Don’t Love, Don’t Lose

Chapter 8

Jasmine’s eyes flew open, coming awake in one sharp second, as she usually did.

But she usually woke up like that at around six-thirty in the morning, not at… She checked the glowing numbers on her alarm, and lay back in frustration.

Not at three in the night. Maybe if she called it three in the morning it would feel a little less wrong.

Lucy was stretched out beside her, on the pillow.

“Get off,” demanded Jasmine, but not with any real heat.

Lucy ignored her.

“Fine. Keep sleeping. You have a vet’s appointment in two days, so don’t look so happy with yourself. You’re going to be poked and prodded.”

The cat didn’t understand a word, but the thought of Lucy being poked and prodded made Jasmine sad, so the cat got cuddled, instead.

Jasmine tried to go back to sleep as the cat slithered out of her arms and settled down on her pillow again, looking affronted at having been disturbed like that.

There was no use. She couldn’t sleep. She could count sheep until the end of time and she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Really, how could one stupid little kiss do all of that!

Giving up, she got out of bed and padded to her workstation.

“Thanks for taking over my bed and not the chair,” mumbled Jasmine, as she settled down and turned on her system. She could get some work done if she couldn’t get any sleep. She’d been letting her regular work slide. She was beginning to wish she’d never gotten involved in the whole thing.

Bt Jasmine found that she couldn’t focus on her work, either. She kept going back to the employee files that she had acquired, and going through them.

Using a temp agency for employees was a good idea. She approved of that. It gave you time to get your team together, and you could always retain the ones who showed the most promise. She’d done that a couple of times herself. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something in there.

There was probably nothing. But Jasmine thought that it was far more logical that Sanders would’ve planted somebody using the agency than trying to turn somebody who had been with Malone Enterprises for a while. Being part of the founding team at a satellite office was probably a promotion for most of them. While Sanders might have found a way to get them to spy for him – money could do a lot – she thought it was probably unlikely.

It was far easier to get somebody local who didn’t like the idea of somebody coming in and buying up property here. To be perfectly honest, Jasmine could empathize with that point of view. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Della’s staunch endorsement, she might have felt like that, too.

So Jasmine started digging.

It was much easier to do the digging when the employer cooperated, thought Jasmine wryly as she got to work, but he had so many temp employees who had come and gone. The turnover rate was pretty high. Apparently, Anthony expected the best from his people. He also paid much more than the standard rates.

If turnover was so high, could they have been reliable spies? She’d have to think about that.

She sifted through data, and more data, until her head started aching and her eyes started watering. But by the time the sun came up, she had a few things.

First, of the twenty-two temps he’d started with, he still had only twelve. Ten people had left. Four had been fired, six had quit, and from the ten new hires, three more had quit, and new ones had been hired.

Really, he needed to reconsider his people skills.

From Jennifer’s reports – and Jasmine was beginning to form some serious respect for that woman, she was as formidably efficient as Aunt Della was – it looked like two of them were likely to be sent back to the agency soon, and the rest might be absorbed into Malone Enterprises soon.

That was good. Jasmine approved of those numbers. Anthony was serious about hiring local, and it made sense.

The reviews for each employee were detailed and precise. Jennifer did not mince words in her reports. She highly recommended five of them, nine were considered very good, and six of them were considered above average. Apparently, you wouldn’t even get a shot if you were average.

Jasmine understood that, too. She handpicked her team carefully. She trusted them completely. Without that trust, she wouldn’t have been able to delegate enough to work on this. To be perfectly honest, the delegation annoyed her, but she could do it without worrying.

It was pretty clear that Anthony planned to bring one of the people from NY – it looked like the person who was coordinating another of Anthony’s teams at the moment – into this office to head it soon. He’d have a job on his hands filling Anthony’s shoes. But that wasn’t Jasmine’s problem.

The fact that Anthony definitely planned to leave after kissing her out of her mind like that was not Jasmine’s problem at all. She was fine with it. It wasn’t like they were dating or anything. It had just been a moment. Maybe it had gotten a little out of hand, but it had just been a moment.

It obviously wouldn’t happen again.

But she had a list now, of people she needed to focus on. Now she could run probabilities.

She liked running probabilities. It was her little baby, that piece of software, and she guarded it jealously. There was so much information about individuals out there, voluntarily offered, that Jasmine wondered if they realized what they were giving up or how valuable it was – or how it could be used.

Soon she had probabilities, from data scraped from publicly available social media profiles and reviews and every other piece of information out there, of people most likely to dislike an outsider coming in and buying land close to home.

She tentatively shortened her list to about seven people, and she sat back.

There was a pretty good chance that one of those seven people had been involved in the spying. Now she needed to check what kind of permissions and access those seven people had had, and whether they had used any of it. Or if they had tried to use more than they should have.

She’d have something soon.

And while she let that rest, she started on something else – something that was definitely on the other side of illegal. It was possible that Sanders had a hand in the agency itself.

The man had his finger in so many pies, it was a wonder he hadn’t run out of fingers. But that wouldn’t have stopped him anyway. He would just have used somebody else’s fingers.

She had to do this one carefully. She dug into the company’s registration details, and then started from there. She looked into financials, audits, tax reports, quarterly reports – everything she could find.

Then she went after the people at the top of the company. A couple of names rang vague bells.

It wasn’t a publicly traded company or anything, so the information available – at least legally – wasn’t that prolific. But Jasmine knew ways around everything.

She sat back and cracked her knuckles, stretched her neck, and was about to start when Lucy jumped onto her lap and glared at her.

It was only then that Jasmine looked at the time.

“Oh no!”

She’d be late yet again if she wanted to go for her run, and she did want to go for her run. Reluctantly, she got to her feet and realized just how stiff she was.

“I think I might be getting a little too involved in this, Lucy. I don’t think I can blame it all on wanting to see Sanders go down, either.”