by Emma Shortt
She also had what he would describe as an interesting face. Slightly too-wide lips, an upturned nose, and those very pretty eyes…yes, under any other circumstances, Chance would have had no problem watching her across the office for many minutes more.
“You’re not going to let me leave until I talk, are you?” she said after a moment. “And my time is running out.” She let out a sigh. “Fine, if you want the truth, I was looking for the CEO, Jack Richards.”
It was only through years of practice that Chance managed to keep his face blank. “Why?”
“Because,” she snapped. “X-Tech has stolen my work!”
Chance’s heart raced, and something akin to excitement danced along his spine. Was it possible that while looking for evidence of wrongdoing in his company that very evidence had fallen directly into his lap?
“That’s quite an accusation,” he said slowly.
Blue glared. “I have plenty of evidence to back it up.”
“Evidence you have on you?”
“Why do you care?” she asked.
Chance shrugged as nonchalantly as possible. “I’d be interested in seeing it.”
She shook her head and pointed a finger at him. “I answered your question. Now answer mine. What exactly are you doing here?”
For the second time, Chance considered telling Blue the truth. He was who she was looking for and he wanted, no he needed, that damn evidence. But so much had happened over the last year, so many people he’d thought he could trust were possibly not trustworthy at all, and he had only her word that she was telling the truth about her motives. He needed more than that. A lot more.
“I can’t answer that right now.”
“Can’t or won’t?” she asked.
“Won’t.”
“And how long are you planning to keep me here for?”
Jack sighed. How the hell was he supposed to answer that? He could hardly keep her here all night, could he? And yet, he couldn’t leave her to run freely around the building—his building—either!
“I’m not sure, I—”
Chance’s words were halted as Blue launched herself across the room. It was such an unexpected action that he didn’t quite move fast enough to stop her. She barreled into him, smacking him hard against the doorframe. He let out a growl and reached out to grab her arm. Again, he wasn’t fast enough.
She slipped through the office door and out into the lobby. Chance raced after her, and this time he was quicker. They both came to a halt at the door that led to the red corridor, and Chance snaked an arm around her waist before pulling her hard against him. In some part of his mind, he was shocked by how soft she felt, how giving, but he ignored that part because now really wasn’t the time.
“Ow! You oaf,” she screeched. “Let me go!”
Chance relaxed his grip slightly but not enough to allow her to wriggle free. “Be careful, you’re going to hurt yourself.”
“I’m going to hurt someone in a minute,” she growled.
“Stay still.”
“Let. Me. Go.”
“I will,” Chance snapped. “The moment you stop struggling. There,” he added as her body began to relax. “That’s better—”
The next words Chance was going to say were lost as Blue twisted, pulled back, and landed a knee directly between his legs. A second after the contact was made, an excruciating pain erupted, agony filled him, and Chance could only gasp and groan as he tilted sideways.
“You…you…”
“Me what?”
Chance didn’t answer, he couldn’t. The pain was traveling into his guts, and the best he could do was a sort of grunt, and even that made him wince. How hard had she hit him? How long was this agony going to last?
“Uh-huh,” Blue said. “That’s what I thought.”
“Stay…right…there…”
She shook her head as he slumped onto the floor. He noticed—in an abstract sort of way—that her blue hair sparkled in the overhead lights.
“Don’t think so, sweetheart,” she said. “But don’t worry; I won’t rat you out. Steal whatever the hell you want. X-Tech is no friend of mine. We’ll keep this little”—she paused—“altercation between the two of us.”
“The evidence…” he tried to say. He needed that evidence!
She laughed and tapped the space between her breasts. “Right here,” she said. “You should have held me a bit higher. You’d have felt the flash drive. Never mind though, there’s always next time.”
“Blue…” he gasped. “Wait.”
But she didn’t hear him. Aching in pain, his stomach clenching in agony, Chance realized…she was already gone.
Chapter Four
Meg was antsy in a way that she didn’t quite understand the next morning. She’d gotten up super early, spent three hours straight playing the new release of Crash Bandicoot, and even though the redesigned game play drove her mad, she’d worked off quite a bit of the tension that she’d taken with her from X-Tech towers.
That feeling lasted only about as long as it took Meg to make her way into the city proper and to the computer store where she and Kate worked. Once there, sitting at her desk, a large, skinny latte in front of her, and nowhere near enough customers to keep her busy, she started to reflect on what had taken place in X-Tech, and the more that she thought about it, the more she couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened.
She replayed the conversation she’d had with him. She thought about the expressions on his face. She tried to remember exactly what the lines of code on his laptop were. She even went so far as to write them down. And, with each thought, each memory, Meg became convinced that she’d missed something important.
But what?
She pulled up the proposal that she’d taken with her to the X-Tech competition. She read it for maybe the millionth time, and then she read the leaked X-Tech post she’d saved. Nothing had changed. They were nearly identical.
She logged in to one of her favorite tech forums and navigated straight to the thread where hundreds of thousands of nerds were speculating on exactly how X-Tech’s new project was going to work. Meg could have told them. Part of her wanted to. But she didn’t. Instead, she scanned the new posts, looking for anything that might help her case.
