ways years ago.
“Jail.” I shrugged. “I wouldn’t look good in orange.”
He laughed. “Fine. But I’m telling you, talk to the guys. From what Austin says, I think you’d fit in with them. Who knows, you might even fall for one of them. I mean, how often do submissive omegas who are smart and successful fall in a guy’s lap?”
I snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Wade was kind of sweet in an I’ve-been-hurt sort of way, but the rest of the guys seemed to be carrying more baggage than a cargo ship. Dakota spent more time watching people as characters than he did seeing them as real humans, and Bradley had frowned the entire pool party. That didn’t scream “Get to know me, I’m ready to settle down with my Dom.”
He’d honestly struck me as kind of vanilla in a judgmental way. The entire party he’d refused to put on swim trunks or get undressed since everyone else was naked. Well, everyone but Russ…he was kind of weird, though. For an alpha who seemed really comfortable with his sexuality, everyone being naked had freaked him out. He’d kept mumbling something about rules.
Everyone seemed to like the guy so I wasn’t worried, but he hadn’t come off as the most stable alpha. Honestly, most of Tanner’s friends and family were odd. I wasn’t so delusional that I didn’t recognize the fact that I was lonely, but I wasn’t sure I was that lonely, even if Bradley was hot.
“At the very least they’d make good friends.” Something about Eddie’s grin had me worried. He’d looked just like that before the national news media had started talking about someone hacking government databases. Evidently someone had posted pictures of unfortunate-looking penises in random files as a way of protesting government waste.
I hadn’t asked Eddie about it.
No matter what anyone else said, I had pretty good self-preservation instincts.
If Shane’s friends gave him that smile, I was right to second-guess everything about them. “I’ll think about it, but I’m really not trying to stir up shit at home. My mother is still losing her mind about it all and I can’t handle any more unhinged phone calls.”
I was always skeptical when I listened to other people complain about their insane families because usually, they seemed really normal compared to mine. There was slightly clingy and then there was my mother.
“The closer I get with Shane’s friends, the more likely I am to find drama of some sort.” I liked living under the radar and Shane’s buddies didn’t seem to know what that meant.
Maybe it was the confidence of having money and friends in high places, but they weren’t subtle about their preferences and I didn’t want to end up on the news. Shit, Austin still had paparazzi following him all over the place.
I wasn’t as daring as Eddie, but I didn’t need that kind of notoriety just because I was bored and they were funny.
Eddie couldn’t disagree with that one. “Come on, when have you been afraid of drama or making good decisions?”
Rolling my eyes, I snorted. “You’re thinking of yourself. Not me.”
“Fine.” He’d given in way too easily, but I wasn’t going to poke at it. “If you insist on being boring, how about we discuss a job instead?”
It should have been a complete one-eighty, but I knew better.
“What kind of job?” I wasn’t opposed to the occasional interesting side job that was too unique to go through normal channels, but with Eddie, I knew to be careful.
He grinned, making me even more wary. “I’ve got a client who needs a website set up. It needs to look very vanilla and boring on the outside, but the good stuff is going to be hidden behind a few icons.”
“Am I making a porn site?” I hadn’t technically worked on any, but I consulted on a few to figure out how to keep the fun parts from being too easily found by government censors.
That just earned me a vague shrug. “Not exactly.”
His poker face sucked. “What does that mean?”
“I can’t tell you. The owner wants to chat with you first to make sure you’re not insane or some kind of alpha asshole.” He said it sincerely enough that I knew he wasn’t lying, but he was leaving something out.
“Is this going to get me in legal trouble?” I was saving for a bigger house, not a bail fund.
He flung his hands out in a casual, no idea kind of way. “No more than the porn sites.”
That wasn’t a good answer either, but at least it probably put it in the gray area. “Okay, have them email my secondary account. What did you tell them about me?”
Most of the time we had specific protocols for dealing with interesting jobs. I’d use my middle name and a completely private email account to start…and I only worked by referral from a select group of people I’d known for years.
