“Yeah, Boone, can you bring Ryn’s laptop in? We need to check if it’s hacked,” he said into the phone. “This asshole who’s fuckin’ with Hattie sent her an email. And there might be more. I’ll explain when I get to the office.” Pause then, “I don’t know. But Ryn recommended a website this guy is using and obviously she has Hattie’s email.” Another pause, then, “Yeah, thanks, brother.”
He disconnected and I said, “Maybe it’s more than just how he got my email.”
“Did she send you a link to that site, or did she tell you about it?”
“At first we talked about it. But she sent the link with her subscription info so I could give it a go before I committed to subscribe.”
He nodded. “When was this?”
I shook my head. “I … really don’t remember. But it’s at least a year.”
He nodded again. “Cisco says Sly’s busy. He’ll be free in a couple of hours and he doesn’t have anyone else available. Neither do we. Though I suspect Boone just freed himself up. But that means, in the meantime, honey, get dressed. You’re goin’ to the office with me.”
Oh boy.
I was curious about where he worked.
But this wasn’t how I wanted to get my first tour.
“Axl—”
“Babe, I know you’re probably freaked. But I need you to get a move on. If he’s in Ryn’s laptop, I’m thinking less good thoughts than I was before. But a hack can be traced. If he left that trace, we can find him. I want on that right away.”
“Okay, I’ll be fast but, he finished.”
“What?”
“They both did.”
He took a quick breath, but it was big, expanding his chest, all this in an effort at patience, before he demanded, “Explain fully.”
“I know you told me not to, but I watched the end of the one for me. And I finished the one for you. And they both climax.”
“I see you think this is important, so I need you to explain that.”
“I think, I don’t know …but if he wanted to hurt me, or you, or freak us out, would he show them finishing?”
Axl didn’t reply.
“It’s like, again, I don’t know, but it feels like … flirting. Or a come-on. Or an invitation or something.”
“You think this whackjob genuinely has a thing for you outside being a whackjob who clearly has a thing for you?”
“For us.”
“Hattie, I can see wanting to think that in order to make it less disturbing, but I’m not sure it says that.”
“Okay,” I muttered, starting to get off the stool so I could go and get dressed.
“Babe,” he called, wrapping a hand around the side of my neck, so I stopped moving and looked up at him again. “You want someone, you approach them at a bar and hand them a line. You do not send them pictures and movies without even introducing yourself. Again, Boone doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty, but they find partners in the normal way. A lot of the time, they can just sense who is who and who likes what. They also have signals, like shit people wear, bracelets and necklaces and stuff. And they got their own thing going on where they can be around like-minded people and meet potential partners at bars, clubs, parties. They don’t find someone they like who they have no idea if they’re in the life or not, follow them, leave unsettling presents on their doorstep, and invade their lives.”
I nodded.
That made sense.
“Yeah?” he asked, even though I nodded.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“You okay?” he pushed.
I couldn’t shake something.
I nodded again.
“Tell me the truth, Hattie,” he said gently. “I wanna deal with this,” he indicated my laptop with his head, “but you’re more important so I need to know you’re good.”
“I’m good. I just think … ” I shrugged and finished, “Something is off.”
“Something is definitely off,” he agreed.
“Not just this guy being whacked. Something else.”
“We’ll get down to it.” He gave my neck a squeeze. “Get dressed, honey. We gotta go.”
I nodded again, he gave me another squeeze and then he let me go.
I ran and got dressed.
* * *
We were all standing around Axl’s workstation (and, by the by, Axl’s workplace was serious cool, precisely what you’d think of as commando central!).
All of us (though, I wasn’t standing, Axl told me to take a seat in his chair, which I thought was sweet).
That all of us included Axl, Boone, Ryn, Axl’s boss, Hawk, and the office manager, Elvira.
They’d connected remotely with some IT guru to Ryn’s computer and he had some diagnostics running.
But they were watching the montages sent to me on mine.
As was not in question, I liked porn.
Watching porn montages sitting at Axl’s workstation with our friends, his coworker and his boss?
Awkward.
“Well, not much you can say about this dude, ’cept he’s got good taste in porn,” Elvira remarked.
Ryn made a choking noise and I knew why because I was swallowing my own laughter.
“Vira,” Hawk’s deep voice tumbled from one side of me, where he was standing, to the other, where Elvira was, and I fought holding on to the arms of Axl’s chair so the force of his unhappiness wouldn’t knock me over.
