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

I was at the game and you were in Hawaii.” I take a drink of my bourbon. “He told me how you took Moneyball to the next level. Your math skills, plus an understanding of outside dynamics like bringing up Jake, Crispin, and Jeremy all together, made you invaluable.”

Mia turns a beautiful shade of pink. I couldn’t be prouder of her. She’s brilliant and beautiful and so down to earth and humble.

She looks at her glass and not at any of us. “Jeremy was so young; I knew Crispin and Jake would be integral to his success.”

“Well, that was an excellent call,” Marci says.

“Yes, but part of it was luck,” Mia assures us. “I knew they’d eventually mature into great players. I just couldn’t gauge when.”

We have a fun time together, enjoying an egg frittata with tons of fruit, big stacks of bacon and sausage, and fresh croissants on the side. We also consume what seems like gallons of coffee, plus bloody marys and mimosas. We chat about our different interests, and I now have plans to play golf with Walker at his club in a few weeks.

I was intimidated coming to this house, but Marci and Walker quickly put me at ease. They’re really likable. I’m incredibly impressed with Walker and can see why people talk about what he’s going to do after being the US Attorney for Northern California. And, damn if Marci isn’t ferocious when it comes to her clients. I feel entirely confident she has Mia’s best interests at heart.

As we get in the car, Mia holds my hand. “What should we do this afternoon?”

Chapter 27

Axel

“SoBe, stop being an attention whore.” I turn to the couple at the next table. “I’m sorry. He’s such a manipulator when it comes to strangers. He doesn’t want your food; he just wants your attention.”

The woman smiles at me. “No problem. We’ve got one of those kinds of dogs, too. People must think she never gets any affection at home.”

I turn back to Mia, and she’s hardly touched her clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. I thought sitting here would be the right place to continue the talk we started this morning, but the tables are too close for a private conversation. “Is everything okay?” I ask.

She nods. “I’m just stuffed after that huge brunch at the Cliftons.”

Relief washes over me. “Do you want to take that home?”

“No. It’ll just go to waste. Let’s pack it up and maybe we’ll find someone in need we can give it to.”

Always kind.

As we walk down Pier 39, it’s slammed with tourists. Peter is close, but not so close that we’re a trio of friends walking down the sidewalk. I’m grateful he’s with us. I lace my fingers with Mia’s, and we meander through the crowds.

“So, tell me more about the pirating of your dating app,” I suggest.

She sighs. “The extent of the problem depends on whether they took the algorithm from the test app or if they got into our network. If they got it off of the network, they have access to the basis of the algorithm for my other company.”

My eyes go wide. “Diamond Analytics?”

She takes a big breath. “Yes. While I was in college, I wrote an algorithm—a set of instructions for a computer program. I showed you how it works when I did the data mining with the query on Jeremy.”

I nod. “Right. Okay, wow.”

“And whoever pirated Flirt could potentially reverse-engineer the Diamond Analytics algorithm, which is highly confidential.”

“How big is Diamond Analytics?”

“It’s a Fortune 50 company.”

I turn to look at her. I do recall that from one of the real articles I finally read. “You founded a Fortune 50 company?”

She nods, standing a little straighter as she walks. “We didn’t start that big. But we’re publicly traded now, and we hit a trillion dollars in top-line revenue last year.”

“Are you still involved with them?”

“Officially, yes. I’m the CEO. But with this mess with Viviana, I’m on leave. That’s why I built Flirt. I needed something to keep me busy. So, I started with the basic algorithm and built it into what became the Flirt app.”

“Wait. Why haven’t I ever heard of Diamond Analytics?”

“If you’re not in the industry, it makes sense. I would imagine there are quite a few companies in the Fortune 50 you wouldn’t recognize. All sorts of companies use our services, but they use us through intermediaries. For example, I would bet your company uses a public relations firm to track your clients’ names as they appear in the media. The firm likely uses our services to do that, to the tune of five hundred dollars a search. You have ten or so clients. How many clients does your firm represent?”

I shake my head. “Thousands. Not just sports, but writers, directors, producers, actors, photographers, musicians, cartoonists...”

She nods. “Then you know the other kinds of things public relations firms track. We look at thousands of platforms every day, hour, and minute. And we service thousands of industries through various consultants.”

I nod, impressed.

“Now think of Nate and his company, Lancaster Holdings. They started in artificial limbs and then grew into robotics, which grew to artificial intelligence. Additionally, he’s overseeing technology that he’s giving away to developers for free. He’s involved with Lilly’s stroke software, which will quickly begin to splinter into a thousand other uses. He has the baseball team, and the list goes on. He always has an eye on his competitors and what they’re doing, as well as what people say about them—things they like and dislike about them. Lancaster Holdings wants that information for research and development, to sell against them, to improve current products, to identify possible groups to sell to—the list is unending as to what they use the information for. Everything is public these