Her siblings were champions of social justice, each in their own way, just as her parents and grandparents had been in their younger days. Their humanitarian activities were administered by the Russel Corporation, and, as one of the corporation’s chief operation managers, Audra had the role of overseeing a variety of projects—from hiring the expertise needed on different jobs and organising the delivery of necessary equipment and goods, to wrangling with various licences and permissions that needed to be secured, and filling in endless government grant forms. And in her spare time she fundraised. It was hectic, high-powered and high-stakes.
For the last five years her sister, Cora, a scientist, had been working on developing a new breakthrough vaccine for the Ebola virus. While such a vaccine would help untold sufferers of the illness, it also had the potential to make pharmaceutical companies vast sums of money.
She tried to slow the churning of her stomach. ‘Thomas was after Cora’s formulae and research. We know now that he was working for a rival pharmaceutical company. We suspect he deliberately targeted me, and that our meeting at a fundraising dinner wasn’t accidental.’
From the corner of her eye she saw Finn nod. She couldn’t look at him. Instead she twisted her hands together in her lap and watched the progress of a small crab as it moved from one rock pool to another. ‘He obviously worked out my computer password. There were times when we were in bed, when I thought he was asleep, and I’d grab my laptop to log in quickly just to check on something.’
She watched in fascination as his hand clenched and then unclenched. ‘You’d have had to have more than one password to get anywhere near Cora’s data.’
‘Oh, I have multiple passwords. I have one for my laptop, different ones for my desktop computers at home and work. There’s the password for my Russel Corporation account. And each of the projects has its own password.’ There’d been industrial espionage attempts before. She’d been briefed on internet and computer security. ‘But it appears he’d had covert cameras placed around my apartment.’
‘How...?’
How did he get access? ‘I gave him a key.’ She kept her voice flat and unemotional. She’d given an industrial spy unhampered access to her flat—what an idiot! ‘I can tell you now, though, that all those romantic dinners he made for us—’ his pretext for needing a key ‘—have taken on an entirely different complexion.’ It’d seemed mean-spirited not to give him a key at the time, especially as he’d given her one to his flat.
He swore. ‘Did he have cameras in the bedroom?’
‘No.’ He’d not sunk that low. But it didn’t leave her feeling any less violated. ‘But...but he must’ve seen me do some stupid, ugly, unfeminine things on those cameras. And I know it’s nothing on the grand scale, but...it irks me!’
‘What kind of things?’
She slashed a hand through the air. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Like picking my teeth or hiking my knickers out from uncomfortable places, or... Have you ever seen a woman put on a pair of brand-new sixty-denier opaque tights?’
He shook his head.
‘Well, it’s not sexy. It looks ludicrous and contortionist and it probably looks hilarious and... And I feel like enough of a laughing stock without him having footage of that too.’
A strong arm came about her shoulder and pulled her in close. Just for a moment she let herself sink against him to soak up the warmth and the comfort. ‘He played me to perfection,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t suspect a damn thing. I thought—’ She faltered. ‘I thought he liked me.’
His arm tightened about her. ‘He was a damn fool. The man has to be a certifiable idiot to choose money over you, sweetheart.’
He pressed his lips to her hair and she felt an unaccountable urge to cry.
She didn’t want to cry!
‘Stop it.’ She pushed him away and leapt down from the rock. ‘Don’t be nice to me. My stupidity nearly cost Cora all of the hard work she’s put in for the last five years.’
‘But it didn’t.’
No, it hadn’t. And it was hard to work up an outraged stomp in flip-flops, and with the Aegean spread before her in twinkling blue perfection and the sun shining down as if the world was full of good things. The files Thomas had stolen were old, and, while to an outsider the formulae and hypotheses looked impressive, the work was neither new nor ground-breaking. Audra didn’t have access to the information Thomas had been so anxious to get his hands on for the simple fact that she didn’t need it. The results of Cora’s research had nothing to do with Audra’s role at work.