The morning ticked by. A few customers came in. Meg dealt with some. Kate dealt with others. By the time midday came around, Meg found herself on Google images, pulling up the old grainy pictures of Jack Richards.
“Such a stereotype,” she muttered.
Kate came over to her desk. She’d been upstairs in their computer lab, probably working on her own project, her medieval second-life game. Despite the fact that they’d both worked at KIT ever since Kate had set the store up, they had their own interests and ambitions. Kate’s was to launch her game into the world. Meg’s was, had been, to finish her PhD, get a job with X-Tech, and develop her work into something that would change the world. Yeah, she’d always had very achievable ambitions.
“Jack Richards?”
Meg stabbed a finger at the images on the screen. “Do you remember when we were younger? I swear there were more images of him online, and they weren’t grainy like these ones. He always wore that gray sweater in them. Everyone says that he still does. But the man’s like a squillion-aire. You’d think he’d buy some halfway decent clothing.”
“It’s his uniform,” Kate said. “He probably feels comfortable in it.”
Meg arched a brow at that. She gestured to her own outfit. Even feeling the way she had this morning, all kinds of tense and angry, Meg had put the same effort into her appearance as she always did.
“Comfort isn’t everything, Katie.”
Kate sighed at that. She wore her usual jeans, T-shirt, and Converse. “Why are you even looking at pictures of him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Meg said. “Maybe because I’ve been looking at pictures of him for what feels like forever? I’ve practically got these shitty images memorized.” She sh
ook her head. “I was so psyched-up to see him…”
Kate reached out and patted Meg’s hand. “I know,” she said. “Why don’t we go out for lunch? That will cheer you up. We could get Atomic burgers?”
“I don’t feel like going out for lunch today.”
“Okay…”
“Might as well just grab some take-out,” Meg added. “A fruit bowl or something.”
“Okay…”
Meg tilted her head and turned to look at her best friend. “Why are you doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“You have a tone to your voice,” Meg said.
Kate sighed again and pulled out the chair opposite Meg’s desk. She sat down before reaching across the table and taking Meg’s hand into hers. “I’m worried about you. I’ve been worried about you from the moment you came racing out of X-Tech like the devil was on your heels. Your suggestion of a fruit bowl for lunch only confirms that I should be worried.”
Meg almost laughed. “I wasn’t even wearing heels, just those stupid sneakers, and I wasn’t racing, I was very calm and composed.”
“You were sweating bullets,” Kate said. “You made me sweat bullets. I nearly crashed into that dumpster.”
“It did have a bit of a Grand Theft feel to it,” Meg said.
“It was way worse than that,” Kate replied. “I thought…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. The main thing is that you got out of there without any trouble.”
Abruptly, a perfect image of the light from the lobby falling upon the burglar’s face flashed through Meg’s mind. She knew, she absolutely knew, that it was ridiculous to be thinking about how hot he was. Especially as he had looked all sorts of pained and pathetic as she’d left him in the lobby, on his knees, gasping in agony.
“There was plenty of trouble,” she said.
“Yes,” Kate agreed. “But not the kind we expected.”
Meg frowned at that and pulled her hand free of Kate’s. She placed it on her mouse and scrolled down the handful of images of Jack Richards. She was positive there had once been more of them, sharper images, too, ones where you could make out his features, see the individual curls on his head. She sighed. If there had been, those images were long since gone. Those that were left now had been taken in the early years of X-Tech when Jack was just a kid. Still, in every image he looked the same. Thin, nerdy, and wearing that damn sweater.
“Why wasn’t he in the building?” she asked. “He should have been there. I timed it exactly right.”
“Meggie, I know you’re disappointed,” Kate said.
“Disappointed is not the word.”
“Give me one, then.”
Meg shrugged. “Pissed.”
“Meg…”
“We spent days planning this,” Meg said. “We worked on every possible scenario. Well, every scenario but some jerk getting there before we did. If he hadn’t been there…”
“The best thing you can do is forget about that guy.”
“How can I?” Meg asked.
“Because he was a burglar,” Kate said. “You said so yourself.”
Meg opened a new browser window and typed burglar into the search bar. She angled her laptop so they could both look at it. Images loaded on the page. Most were cartoon-like, men in striped shirts, holding bags of swag. But some, some looked just like he had. Men dressed in black. Men looking all kinds of dark and dangerous.
She clicked on one. An attractive, roguish-looking guy filled the screen. He was staring straight at the camera. It was then that Meg realized why she had immediately thought something was off with her burglar last night. It was his vibe. A sort of weird intensity that she hadn’t felt before. The guy on the screen had it, too.
“He did look like a burglar,” Meg said slowly. She paused. “A high-end one.”
“High-end?”
She switched from the browser full of burglars and back to the grainy images of Jack Richards. “I’ve never met one who was busy running intrusive computer code.”
“You’ve never met one, full stop.”
“True, true. Here.” She passed Kate the notebook where she’d written down as much of the code as she could remember. “It is intrusive, right?”
