Rich (Benson Security 5)

“Hey!” they both shouted.

“No devices at the table,” Harvard said firmly.

“Are you going to ground them?” Ryan asked as he laughed.

The concierge chose that moment to buzz up to tell them their pizza was there. Before Harvard could ask someone to get it, Ryan was out of his seat and running.

“There won’t be any left by the time he gets back,” Elle complained, her attention on her laptop. Harvard could have sworn there were tears in her eyes.

“So,” he said, placing his contraband on the seat beside him, “if there has been internal hacking in the system, the ghost program would have found it, right?”

“Right.” Elle nodded.

“Then how are they stealing the files?” Rachel said, looking pretty pissed off.

Pissed off he could cope with; it was miles better than politely distant.

“I don’t know.” Elle’s head dropped to the table and stayed there.

Okay, so that’s what happened when you took away her favorite toy.

Rachel got up and brought back plates, napkins, and silverware, which she put on the table. “There’s no need to be barbarians,” she said when he cocked an eyebrow at her.

It was the first time they’d sat down together at the table to eat. Normally, on the way home from work, Rachel called for delivery from one of the hotel restaurants she liked. When it arrived, they dished it up, and Rachel took hers to her bedroom, leaving him alone. Harvard hated to admit defeat, but he was beginning to wonder if he’d been mistaken in thinking the attraction between them went both ways.

When Ryan came in with the pizzas, he was already eating a slice.

“Told you,” Elle said, her head still on the table, but angled to watch Ryan.

“There’s still plenty left.” He put the boxes down on the table, opened the lids, and started piling up slices on his plate.

“Not for long,” Elle muttered, sitting up to get some before Ryan demolished it all.

Rachel just stared at the boxes. “What is this? Where did we get it? This isn’t the pizza I usually get.”

Ryan shook his head at her, but there was a twitch of a smile around his lips. “That’s because your pizza usually comes from a Michelin star chef and is dusted with gold.”

“As it should be,” she answered with a completely straight face.

“Just try it,” Harvard said. “You might like it.”

When she made no move to get any, he took a slice from the meat lover’s pizza and put it on her plate. She stared at it as though it’d dropped from Mars.

“You can do it, Rachel,” he said with a grin. “I have faith in you.”

Shooting him a glare, she picked up her knife and fork and cut off a piece, which she delicately put into her mouth.

“That’s not how you eat pizza!” Ryan was outraged. He was also covered in pizza sauce.

Rachel ignored him and inclined her head in thought as she chewed. “This is tolerable,” she said at last, making Harvard chuckle.

Harvard went to the wine rack and grabbed a bottle of red wine for Rachel. He put it and a glass beside her. Then he sat back down, picked up his beer, and ate pizza the way normal people did it—with his fingers.

“Okay,” he said once he’d finished a slice, “I have an idea. What we need to do is give the thief a window of opportunity they can’t resist and hope they take it. If they do, and we don’t manage to catch them, we’ll still be able to narrow down the ways they might be using to steal from TayFor.”

“You want to set a trap,” Ryan said.

Harvard nodded. “We tell everyone the network’s compromised, but only for a very limited time. Then we monitor the cameras and run when the system says there’s been a download.”