The Passionate Mistake Read Free Page A

more lines of code before abandoning it.  It was code for populating a website with a dozen features and it was too esoteric. She wanted a program that was truly generic, and this wasn’t it.
    Without at first realizing it, she was staring at Mike again. Dark-haired and handsome as the devil. Intense and charming. He gazed at his tablet, a small furrow between his brows. He looked up and scanned the room. She ducked her head just before he caught her watching him again. But it was the others he was looking at: his programmers, not her hovering to one side of the room. He was looking at his tablet and then back up as if puzzled. Looking at Francine, in fact.
    She shrugged and dismissed him from her mind with a small effort, refocusing on the next software file, translating code with an ease born of years of practice. This was a little closer to what she wanted: an application for organizing and scheduling a busy working mother’s overwhelming workload; tying into Dave’s presentation, no doubt.
    Motherhood was generic. There were billions of mothers in the world. Perhaps she had the right program. But it looked like only half of it. A shell of user interface designed to wrap around a deeper functionality. There were chunks missing. Were they still in development? Or was there another level of data she had not yet reached?
    Just like every damned program -in-progress she’d accessed so far, which pointed to a library of source code that was nowhere she could access. It must be locked up in the Datacentre. There were no hidden rooms anywhere in the building and the only other locked section was the plushy office suite on the first floor for the Platform Division’s programmers.
    She brought up her worm and sent it tunneling through the networks, searching for links to the mothers’ program, anything she might have missed. She was distracted each time the speaker changed, and a couple of times found herself Mike-watching again, but mostly her task held her attention until the series of presentations came to an end. The subject of the meeting was the gathered thoughts of this work team on their current projects, the Inspirations. Served out to the team via auditory medium and tactile (the folders), and now they would discuss the ideas.
    It was a process that was supposed to engage the team fully. She knew the theories behind it, and it all sounded like hooey to her. Just send people an email telling them what they were supposed to do, and then let them get on with it. This sort of thing was such a waste of time.
    Anyway the discussion was really the part of the event where she was expected to take notes. The actual presentations would already have been emailed to everyone anyway. The debate was the soul of it.
    She disconnected from the remote server running the search and tucked her worm’s results well out of sight. When everything looked innocuous enough she put her tablet in the centre of the table for best sound pick up, then backed away and tried to look like wallpaper.
    As the discussion proceeded it was hard to keep her mouth shut. Bright as the members of the team were, there were holes and gaps in their thinking. She longed to plug them. Incompetence was difficult to tolerate. Twice her mouth fell open and she drew breath ready to speak. Twice she squelched herself. Not her place, not her role, and definitely not part of her plan.
    The second time Mike Summers caught the movement, looking at her again with his eyebrows raised. With the whole room attuned to him, it was only seconds before heads started to turn her way and the speaker of the moment stammered and paused. Cathy put her hands behind her back and looked at the floor in stony denial she had anything to contribute, and after a moment the speaker resumed, faltering slightly.
    Whoops. Way to go, staying below the radar. Next ti me she was asked to do this job she would just leave her tablet in the centre of the table and leave, and let anyone who wanted to