This Is My Life

By T M Anderson

Evelyn Tart has to go to Chile to clean up a disaster her new employee has created at Chile's largest Internet provider. When she gets to her hotel room standing in the middle of her room is a Greek God wearing nothing but a towel and a smile.
A room mixup begins a whirlwind romance for Evelyn Tart and Elias Matts that takes them to Sweden, Seattle, and Bermuda.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781471698095

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T M Anderson

This Is My Life

First published by Auteur LLC 2022

Copyright © 2022 by T M Anderson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

T M Anderson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

T M Anderson has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-4716-9809-5

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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Contents

1. You’re Going To Chile

2. Dinner

3. A Real Date

4. Where Do We Go From Here?

5. Come To Sweden

6. Mama Said Knock You Out

7. Mama Said Knock You Out II

8. Mama Said Knock You Out III

9. Time To Go Home

10. Just A Little Complicated

11. Saying Goodbye

12. Saying Goodbye II

13. Bermuda

14. Sometimes You Just Can’t Be Nice

15. Little Close For Comfort

16. It’s Time

One

You’re Going To Chile

Chapter Separator

Evelyn, I need you to go to Chile this weekend.

Charles, what the hell? I just got back from Seattle two days ago. I haven’t even washed my clothes from this last trip. She put her coffee cup down.

Look Eve, the migration we were trying just went pear-shaped. So we need you down there to back the migration out and then correct what needs to be corrected and install the security patch we developed.

Evelyn closed her eyes and counted to ten before she responded.

Who the hell did you send down there? Charles, this is elementary shit that a child could do. Wait! She pointed an accusing finger at him, Did you send Blake to do this install?

Charles dropped his head letting her know that he had.

I’ll go Charles, but I’m sending him back here and you will be firing him. I told you he was padding his resume but you didn’t listen, so he’s out. I’m taking Doug with me. I don’t feel like trying to figure out what he fucked up.

I’ll take care of it, Eve.

* * *

Starlight security consulting was one of the hottest security consulting firms in the world. Thanks to Evelyn’s coding skills and an impenetrable security suite she developed, they were in high demand. Charles Dean was her business partner and ran the company’s day-to-day operations, which allowed Evelyn to develop new code.

They employed a menagerie of people who, if not for Evelyn, would all be in jail for hacking and various felonies.

Wilson was their sales guy. Evelyn always said he could sell ice water in the arctic. He was a business major at NYU and had an MBA from Wharton. What he didn’t have was the ability to choose good people to bring into his life. Tara Marie was the reason he had to wear an ankle brace for his first six months at Starlight. Evelyn hired the best lawyer to get him off for a securities fraud scheme. Wilson had no idea that after they had sex and he fell asleep, Tara used his credentials to log onto the security and exchange system and execute trades. The feds caught up with Wilson, but Tara was in the wind before they could apprehend her. If Wilson hadn’t had a penchant for taping his sexcapades, he would have gone down for the entire scheme. The feds still needed someone to blame, so the six-month probation was Wilson’s punishment for not keeping his credentials secure.

Berle Anne Weaver was a person who needed something to harness her penchant for destroying everything in her path. She discovered her affinity for computers when she was eight. Her father was a notorious IRA master bomber at the time and would put the deadly bombs together with Berle sitting in his lap.

One day she told her father that they needed to be further away when the bombs went off and that she had learned some things at school about computers and clocks. When they finally arrested her father in Ireland, her mother fled with her and her sister to America.

Her mother had always suspected she was a little off—especially when they moved to New York and she didn’t really seem to grieve her father as they had. She turned inward and her mother took her to a doctor to find out what was wrong with her.

Personality disorder was all that her mother ever heard, and it would plague them for the rest of their lives. Berle had no impulse control either, so when she fixated on something—right or wrong—she wouldn’t stop. Without Evelyn coming into her life to help her focus on something good, the federal pen she was in was going to lock her up and throw away the key.

David was a black-market hacker who could be hired at the right price… until the British authorities caught up to him on a fake credit card scheme. He went to prison, but while there he hacked his own prison record and paroled himself a full ten years ahead of time on the warden’s computer. He was a model prisoner for the first three years, just biding his time until he could bust himself out, and he wasn’t going to leave the prison Shawshank Redemption-style.