FYI: pre-Axl, I would probably be apoplectic around Hawk Delgado (much like the semi-functioning apoplectic I was around Axl).
Yes, he was that handsome.
Then again, none of the guys were slouches, far from it.
But they’d been picked for my girls.
Hawk, though (even if he was very married).
Dayum.
I looked up at him.
Dayum to infinity.
His face was carved in stone.
One could say he did not like his boys dicked with, especially not through their women.
Or just not at all.
But one of his men having an issue was one thing.
Another one dragged in?
Man, whoever was doing this was up shit’s creek.
“I watched this one,” Ryn declared. “Start of it was a three out of ten, but I was bored so I let it roll. Totally ended on a bang.” Pause. “Literally.”
Elvira laughed.
Ryn laughed with her.
I chewed my lips in order not to laugh with them and wondered how they could sally forth in such a manner with the suffocating, pissed-off, alpha-male vibe weighing down the air.
“Hattie, could you place any of the pictures this guy sent?” Hawk asked me, muffling the fury in his tone, but just barely. “Did he take stills from porn movies you may have seen and that’s what he sent to you?”
I shook my head at him.
Hawk shifted his gaze.
“Ryn seen the pictures?” Hawk asked Boone.
“Not yet.”
“Show her, see if she can place them,” Hawk directed.
“I’ll get ’em,” Axl said, then he was off.
“Play it again,” Elvira said.
I looked to her then down to my laptop to see the short, three-minute clip had ended.
I reached out to hit play when Hawk repeated, “Vira.”
“What?” she asked.
Nothing from him for a second, then an audible sigh.
Before I could hit go, Axl came back and handed a folder to Ryn.
She opened it, studied what was in it, turned one of the photos over, and went completely white.
Oh no.
“What?” Boone barked.
Barked!
Yikes.
Her eyes drifted up to him.
“Can we talk?” she asked in a strangled voice.
Oh no!
Quick as a flash, he had her hand and was dragging her down the row.
It was safe to say this was not good.
Everyone watched as they h
ad an intense discussion with Boone’s neck bent deep so he could get his ear close to Ryn’s lips.
And this discussion did not go well, and I knew that starting with the muscle that played in his cheek, but also because eventually Boone’s face …
No …
Every inch of his body nearly screamed he needed to hurt someone.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
They came back, and Ryn looked sheepish, Boone still looked murderous and he was walking like his shoulders were a wall of cinder blocks swinging to and fro.
Eep!
Still, he did it again holding her hand.
Sweet.
“Well, some of you know, some of you don’t, and it’s never fun to be outed when you don’t call that ball, but here we go,” Ryn started. “I’m in the life. I had a Dom and he tied me up just like this chick.” She lifted the folder and shook it. “Exactly like this chick. He was not a good Dom and I don’t mean that in the conventional, I-didn’t-enjoy-him way. He didn’t play by the rules in a way that could have been dangerous for me.”
Right.
Before, I realized that I was breathing relatively easy.
Now the pissed-off alpha vibe was suffocating.
But my heart hurt that Ryn experienced that.
“She told me about it,” Boone growled. “I found him, had a few words, shared a few other things nonverbally. Had a few words with some important players in town too so his shit would be shut down. His shit, disregarding safe words, is serious, so the players I talked to assured me that he’d find some difficulties feeding his need. That said, way I left him, I felt sure I taught him a lesson in etiquette. I’m seein’ now I left him with a few questions on that.”
“This isn’t about Hattie, it’s about Ryn,” Axl said.
“Yeah,” Boone grunted.
“He’s fucking with Hattie and me to get to you and Ryn,” Axl went on.
“Yeah,” Boone bit off.
“Ding, ding, ding,” Elvira suddenly, and weirdly, said.
And more weird, not a second later Axl’s phone sounded.
He took the call.
But I looked to where Elvira was looking.
Ryn’s laptop.
The diagnostics were no longer running.
“Yeah,” Axl said. “Yeah.” Pause. “You got a location?” Listening. “Leave it to us. Thanks, Brody.” He disconnected and announced to all, “She’s been hacked.”
“Fuck,” Boone clipped.
“I’m so sorry, Hattie,” Ryn said.
“Why?” I asked. “You didn’t stalk me.”
“Brody doesn’t have a location yet,” Axl kept going. “We need to get on that.”
“Dude’s name is Laszlo Kovack and I know where he works and where he lives,” Boone supplied.
Both Boone and Axl looked to Hawk.
“Go,” he bit out.
Boone turned to Ryn and Axl looked down at me.
