I shook my head. “You’re the one withspecializedskills.” I wanted to laugh at that understatement. “I’m just a regular oldcomputer programmer who leads a terribly boring life. And you know I don’t careabout what they’re up to. They’re Shane’s friends…or at least they’re somethingto him since he’s dating Tanner. I’m not going to butt in on his life. Thatwould just be weird.”
He grinned, ignoring most of my response.“I’ll give you old, but your skills are boring only because you refuse to cometo the dark side and play.”
Because I didn’t have his lust foradrenaline and my mother would’ve killed me if I’d gotten thrown in jail forhacking. She still hadn’t forgiven me for tattling to Shane about thematchmaker.
But Eddie wouldn’t understand that side ofthings. From what he’d said over the years, he and his biological family hadparted ways years ago.
“Jail.” I shrugged. “I wouldn’t look goodin orange.”
He laughed. “Fine. But I’m telling you,talk to the guys. From what Austin says, I think you’d fit in with them. Whoknows, you might even fall for one of them. I mean, how often do submissiveomegas who are smart and successful fall in a guy’s lap?”
I snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Wade was kind of sweet in an I’ve-been-hurtsort of way, but the rest of the guys seemed to be carrying more baggage than acargo ship. Dakota spent more time watching people as characters than he didseeing them as real humans, and Bradley had frowned the entire pool party. Thatdidn’t scream “Get to know me, I’m ready to settle down with my Dom.”
He’d honestly struck me as kind of vanillain a judgmental way. The entire party he’d refused to put on swim trunks or getundressed since everyone else was naked. Well, everyone but Russ…he was kind ofweird, though. For an alpha who seemed really comfortable with his sexuality,everyone being naked had freaked him out. He’d kept mumbling something aboutrules.
Everyone seemed to like the guy so I wasn’tworried, but he hadn’t come off as the most stable alpha. Honestly, most ofTanner’s friends and family were odd. I wasn’t so delusional that I didn’trecognize the fact that I was lonely, but I wasn’t sure I wasthatlonely, even if Bradley was hot.
“At the very least they’d make goodfriends.” Something about Eddie’s grin had me worried. He’d looked just likethat before the national news media had started talking about someone hackinggovernment databases. Evidently someone had posted pictures ofunfortunate-looking penises in random files as a way of protesting governmentwaste.
I hadn’t asked Eddie about it.
No matter what anyone else said, I hadpretty good self-preservation instincts.
If Shane’s friends gave him that smile, Iwas right to second-guess everything about them. “I’ll think about it, but I’mreally not trying to stir up shit at home. My mother is still losing her mindabout it all and I can’t handle any more unhinged phone calls.”
I was always skeptical when I listened toother people complain about their insane families because usually, they seemedreally normal compared to mine. There was slightly clingy and then there was mymother.
“The closer I get with Shane’s friends, themore likely I am to find drama of some sort.” I liked living under the radarand Shane’s buddies didn’t seem to know what that meant.
Maybe it was the confidence of having moneyand friends in high places, but they weren’t subtle about their preferences andI didn’t want to end up on the news. Shit, Austin still had paparazzi followinghim all over the place.
I wasn’t as daring as Eddie, but I didn’tneed that kind of notoriety just because I was bored and they were funny.
Eddie couldn’t disagree with that one.“Come on, when have you been afraid of drama or making good decisions?”
Rolling my eyes, I snorted. “You’re thinkingof yourself. Not me.”
“Fine.” He’d given in way too easily, but Iwasn’t going to poke at it. “If you insist on being boring, how about wediscuss a job instead?”
It should have been a complete one-eighty,but I knew better.
“What kind of job?” I wasn’t opposed to theoccasional interesting side job that was too unique to go through normalchannels, but with Eddie, I knew to be careful.
He grinned, making me even more wary. “I’vegot a client who needs a website set up. It needs to look very vanilla andboring on the outside, but the good stuff is going to be hidden behind a fewicons.”
“Am I making a porn site?” I hadn’ttechnically worked on any, but I consulted on a few to figure out how to keepthe fun parts from being too easily found by government censors.
That just earned me a vague shrug. “Notexactly.”
His poker face sucked. “What does thatmean?”
“I can’t tell you. The owner wants to chatwith you first to make sure you’re not insane or some kind of alpha asshole.”He said it sincerely enough that I knew he wasn’t lying, but he was leavingsomething out.
“Is this going to get me in legal trouble?”I was saving for a bigger house, not a bail fund.
He flung his hands out in a casual,noideakind of way. “No more than the porn sites.”
