Taking On The Billionaire (Redhawk Reunion #1) - Robin Covington Page 0,48

message. I’m not great at checking my message so if this is urgent, call my office and leave a message with Estelle. She always knows how to reach me.

She’d already called and left a message with Estelle and sent him a text with no reply so she’d have to wait to deliver the news that she’d found the mole and who he was working for. It was information that Adam would need to protect Redhawk/Ling and it would also be something she could use for her own purpose. She would see him tonight—they had a date to attend one of those fancy-schmancy fundraiser events at the Nestledown Retreat and she could tell him the news then if he didn’t call back sooner.

She grabbed the paper from the printer, scanning the words and data, marking the most important parts with a highlighter. The mole had all of the skill sets necessary to hack into any system and undermine the launch of the app so finding him at this critical point was momentous. It had taken her until the eleventh hour, but it was still momentous.

And he was also someone who could help her. Adam and Justin were reluctant to discuss the act of pressing charges against the person who was trying to sabotage their company. Making those kinds of headlines so close to the launch would pull the focus off their business and place it all on the company. And exposing the fact that you had been susceptible to a hack was never a good look for a tech company.

But the guy would absolutely lose his job and an unemployed man would be a desperate man and a desperate man would be vulnerable to job offers that highlighted his particular skill. Tess needed a hacker to get the final information on Franklin Thornton to expose him as the thief and destroyer he really was. And now she had one.

Pushing back her chair, Tess strode across her office and pulled out the box where she kept everything she knew about Franklin Thornton and her father. Folders and files, papers yellowed with age, stained with late-night coffee, and likely some tears. Some shed in grief and many more shed in anger. Tess let out a huff of air as she flipped through the stacks and stacks of papers—some of which she’d memorized—as she searched for that fury, the blinding rage that usually asserted itself when she indulged in these walks down memory lane.

It was all here on the table: years of instances when Franklin had taken advantage of people a lot like her father. Franklin didn’t just play games with men and women of his same stature and wealth and power; he played with those who were less than him, taking their dreams from them when he wanted what they had. And he never cared about what happened to them. He never gave them another thought when he’d taken from them everything they had of value.

Franklin hadn’t cared when he’d destroyed her dad. And he hadn’t even cared enough to see Michael Roberts’s daughters when they’d gone to him to beg for help. Both she and Mia had been turned away, hadn’t even gotten past the administrative assistant.

So why was she hesitating now when she almost had him in the crosshairs?

Tess knew why. Adam Redhawk.

She pulled out the chair nearest the table and slumped down into it. She was tired, exhausted and queasy and wanting desperately to go back to bed. Tess touched her forehead, wondering if the infection from three weeks ago hadn’t fully cleared up but she had felt fine after a few days of rest and all of the antibiotics. In truth this was probably related to the long days and even longer nights she’d been spending with Adam since the night of the dinner with this family.

That night had transformed everything between them, turned the entirety of their arrangement completely upside down, and she’d never been so happy and so scared in her whole life.

That wasn’t true. She’d been terrified, bone-deep cold with fear, when she’d suddenly had to face raising Mia all by herself.

But this fear was something different; this was risking it all. To do this with Adam, to give in to what she felt for Adam would mean giving up this vendetta against Franklin. Not because she was worried that Adam would be implicated in any of it but because it would hurt him.

There was no love lost between Adam and his adoptive father but that