Fire And Flame

Lily, on the way back home, kept smiling at Laura.

"What?" Laura felt annoyed.

"Wear the baby pink colored dress tomorrow," Lily kept on smiling like a fool.

"Why don't you go instead? You seem very interested." Laura turned to look outside the window.

"I wish… but he has eyes only for you I guess… Sad." Lily smiled widely, displaying her whole set of white teeth.

"Shut it, will you?" Laura didn't bother to look at her best friend, who was being random.

---

Next morning, Laura and Lily headed to office. Laura had asked Kelvin to take a day off from work. Laura drove to the office.

"It is so simple! How can you have a date with the CEO of Maple wearing such a simple dress?" Lily nagged the whole way to office.

"It is what I wear on usual days. And yes, we are not going on a date. He said he would have lunch with me, not date me." Laura answered, her eyes fixed on the wide road.

"You know what, stay single. Who goes on lunch with BRANDON REYNOLDS in office dress?" Lily was clearly frustrated.

"I do." Laura answered honestly.

"Ouch!" she felt a familiar pain on her arm.

Lily pinched her.

"Can you stop that?"

"No, I won't."

---

While Laura was busy reading a file, she heard the door being knocked.

"Come in."

The door open, a young man in a grey suit stood in front of her, holding a file in his hands.

"Laura, this is very important." he handed over the file.

The file had some confidential details of the company. Laura was quite shocked to see the leak of such highly confidential data on a paper file.

"How did you get this?" she asked, her eyes never left the file.

"As I was going through our company's site, I found a glitch which was pretty weird. Our site is protected from all malicious attacks. But, when I went to the core, I found some loopholes in the system. I must say, it took me a day to find out who was updating wrong data. The numbers, figures and charts were handled perfectly with a slight difference from the original data. This is the work done by the IT team. But not all are responsible for this, there's only one person doing this." Jacob took out some papers from his pocket and handed over to Laura.

"Who is it?"

"David." Jacob answered.

"As a part of the marketing team, nobody should know about this." he requested.

Jacob Well, known as the Black, is one of the best hackers. Being a schoolmate of Laura and Lily, he had applied for the company's marketing manager. But, he personally asked Laura to hire him so that he could handle the marketing team as well as protect the company from various malicious attacks, as he enjoyed being a hacker. Not all knew about him being the best hacker except for Laura.

"No wonder, why a minority of our clients invested in CashCredit company, which is new to the market." Laura was thankful to Jacob. If not informed now, the company would have faced a huge loss just like Maple.

"Can you rectify this? I'm sure you must be having the login access of the IT department."

"I already did, Laura." Jacob's face broke into a wide smile.

"Thank you so much!" Laura smiled.

"Welcome." Jacob smiled back at her. Suddenly, they heard the door being knocked again.

"Lily..." Laura immediately identified. It was Lily's style of knocking after all.

"Laura, you need to..." Lily stopped speaking as soon as she saw Jacob inside.

"Oh, hello, Jacob. How are you?" Lily smiled. Looking at her perfect smile, Jacob blushed.

"I am fine. How about you?" he spoke shyly.

The one who was confidently speaking in front of Laura, now blushed in front of Lily.

How lovely. Laura thought to herself.

"Nice to know. By the way, I came here to remind you that you need to go now." Lily then turned to Laura and spoke. Jacob's eyes never left Lily.

"Jacob, I will look into this matter after I return. Thank you once again." Laura stood up and took her bag as she was about to leave the office.

After Laura left, Lily placed the files on the table. She then realised that Jacob was still standing like a statue.

"Do you have any other work?" she asked.

"No, I will go have lunch. What about you?" Jacob took a deep breath after speaking.

"I don't have much work either, I will eat first. I am very hungry. Let us eat lunch together." she asked. Seeing jacob not responding, she felt awkward.

"Sorry, if you have plans with someone else then it's fine. we'll eat some other day." Lily clarified.

"NO!" Jacob spoke in a high voice.

"Huh?" Lily was confused. She was near, what was the need to speak this loud?

"I mean, no, I don't have plans with someone else. I want to have lunch with you." Jacob spoke like a robot.

Lily laughed at him, "Okay, let us go, then!"

As Laura was about to get in her car, a black Maybach stopped in front of her.

Rolling down the glass window, a man in grey tuxedo looked at her. He was Brandon Reynolds. Laura looked at his handsome face and smiled out of formality. Brandon was surprised to see Laura in simple office dress.

"Good afternoon, Mr.Reynolds. I was about to visit you at your office. Why are you here?"

"I suppose, we didn't decide the venue last night. Are you going somewhere else, Ms.Williams?"

"Ah, yes, I also forgot to ask you. No, we were supposed to have lunch together." she smiled.

"Get in, we'll drive to a good restaurant." Brandon unlocked the car.

"Thank you." Laura fastened her seatbelt as she got inside the car.

"Where do you want to go?" Brandon turned on the engine.

"Anywhere where they serve good food."