“No way,” Jess Carlyle, head IT tech, said under his breath. “Whoever did this is a diabolical genius.”
Yeah, Dalton had already figured that out. But he wasn’t feeling nearly as warm and fuzzy about it as Jess seemed to be. “What do you mean?”
“The reason you couldn’t click on the icons is because your desktop is a picture of your desktop. Your actual desktop is underneath it. See?” He hit escape and the picture minimized. “I’m going to restart your computer and it should go back to normal.” He hit a series of buttons and then the log-in box came up. “Enter your password.”
Dalton leaned forward to type it in. Instead of opening to the desktop, the screen flickered for a second before saying he’d entered the wrong password. He entered it again and still nothing. She’d reset his password too. He’d give her points for creativity—right after he turned her over his knee and spanked that luscious bottom of hers.
“Can you reset my password?”
“Sure.” Jess typed and a series of screens came up. He typed and typed. “Enter your new password.”
Dalton typed in a new password and made a mental note to add it to the password list in his phone as opposed to the sticky note under his desk. He had no doubt he’d do something to piss Harmony off again soon, and he was a man who learned from his mistakes.
“What in the holy hell is going on here?” Barry Lamont boomed from the doorway. He stabbed the air in front of him with his tablet. He touched the screen, pulled something up, and waved it like Dalton could see it from fifty feet away. “You gave everyone a raise?”
“Jess, can you please excuse us?” Dalton shoved his hands in his pockets and tried not to think of all of the ways he was going to kill Harmony.
“You bet.” The computer guy left his laptop on the desk and strolled out of the office. “I’ll just see if Eleanor has any of that pie left.”
Wait a minute. Harmony had brought his assistant a pie? All he’d gotten were chocolate chip cookies, and Harm had taken those with her before he’d even gotten one. Which, come to think of it, didn’t seem fair considering all the havoc she had wrought.
“A raise …?” Barry was a domineering control freak who liked to think that he ran the world. “Son, what were you thinkin’?”
“My computer was hacked and an email was sent out without my knowledge or consent.” He’d gotten and kept this job by not backing down. “I’ll fix it.”
He couldn’t exactly say that he’d handcuffed Lyric Montgomery’s evil twin in his office and it was payback. Especially not after the meeting they’d just had with the commissioner.
“You’d better, or start looking for a new job.” Barry stormed out just like he’d stormed in.
Dalton took a couple of deep breaths and pulled up his sent emails. Harm had given everyone except the players, coaches, and cheerleaders a five-thousand-dollar-a-year raise. He scrubbed his face with his hands. With a few keystrokes, she’d added six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to his annual budget. How exactly did he revoke an almost company-wide raise without
angering his employees?
Yes, he could send out another email explaining the situation, but people were funny about their money. They wouldn’t care that it had all been a joke.
What a big fuckin’ mess.
It looked like he’d be spending the rest of the afternoon finding a way to squeeze an additional six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars out of the budget—which was not at all what he’d had planned.
Then again, nothing had gone as he’d planned since Five-Alarm Harm had walked into his life. The woman was a force of nature, and trying to control her was proving was fruitless.
What surprised him the most was that he didn’t want to control her. Even after everything she’d done, he wanted to sit back and watch her in action.
* * *
Chapter 12
* * *
“I still don’t understand why didn’t you tell me about the tabloids running with the bar fight?” Harmony was having a hard time making eye contact with her twin because Lyric had her eyes trained on her laptop. When Lyric was working, the world around her stopped spinning.
It was high school all over again. Harmony raised hell and Lyric got blamed for it. What did a girl have to do to lose her good reputation?
“Because it’s stupid. Everyone is making a big deal out of nothing.”
Lyric was super smart, like genius smart. Because her brain was too busy solving the mysteries of the universe, she tended not to notice or care about things like pop culture, tabloids, and social interaction. Sometimes it was hard to impress upon her that other things besides astrophysics actually mattered.
“Are you sure?” Harm watched Lyric for any sign that her twin was taking fallout because of her. The last thing she wanted was to hurt Lyric in any way. They might be as different as two twins could be, but she would do anything for Lyric.