About That Night by Julie James Read Free Book Online Page A

began to get worried. He knew she sometimes partied hard with her friends, and he’d begun to have nightmare visions of her becoming one of those tragic tales reported on
Access Hollywood
, the supermodel who drank too much and died when she slipped in a hotel bathroom and dropped her five-ton makeup case on her head.
    On the fourth night of her trip, he finally got a response.
    Via Twitter.
    @KyleRhodes Sorry not going 2 work out 4 us. Going 2 chill in LA with someone I met. I think U R sweet but U talk too much about computers.
    Kyle had to give her credit; it took skill—plus no heart and a serious abuse of the English language—to break up with someone in fewer than 140 characters. She didn’t even have the decency to send him a private message; nope, she’d just tweeted that sucker for anyone and everyone on Twitter to see. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Twenty minutes later, Daniela posted another tweet, this time with a link to a video of her making out with movie star Scott Casey in a hot tub.
    That sucked.
    Kyle felt like he’d been punched in the gut when he sawthe video. He knew they’d had their problems, but what Daniela had done was just so…heartless. Particularly since she’d managed to make him look like a complete and utter fool. He could just see the tabloids:
    STEAMY SAUNA SCANDAL!!!
Supermodel Cheats on Billionaire Heir
     
    He worked in computers, he knew what would happen—the video would go viral within minutes. Between the wet supermodel in her skimpy bikini, the movie star, and the fact that the damn thing was even cinematically pleasing with the sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills in the background—
everyone
was going to see it.
    Not on his watch.
    Kyle grabbed the bottle of Scotch from the bar he kept in his home office and slammed a shot. And four more after that for good measure. One thought kept ringing through his head.
    Fuck
Daniela.
    He may not have been a movie star, or the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation, or on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
, but he was not some also-ran. He was Kyle Rhodes, and he was a tech god. His specialty was network security, for chrissakes—he could simply hack into Twitter and delete Daniela’s tweets and the video from the site, and no one would ever be the wiser.
    And he might have gotten away with the whole thing if only he’d stopped there.
    But somewhere along the way, as he sat at his computer with his glass in hand, intoxicated and furious, staring at that tweet—that stupid it-was-fun-while-it-lasted-but-fuck-you of a tweet—he had a moment of Scotch-induced clarity. He realized that the true problem lay with social media itself, the perpetuation of a world in which people had become so wholly
un
social that they believed 140-character breakups were acceptable.
    So he took down the whole site.
    Actually, it wasn’t all that difficult. For him, anyway. Allhe needed was one clever computer virus and about fifty thousand unknowingly infected computers, and he was good to go.
    Take that, tweeple.
    After he crashed the site, he decided to cut loose. He threw his laptop, his passport, and a change of clothes into a backpack, hopped on a red-eye flight to Tijuana, and proceeded to get shit-faced drunk on cheap tequila for the next two days.
    “Why Tijuana?” Jordan had asked him during the brouhaha that followed his arrest.
    “It seemed like the kind of place a person could go without being asked any questions,” he’d explained with a shrug.
    And indeed, it was that. In Tijuana, no one knew, or cared, who he was. He wasn’t a guy who’d been cheated on by his supermodel ex-girlfriend. He wasn’t an heir, a tech geek, a businessman, a son, or a brother. He was no one, and he loved all forty-eight hours of the anonymity—being the son of a billionaire had deprived him of that freedom long ago.
    On the second night of his trip, Kyle had been sitting at the bar he’d made his home for the last two days, nursing what he had