Lauren (Silicon Valley Billionaires 1)

My phone buzzed. It was my sister, calling instead of texting.

“Hannah? Are you okay?”

“Yeah—I just wanted to call you first thing. Are you in the office? Have you been online yet?” There was a breathless urgency in her voice.

“Not yet.” I headed out to the kitchen and fired my laptop immediately. “I’m logging on now. What is it?”

“It’s Clive. He’s been arrested.”

“What?” I asked, heading to the Valley News website.

I read the article, which was only two short paragraphs. It said that Clive Warren had been arrested on tax evasion charges, and that he was awaiting arraignment.

“Tax evasion?” I asked. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know. And the other weird thing? I called my contact at the Valley News, and he said he’d heard from his police source that Clive turned himself in.”

What the actual fuck? “Thanks Hannah. If you hear anything else, call m

e, okay?”

We hung up after she promised to have her bodyguard breathing down her neck all day, and I promised to check in with her later.

I started the Keurig, made myself coffee, and commenced pacing.

I had been on the verge of calling the police. Clive had gone ahead and done it himself. But why?

There was only one answer, and it wasn’t because Clive had grown a set of ethics overnight and decided to pay his back taxes—if he actually owed back taxes.

Gabe came out of the bedroom, in a snug-fitting T-shirt and boxer briefs. I tried not to ogle his hot body. The timing was so not right. He smiled at me as he headed toward the coffeemaker but seeing my expression, he stopped. “What’s the matter, babe?”

I tapped my fingers against my mug, jittery. “Clive Warren’s been arrested.”

The sleepy look vanished from Gabe’s face. “For?”

“Tax evasion.”

Gabe blinked, processing the news. He made it to the coffeemaker, hit the button and turned to me. “I’m guessing he turned himself in.”

I nodded. “And you know why, right?”

He crossed his arms against his chest, his biceps popping. I sort of wished I was his prisoner, and that he could keep me restrained with those big arms—and that I didn’t have to deal with the fact that my world was crashing down around me this morning.

“Because he doesn’t want to wind up dead at his office?”

I nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. He’s afraid of them. He’s afraid of what they’ll do.”

I started pacing again, my insides tangling in a mixture of guilt and panic. “I might be responsible for this, you know. Maybe Li Na found out that he’d talked to me yesterday and she was upset. Maybe he was afraid of what she’d do.”

“Babe, come on.” Exasperation rolled off him in waves. “You can’t feel guilty about this—Clive Warren hacked you. He stole from you. He sold your information to the Chinese, and now they’re trying to reverse engineer the technology you’ve worked on for years.”

Even though that was true, guilt still knotted my insides. “But they’re failing. They’re angry—and he’s so afraid of them, he turned himself into the police.”

Gabe’s eyes were stormy. “I don’t care about Clive, for fuck’s sake. Good riddance—whether it’s because he’s in jail or because Zhao puts a bullet in him.”

I whirled on him. “You can’t mean that.” I appreciated his loyalty, but sometimes, his protectiveness outweighed his common decency.

“Of course I mean it. He threatened you. He’s put you squarely in harm’s way—with people he’s so afraid of, he’s gone to jail rather than face them. I have zero sympathy for him, babe.”