“Has to be.” Kate visibly shivered. “He’s a black hat. We do not mix with black hats.”
“No,” Meg agreed, because they didn’t, they never had. Here at KIT they helped people to keep their systems, and their data, safe. Black hats were the kind of hackers they worked against. The kind that stole and exploited data. The kind that uncovered secrets…
Meg frowned as she looked from Jack Richards to the incomplete code. Something prodded her. She lifted a hand to run it through her hair, remembered a moment later that she had teased it into a complicated beehive, and dropped her hand back onto her mouse.
“If he was hacking into X-Tech…” she began.
Kate shot her a look. “You think he might have found some evidence of their thievery?”
“It’s possible.”
“If that was what he was looking for,” Kate said. She frowned. “What I can’t work out is why he was hacking from inside the building. It’s so risky.”
“It’s impossible to get through X-Tech’s defenses remotely,” Meg said. “You know that. Maybe he thought he’d have more luck if he went from the inside?”
Kate’s frown deepened. “Hacking in through one of the computers? You really think that’d work? That X-Tech hasn’t covered those bases?”
“I don’t know,” Meg said. “But he does.”
She switched back to the other browser. The dangerous-looking guy filled the screen once more. That something prodded Meg all over again. What had she missed?
“Meggie…”
She looked up. Kate was staring straight at her. “Katie…”
“You have a look on your face that I have come to fear,” Kate said.
Meg nodded slowly, drumming her fingers on the desk as she did so. “I was just thinking…just wondering…considering even…maybe it wouldn’t hurt to find this guy. Find out what he was up to.”
Kate’s eyes widened behind her huge glasses. “Absolutely not!”
“It makes sense,” Meg said.
“It totally does not,” Kate replied. “He’s a hacker…”
Meg arched a brow at that. “We’re hackers.”
“We’re small-time hackers,” Kate said. “And the little that we do is for the greater good. But this guy?” She shot up and out of her chair. “He broke into one of the biggest software companies in the world. For all we know he didn’t have a Jimmy to help him. He might have done it on his own. And if he did? How did he even get past the security systems? How did he get all the way into the management suite without a card pass?”
Meg had asked herself the same questions all morning.
“He could be dangerous,” Kate added.
“He didn’t look very dangerous on his knees gasping for breath,” Meg replied.
Kate glared. “You got lucky.”
“Maybe I’ll get lucky again?”
“Or maybe you can take a moment and think about what you’re doing,” Kate said. “I mean, how would you even go about it? It’s not like he gave you a name or anything. Are we going to hit the forums? Post a request? Wanted, one hot hacker? Morals optional?”
“Katie…”
“You do realize you spent about a half hour last night describing exactly how good looking he was?” Kate continued, clearly on a roll.
“It was five minutes.”
“It was not.” She turned, hands on her hips. “And you’re supposed to be past your bad-boy stage? Didn’t we agree on that?”
“We don’t even know that he is a bad boy,” Meg said, but Kate plowed on.
“A burglar? A hacker? I think we can be pretty sure that he is. And look at him; he’s trouble. Trouble we, you, do not need.”
“But…I keep thinking about why he was asking for evidence,” Me
g said slowly. “I mean, why would that be important to him?”
“You couldn’t have asked last night?”
“It was all too intense,” Meg said. “Seriously, Kate, we’re talking movie-style intense. And I knew you and Jimmy were waiting downstairs for me, and the whole thing was so weirdly stressful. I just wanted to get out of there.”
“You wanted to get away from him. Somewhere, some part of you, buried deep, by the sound of it, knew that was the right thing to do,” Kate said as she came around the desk.
She tugged Meg up and away from her laptop. Meg let her best friend do it because she knew that Kate was worried. Hell, despite her bravado, Meg was also worried. Kate was completely right. He could be dangerous. This whole situation could be. And yet…
Meg took a deep breath. She could see the river behind the store sparkling in the sunlight. It was beautiful. Meg was in no mood for beautiful. She turned and looked instead at the store, at her second home. It was comforting. Meg was in no mood to be comforted.
She reached up and ran her hand through her hair, realizing only when it was too late that she’d dislodged her beehive. Dammit! She’d have to go and fix it now, and it would take at least a half hour. Still, there were no customers. At least there hadn’t been. Meg narrowed her eyes on the front door. It was a huge glass affair, the whole front of the store was, and someone was heading straight for it.
“Katie…” she began.
But Kate wasn’t looking at the front of the store. She was looking right at Meg, concern still evident behind her huge glasses. “I don’t want you in danger like that again, Meg,” she said softly. “Promise me you won’t go looking for him. Promise me.”
The door opened. Their theme tune, classic Star Trek, sang out. Meg barely heard it. A shot of pure adrenaline hit her system, and it was quickly followed by a weirdly traitorous excitement that danced along her spine. She licked her lips even as she struggled to take in what she was seeing. How was this possible?
“Meg?” Kate prompted.
“I don’t think I’m going to need to,” Meg eventually said.