Firefighter's Virgin

In life, I wasn’t much of a rule breaker. Sure, I liked to push the general rules if they d

idn’t fit with what I was doing with my business, but I never straight out committed crimes. In general, I was a very law-abiding citizen and probably a little tame in the risks I took with my life.

It made me nervous that my trading account had been flagged. I hadn’t ever dealt with a real investigation into my life, either financially or legally, and I really wanted to keep it that way.

After a good thirty minutes of no action on my account, I finally clicked out of it and tried to find something else to keep myself busy as I waited for Del to message me back.

There was plenty for me to do; I certainly wasn’t all that hard up for work. I was working on a new business deal with some of my old partners and we were actively looking for new companies to invest in. I also had a lot to do around my house. I’d spent so many years working that I hadn’t put any effort into decorating the place to show who I was. I was hoping to make it more livable and less like a bachelor pad.

Delilah: I’m doing good. How’s your day?

She texted me. I could have gone into all the crazy flagging that was going on with my account, but all I wanted to do was talk to her. Instead of texting her back, I just dialed her number. It was a bold and spontaneous move that I hoped would come across that way to her.

“What kind of maniac responds to a text by calling someone?” she laughed into the phone as she answered.

“Sorry, I just thought if you were available, I’d much rather hear your voice than just look at your words on the screen,” I said.

“Aww, you’re forgiven. My day is going all right. We seemed to have a hacker in our online system, though. Well, not sure it’s a hacker yet, but the work I did last week has totally reverted and my code needs to be re-written.”

She certainly sounded like a computer woman who knew what she was talking about. I wished Josh was there to hear her talk about her job. It would have put him at ease with all his conspiracy sugar baby talk.

“I’m not sure I understood all of that, but I hope your day gets better.”

“It’s all right. I mean, it’s not like it’s my personal account. At least at the end of the day I get to go home. But I really hate when it looks like I suck at my job. I’m already the only woman in my IT department,” she said. “Oh, crap, I need to run. Get online and I’ll message you there; it looks like I’m working then.”

“Okay,” I laughed as she hung up quickly.

My adrenaline surged at the idea that she wanted to talk to me even though she was at work and might get in trouble for it. I quickly logging into my Dating the Rich account and pulled up the instant messaging to talk to her. She wasn’t there yet and I waited, and waited, and waited.

Talking to Delilah felt weirdly perfect to me. When she finally came online, I couldn’t help but get excited that I’d have a few moments to sneak a conversation in with her while she was at work.

Chapter Nine

Delilah

“So, what did you do to the system this time?” Robert said as he hovered over my desk.

“Like I said in my message to you, I didn’t do it. I actually had the error fixed last week and my changes have been removed. I think it’s possible someone has hacked into the account, but I’m not sure.”

It was so frustrating to talk with Robert about what was going on. He was, by far, the most useless person at our company. He didn’t really do anything. His whole job was to supervise other people while they did their jobs. I didn’t even know what skills the guy actually had. He certainly was good at delegating work and not helping with anything.

He was also good at making me feel like crap and like I wasn’t doing my job well enough.

The way he talked to me, it was as if he thought I was just pretending to know about computers and didn’t really know how to do my job. He didn’t seem to think a woman could do much and often made rude comments about any number of the women in the company. It was surprising that he had lasted so long at our organization because most of the people in charge didn’t seem to share his belief that women weren’t capable.

“Or, it’s possible you don’t know what you’re doing and you messed up?” he asked and then stood there waiting for me to agree with him.

There was no way I could have removed all my own work and I knew it, but I also had learned that arguing with Robert was very counterproductive for me actually getting my work done. He had the strange ability of twisting everything around and making me feel like maybe I had done something wrong.

I could have explained to him what work I had actually completed, and if he had been a halfway decent manager, he might have asked that of me. But instead, he just stood there waiting for me to tell him he was right and that I had totally messed up my own work. It was ridiculous, and I wasn’t about to give in to him. I wasn’t going to let him think that I had messed everything up when I knew I hadn’t.

“It’s possible there is another reason for the errors,” I said. “We have a lot of old code in here and some of it might be interacting poorly with the new code. I’ll go back through it line by line and see what I can find.”

“You’re the one who crashed her computer and had to get a new one last week, right?” he asked.

“Yes, but that wasn’t because of something I did. It just crashed and wouldn’t turn back on,” I protested, although I was starting to see where he was coming from on thinking I had something to do with the errors. “This is the new computer, and it’s working great, I really appreciate you making it happen so quickly so I could keep up with my job tasks.”

My attempt to praise him went unnoticed as he just huffed and tried to figure out what it was he was supposed to do with my information regarding the possible hacking. I really didn’t know if it was hacking, but there was a bigger error than I thought I was capable of fixing and I needed help. He was my supervisor and seemed so worried with what I was doing with my time, I’d hoped he would actually try and help fix the problem.