Vince made an impatient noise. “If you see Mr. Nutter, you should impress upon him that he’s in very grave danger as long as that data remains unsecured.”
“Yep. Sure will. If I happen to see him.” I would find Buck myself and literally impress that on his forehead if his skinny ass didn’t cough up the Horn.
“And you might tell him that if he sells, gives away, or loses the information, not only will the cartel want to find him… so will we. And we won’t be quiet about it.”
I grimaced. Awesome. I envisioned a nightmare scenario where Champion Security made front-page news for aiding and abetting a thief with a name like Nutter. The puns—and Jesus Christ, I hated puns—would write themselves unto infinity, and the company I’d thrown my heart, soul, sweat, and tears into would never recover.
“Always great talking to you, Vince,” I said in a bored tone. “We’ll have to catch up in another five years. Or ten. Or never.”
“Tell Bunny I say hello,” the smug bastard said.
There was literally no way. “And give Igor my best.”
“His name is Ivan, Percy. Don’t be petty.”
Petty? I’d give the cheating bastard petty. I was going to find the fucking Horn, and I was going to take it directly to Vince’s supervisor.
I jabbed the End button before I said anything that would get me sent to Guantanamo or trigger an IRS audit.
Before I could send a group text warning my team about an early morning all-hands meeting to tackle this issue, Alana stopped by my table. “You ready to cash out, Champ?”
I drummed my fingers on the table, pondering this. The urge to get seriously drunk—drunk enough to lose myself for a few hours, to maybe forget how Vince’s nails-on-a-chalkboard voice sounded when he said the word Percy—was hard to resist.
“I know a drink called a Howling Turtle that’ll cure whatever ails you,” a sweet voice said as the dark-haired man from earlier slid into the empty seat beside me. The look in his eyes was dialed up from attractive to blatant-eye-fuckingly-irresistible, and he smiled blindingly as he held out a hand for me to shake. “Quinn,” he purred.
“Quinn,” I said softly, tasting the weight of his name on my tongue and leaning into his space. He smelled like salt water and herbs, something way subtler than I would have expected based on his outfit. “If you think a single drink can cure me, baby, then you don’t know what ails me.”
His smile softened, deepened, heated. “Then maybe what you need isn’t a drink at all.”
“Maybe it isn’t.”
He bit his lip and laid one small, soft hand on my thigh, just high enough for me to imagine it even higher. “Maybe we start with a drink and see what comes next?”
I took a deep breath and thought about throwing myself into a mindless night of stress-relieving sex with this beautiful stranger. Tomorrow I could focus on solving the problem of the missing data. Tonight I could focus on getting a little drunk and a lotta laid.
I held up my hand for the server. “Two Howling Turtles please.”