Champagne Brunch: The Stiletto Sisters Series by Ainsley Claire (easy readers .txt) 📗

“We appreciate your flexibility.”

“Of course. Who wouldn’t be flexible?”

“You’d be surprised. Some people are particular.”

“I guess it’s a matter of trust.” But if you trust Jim, I don’t see what there is to worry about.

“Anyway, I’ll be in touch, Mia.”

We say goodbye and disconnect our call.

I sit back and try to think through the week coming at me when my cell phone pings. It’s Axel. I smile, and my stomach flipflops.

Axel: The guys are coming over for pizza and Fortnite, if you want to join us.

Me: I’m not very good at Fortnite, but I’m down with some pizza. What time?

Axel: I’m here. You can come over when you’re ready and bring an overnight bag.

Axel: That is, if you’re comfortable staying with me and SoBe. Jeremy sometimes stays in the guest room, so we may have to be quiet.

I chuckle. I’m comfortable.

Mia: I’m on my way.

Forty-five minutes later, Peter drops me off at Axel’s, and I send him home for the night. I’ll take a rideshare back if I decide for some reason not to stay.

I knock on the door and Jake Garcia opens it, wearing just a pair of athletic shorts. “Oh, I thought you were the pizza delivery.”

“Nope. I’m a friend of Axel’s. He invited me over.”

His brow furrows. “Just a minute.” He shuts the door in my face, and I hear some fussing and rustling inside.

Then Axel appears at the door. “Sorry. I wasn’t communicating well. Please come in.”

I giggle. “No problem. I take it random women sometimes show up at your door?”

“Well, not really.”

“His neighbor could show up,” Jake says. “I didn’t hear him tell me you were coming. That’s my fault.”

“It’s okay.” I put my bag down, and Axel gives me a chaste kiss. The guys exchange a look. “I hope I’m not interrupting your party.”

“Not at all,” Jeremy says with a silly grin at Axel.

“Grow up, all of you,” Axel snaps. “This is my girlfriend, Mia.” He looks at me with his eyes wide, like he’s just realized what he said.

“Hi, Mia,” the boys all say in unison.

The bell rings again, and this time it is the pizza guy. Axel takes care of it while I stow my things out of the way.

We sit down and enjoy our dinner. The guys talk about practice. “Jeremy hasn’t thrown a fastball slower than a hundred and nine miles an hour in days,” Crispin complains. “That sucker’s a bitch to hit. I’ve tried.”

“Yeah, that’s because you’re too slow,” Jake teases.

I stifle a snort. These guys crack me up.

“What do you do, Mia?” Jeremy asks.

“I have two companies,” I tell them. “One is a data-mining company and I also just started a dating app.”

“What does a data-mining company do?” Jake asks.

“We collect information for our clients and help them decipher it. It can be as simple as what their competitors are doing or where they show up on the internet, or it can be the data that helps them as they develop new products.”

“People pay for that?” Crispin says.

“Quite a bit actually.” I chuckle. Diamond Analytics made over a trillion dollars last year.

“I bet I could do that for them much cheaper than a big company.” Jake narrows his eyes, probably thinking about how easy it would be.

“It’s a little more than just a query in a search engine. In fact, I could set up a data mine to determine how many times Jeremy was mentioned in the first twenty-four hours after he broke Nolan Ryan’s record.”

“Show us,” Crispin says.

“I need a computer or laptop.”

Axel stands and disappears a moment before returning with a laptop.

I log on to Diamond Analytics and pull up the search engine. After setting up a query with the right parameters, I sit back. “This will take a few minutes.”

We finish off the pizza, and eventually the guys go back to their video game. Axel pulls me into his kitchen and gives me a kiss so hot that it curls my toes and leaves me breathless.

“I sort of wish these guys would go home, so I could ravage you.”

“We have all night.” I hear a ping on the computer.

I go back to the living room. “All right…” I look over the raw data and get the guys’ attention. “In the hour after the game, there were seven-hundred-fifty-two-thousand-and-change mentions of Jeremy’s record. There were over a million hits on an article about the record-breaking game on ESPN’s website, and over four hundred comments. There were over two million positive chirps. On television, radio, and podcasts, he had over six-hundred-thousand mentions.”

I stand and look at the guys. Their mouths are open wide. “I have sixteen more data points, but that’s only within an hour following the event. The computer will tabulate them and break them out into highly positive, positive, neutral, negative, and extremely negative. It will break them down by source, so we can tell if Chirp is all negative, but ESPN is all positive and so forth. But for general purposes, it looks like ninety-four-point-three percent were all positive or mostly positive.”

When I look up, Jeremy is a deep shade of crimson.

“Crispin, do you still think you could tabulate all of that cheaper and faster? Pulling it isn’t the hard part. That’s a simple algorithm. It’s interpreting it that makes a difference.”

“No thanks,” Crispin mutters.

There’s a knock at the door, and when Axel goes to answer it, Bash and Jim from Clear Security walk in. My blood pressure spikes.

A look of shock flashes in Jim’s eyes when he sees me. “Jeremy, can we talk?” he asks.

Chapter 12

Axel

There goes my night. Jim and some guy who looks like he plays