Shane might have gotten in with the money and political clout crowd, but I knew more than a few interesting people too. The only difference was they weren’t trying to end up on the gossip channels.
Eddie grinned entirely too widely. “That your name is Michael and you’ve done sites similar to this before and you’re not an asshole.”
“Thanks.” I rolled my eyes. “If this backfires on me, I’m going to make sure all your porn accounts magically vanish.”
Laughing, Eddie didn’t look bothered by the threat. “You’re going to owe me more than a few beers after this one.”
How much was this guy going to pay?
“We’ll see.” I sat up. “Why aren’t you doing it?”
“Too busy.” He answered quickly enough that it seemed honest. “I’ve got a few things going and I don’t have any free time at this point.”
That sounded legit.
“Alright, have them email me with more specifics and any questions they’ve got.” I groaned when Eddie finally looked guilty.
“I might have already done that.” He gave me a casual, I’m too cute for you to be mad at grin. “I knew you wouldn’t say no and there wasn’t anyone else I trusted with this.”
There were holes I could drive a truck through in all this bullshit but I trusted the asshole, so I nodded. “Fine.”
He grinned. “You’re going to have a blast with this.”
“I’ll settle for boring and pays well, thanks.” But judging by his expression, I wasn’t going to get that.
“Money’s no problem. He’ll pay your regular side job rates.” Eddie’s response had one of my concerns alleviated, but there were plenty where that one came from.
There were only a handful of website developers who’d do the more specialized sites, so it wasn’t a cheap endeavor. It wasn’t so much that people had no idea how to do it; mostly it was just about looking down on people who were more unique. There were assholes in every profession, but the watchdogs had done a good job of making anyone outside the vanilla box look evil.
But it left more fun for the rest of us, so I probably shouldn’t complain too much.
Some days, however, I was really curious if the government knew how many sites with hidden content like the kink porn were actually out there. But I wasn’t curious enough to ask Eddie because he’d probably hack some system just to figure it out.
I was leaning toward them deliberately ignoring what was really going on so they didn’t have to actually legislate it. Most people were blind to the layers of fun on the internet and the government wanted to keep it that way.
“Okay.” I wasn’t going to ask any more questions until I’d touched base with the guy, so I changed the subject.
“Hey, you still talk with that beta you introduced me to a few years ago who had the dungeon? I tried looking him up the other day and the old email I had didn’t work anymore.” I wasn’t going down the rabbit hole looking for him if Eddie already had the info.
Eddie sighed, his excitement finally fading. “His alpha got married to his boring little omega who’s so traditional it’s scary. So Jim closed down the dungeon and moved. A combination of memories and worried if the asshole would out him.”
“Did he out him?” Shit, his dungeon had been amazing and he had the most interesting friends who’d come over to play on the weekends.
Eddie shook his head. “No, but I wouldn’t want to take the risk, so I get it. He moved clear across the country from what I heard.”
“That’s rough.” It wasn’t surprising, but it sucked to hear about it.
From what I’d seen of other couples in the lifestyle, that wasn’t uncommon. If it was a bad breakup, there were always fears about what could go wrong. Sometimes they were unfounded, but occasionally there were asshole exes that made things difficult.
From what he’d said, Eddie had started hacking originally to get some pictures and rumors off the net after a friend in college had gotten outed as an alpha Dom. The guy had ended up changing schools, but Eddie had made sure the rumors hadn’t followed him.
Things like that were one of the reasons I liked to keep my preferences and needs to myself. It was also why I was cautious about who I dated and why I’d been single for so fucking long. When a bad breakup could ruin your business and out you to the community at large, it made some people cautious.
“I’ll let you know if I hear of anything like that, though.” Eddie looked as frustrated as I felt. “But it’s been super quiet lately.”
Which did not bode well for my dating life.