He had a car pick him up outside the prison and booked a one-way first-class ticket to Brazil, compliments of the warden’s credit card. The authorities were about to close in on him in Venezuela when he slipped into a hotel bar that held one Evelyn Amelia Tart. She offered him a chance for freedom and a clean life, and just so happened to have a private plane headed back to the states if he committed to work for her.

Many knew Gwen Taylor as the kindergarten teacher who hacked the pentagon to find out what happened to her brother in Afghanistan. He was labeled a traitor and was reported to have joined the Taliban. She hacked the pentagon to get the files to prove that he was not a traitor but a patriot, someone who had been undercover and had been essential in the demise of most of the terrorist cells in that part of the world. She published all the papers on Wikileaks and sent copies out to every news service she could. She soothed her parent’s hearts but wound up being charged with espionage and was waiting for trial when she was released into Evelyn’s care. Being a favored vendor for the federal government had its perks.

Doug was special to Evelyn. He was slightly autistic, but he showed a good head for mathematics and computers at an early age. Doug used to live next door to Evelyn and she was the only friend he had due to his limited social skills. He was the reason Evelyn made her mark in the world of Cyber Security—Doug was her inspiration and her collaborator on their first version of code. Doug’s mathematics was the basis for the code and why it had been impenetrable. The math was in his head; no one knew he had created new mathematical equations that the world had never seen—nor would see due to his inability to communicate it with Evelyn or his family.

Evelyn became Doug’s protector over the years.

Kids always seemed to want to mess with Doug, and Evelyn was more than happy to beat up a few kids twice her size. Evelyn loved it when people underestimated them. The trend continued at college as they both enrolled at MIT and graduated a year ahead of schedule. Doug may have been a math savant, but Evelyn was gifted beyond measure with her 190 IQ and her charming personality.

This was the merry band that made up Starlight Security—except for the one-off: Blake Bishop. He was a favor Charles owed Blake’s father. The guy was all talk, and when it came time to put up, he was totally inept. Every job they’d sent him on, even with supervision, he had messed up. Evelyn had let it go, but this was the end for her. This account generated nearly 10 million dollars a year for her firm. She was not about to see that income stream disappear.

After rushing home to send her laundry out, she started to pack. She was in constant contact with Doug to see if he could back the install out remotely before they got there. Doug was pissed; he said Blake had done the install without testing its effect in their testing environment, he just came in and installed the security patch in their production environment. He literally brought Chile’s largest Internet Service Provider to its knees.

Lucky for them, Doug had loaded Blake’s laptop with a keystroke bug that tracked everything he did. He knew right away that he was going to crash their servers. He let him crash them in order for Charles to finally see this guy was a menace to their business. Thanks to Doug, they were only down for an hour. Now Doug was cleaning up the damage to whatever servers were still having issues. She could not believe that Blake was single-highhandedly trying to destroy her reputation. Charles was going to own this one, including losing his share of the profits from this job.

Evelyn got everything packed and waited for the car to come to pick her and Doug up, taking them to the company jet for the flight to Chile. Just before takeoff, Charles let her know that Blake was on his way back, and he had flown him back in deep coach at his own expense.

To say that Evelyn was worn out was an understatement. She had a penchant for hitting the ground running whenever she was doing an installation—straight from the airport to the job site, but she knew she was exhausted this time, so she told Doug they would start the installation the next day. Doug told her to go to the hotel and rest, and that he would go over and take a look at what needed to be done and calm their customer down.

Evelyn felt like she crawled to the front desk at the Ritz Carlton. She checked in and the front desk clerk let her know her suite was ready. She dragged her way up to her room and as she opened the door, there, standing in the middle of the room, was a Greek God in nothing but a towel and water droplets flowing down his body.

Oh! I am so sorry I must be in the wrong room. I’ll go back down to the front desk and figure out what happened.

A beautiful smile emerged from the Greek God. No need to rush off, let’s just call the front desk to find out what happened.

She couldn’t place the accent