over him.” Baby took a giant bite of pizza. “Dude is so amazing with computers that he can be unbearable about his own genius sometimes.”
She shook her head. “Sorry. I wasn’t in class with him most days, but he was a great student when I did see him.”
“Damn it. That’s no fun.”
He continued to eat.
“That’s it? You’re not going to ask me why I got fired from Harvard?”
He gave her a shrug. “Doesn’t seem like it’s something you’re very keen on talking about.” He swallowed. “I’m more interested in getting you to eat more of your pizza so that Mr. D doesn’t come after us demanding to know what’s wrong.” He pointed to the half-eaten slice pizza on her plate.
She picked it up. “I just...” she trailed off with a shrug.
She wanted to tell him more but didn’t know what to say. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t handled the situation better at Harvard. She couldn’t believe she’d lost everything so quickly.
She didn’t want him to think of her as the complete loser she felt like.
She set the pizza down again.
“I just...”
He reached over and grabbed her hand, trailing his thumb across her palm. “You don’t want to talk about it. I understand what it’s like to want to keep some things to yourself.”
“Like you?” she asked. “Do you keep things to yourself?”
He released her hand and sat back. “Me? Of course not. Ask anybody in Oak Creek. Everyone knows everything there is to know about me. I’m an open book.”
He tilted his head to the side and gave her a grin. Charming, confident, sassy.
And absolutely hiding something.
Baby Bollinger had secrets. Ones hidden so deep no one knew he was hiding anything at all.
She wasn’t about to press him on it, not while she was refusing to talk about what had happened in Cambridge.
“Eat your pizza and tell me about this whole scholarship fraud ring you broke up with your bare hands. Did the FBI recruit you? Did you have to go to spy academy? Are you 007 status? You have a gun strapped to your thigh, don’t you?”
She laughed, glad the crisis had passed. She picked up her pizza again. “I’m afraid you’ll be quite disappointed by that story. I never had to chase anyone through campus or anything.”
He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a conspirator’s whisper, “Please tell me you at least had to seduce some rogue operatives in order to get the intel you needed.”
She laughed and took a bite of her pizza. “You’ve been watching too many James Bond movies.”
“Is there really such a thing as too many? Okay, spill your guts.”
She laughed. This was much easier to talk about than being accused of stealing and deliberately sabotaging her own career, completely losing her composure, being escorted out by security, and having all her colleagues turn on her.
“It really isn’t a very exciting story to tell. Part of a professor’s job is to sit on various college-wide committees. I was on the computer science department’s scholarship committee.”
“Do you teach computer stuff also?”
“No. But this was for a huge fellowship, a full ride for a master’s degree as well as a doctorate, stipend, living expenses, and pretty much a guarantee that you would get any job you wanted when you got out of school. It was a massive deal, so they always have non-field experts sit on the panel to make sure everything is fair and that they don’t get hive mind or something like that.”
“Seems pretty smart.”
She shrugged. She wished she’d never been a part of it. She’d gotten way too much recognition when it all went down, which had been flattering at the time. But when her career started to fall apart around her, a lot of the accusations had come back to that scholarship case. She’d been accused of snobbery, acting like she was better than her colleagues, having a sense of entitlement.
“Really, all I found was an abnormality. Something about the way one of the candidates worded his essay caught my attention. Honestly, I’m not sure why. I knew I wasn’t of much assistance with the computer stuff, so I was focusing on what I knew. I won’t bore you with all the details of late-night rendezvous and shootouts, while, of course, dressing in bikinis to distract the bad guys.”
She laughed as Baby clutched his heart and pretended to fall over.
“Basically, when I looked a little closer, I found that one of the candidates had written a program which pulled in