“Thanks, man.” I glanced up at the clock and grinned. “Got to go. The game’s starting soon and if I time it right, I’ll cockblock Shane again.”
Eddie laughed. “You’re such an asshole. Have fun.”
Yes, I would. “Don’t dodge my messages anymore, prick.”
Still laughing, he made no promises before ending the video call.
He was probably right about being an asshole, but driving Shane nuts was the highlight of my week and really, at this point, I had a feeling that Tanner was starting to like it. I also had a feeling that Shane’s omega liked drama and a bit of exhibitionism, even if he looked super boring most of the time.
I was just grateful that looks could be deceiving.
Chapter 3
Bradley
Between research, phone calls, and just plain stupid questions, it felt like the day would never end. “Mr. Stein, I can’t be any clearer. You are not authorized to withdraw any funds in that account or make any trades. If you call again, I will inform the courts.”
The asshole hung up, muttering something about just wanting to make sure his mother’s money was taken care of, but I knew it was time to call her lawyer again. Picking up my phone, I hit the most used button on it.
“Yes, Mr. Lang?” Mary was probably pushing fifty and was one of the most boring people I’d ever met, but she’d never asked me a personal question in the five years she’d worked for me, so she was one of my favorite people at the office.
“Will you please call Mrs. Stein’s lawyer and let him know that her son is trying to access her funds again?” The huff she made actually made me smile for the first time all day.
“Yes, sir. I will do that right now.” Then she disconnected the call.
Yep, her social skills were worse than mine, but most of the clients liked her for some crazy reason. After meeting her, Austin said that the reason everyone liked her was that she was more personable than me.
He was probably right.
Going back to work, I finished up the last few calls that required my personal attention. By the time I was done, Mary had left for the day along with just about everyone else. Once the stock market closed, most people started wrapping up the day.
Normally I’d stay as late as I needed to because there wasn’t much to go home to, but today I was on a deadline. The walkthrough with Graham and Russ was within the hour and I had to head out soon. But first…one last email.
Turning to my personal laptop, I brought up my email account. I’d memorized the simple email address for the IT person when Austin’s odd computer guy had first given it to me, so it only took seconds to bring up a blank email and get it set up.
I only used this email for highly personal things and I’d been guaranteed by Austin’s computer guy that it couldn’t be traced back to me. He’d been right. So that didn’t explain why I’d put off emailing the web developer. Forcing myself to look at it logically, I had to admit sharing the information about the club with a stranger felt wrong.
Even though I’d been assured this new IT guy was trustworthy, it still felt like we were putting a lot of faith in a stranger. Unfortunately, none of us had the skills to put together a website like this, and even if we had, finding the time to do it would’ve been almost impossible. Between real work, getting ready for the club, and some of the guys actually having a personal life, we were all putting in too many hours each day.
And if I was admitting that, it really was a problem.
I stared at the blank screen for too long before finally muttering fuck it and just charging right in, hopefully polite enough that Austin wouldn’t kill me if the guy blew me off. After writing a quick, professional greeting, I got to the point.
Kind of.
I wanted to get to know him first before I spilled everything about the club, so I explained I needed a business website that looked very simple, but that I needed hidden layers so only people who knew how to access the real site would know how to find the true information. Since it sounded fishy even to me, I also assured him that while I wanted to maintain the utmost privacy, it was not illegal in any way.
Since getting to know him was my primary goal, I added a few questions at the end about his views on BDSM and if he had any personal biases that would make working with someone in the lifestyle an issue. The email sounded dry, but reading through it, I didn’t see anywhere that I came across like an asshole.
Quickly sending it off, I finished closing up everything and slipping my personal laptop in my bag. The back office wasn’t pleased about my having a personal computer at the office, but after pointing out how many hours I worked and how much I was bringing in for the company, the annoying email lectures had magically stopped.
I was very careful not to use my personal computer for anything work-related and I made it clear they were crazy if they thought I was going to handle any personal business that came up during the day on my work devices.