“You stay here until Sly gets here or you hear from me, okay?”
I nodded.
He bent in and kissed me quickly.
Then he and Boone took off, both of them with their phones to their ears.
I thought about Laszlo Kovack.
And what I thought was, I’d like to have a conversation with him about why he played this the way he did.
Not that I wanted him to play with Boone and Ryn.
Just that …I didn’t get it.
“Did he like you?” I asked Ryn.
“Well, we connected, so he was attracted to me,” Ryn replied. “But for me, he was definitely a one and done.”
“I think he didn’t want to be a one and done,” I surmised.
“Just, you know,” Elivra began, “takin’ up the slack while Hawk here tamps down his inclination to chase up Axe and Boone so he can work out his current murderous tendencies, this Kovack guy thought you’d share with her.” She tipped her head to Ryn. “My guess, this started before you and Axe got together?”
I nodded.
“So … yeah,” Elvira said in conclusion.
“But then he knew I was with Axl,” I pointed out.
Elvira shrugged. “That, I don’t get. Unless he got into it and found he was getting off on it and didn’t feel like quitting.”
It was more than that.
I felt it.
But I focused on Ryn. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t sound convincing.
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“No big deal, it’s over. I’m sorry it leaked to you.”
“That isn’t on you.”
She nodded.
“He bi?” Elvira broke into our back-and-forth to ask Ryn.
“No clue,” Ryn answered.
“He’s bi,” Elvira said.
“And?” I asked.
“And, have you seen Axl?” she asked back. “Or Boone?”
Well then.
There you go.
“He wanted him,” I surmised. “He wanted him. He wanted you. He wanted Ryn. Maybe even wanted Boone. Who knows? That video,” she tipped her head to my laptop, “says ‘Come and play.’ It does not say, ‘Come and play, and after, I’m gonna wear your skin.’ ”
Yeah, just like I thought.
Totally no Silence of the Lambs vibes.
Totally an invitation.
But … who does that?
And it wasn’t just rule-breaking BDSM guy stuff.
I just couldn’t shake that it was …off.
“Boone did not share the details of his ‘conversation’ with Laszlo, but I’m thinking he left it without question that he was not down to play,” Ryn noted.
“This guy doesn’t play by the rules, right?”
“Right,” Ryn said miserably.
“Ryn, honey, it isn’t your fault,” I reiterated.
“It still sucks. I mean, what a dick,” she replied.
“It does suck, but whatever. They’ll get him so it’s almost all over.” It was a lame attempt to reassure her, but it was all I had.
“They’ll get him,” Hawk rumbled.
I jumped, not believing I kinda forgot he was standing there.
Hawk then turned and prowled down the row, and at the end, he jogged up to his office like he had energy he needed to expend.
Hostile energy.
Eek!
“So, you know, you gotta hook a girl up with the shops you go to,” Elvira said to Ryn. “I mean, marriage is da bomb, but you gotta keep things in the marital bed hopping, you feel me?”
Ryn lost some of her gloom and semi-smiled. “I can totally hook you up.”
“Porn too. Malik won’t do all boys, but a girl can take her laptop to a bubble bath and get herself in the mood before she pounces on her man,” Elvira declared.
Ryn’s smile strengthened. “Totally.”
Elvira’s voice changed abruptly, and it did this in totality.
“You are never responsible for a violation. You will almost always feel like you are, but it is not yours to take on. It is never yours to take on. Do you get me?”
“I get you,” Ryn said softly.
Elvira looked down at me. “Do you get me?”
“I get you,” I repeated Ryn’s words.
“Right, this pretty much shouts time for a cosmo. Who wants one?”
A cosmo?
As in, the drink?
“Vira, it’s not even ten in the morning,” Ryn noted.
Yes, the drink.
“And?” Elvira demanded.
Neither Ryn nor I had the answer to that.
Though I had another note.
“Bars aren’t open yet.”
“You think, I work with these boys, I don’t have a setup in my office?” she asked.
Considering this was a place of business, a kickass one, but still a place of business, I wouldn’t have thought that, no.
Though, thinking on it then, if I had to work with an office full of hot guys, I’d have a draw
er of goodies to help me get through.
“Ten or not, it’s girl time,” Ryn said, grabbing my arm and pulling me up.
I hadn’t even had breakfast.
Still.
“I’m in,” I said.
We moved down the row with Elvira declaring (to me), “Girl, you miss my boards again, I’m banning you for life.”
I knew one thing in that moment.
I really liked this woman.
So that could not happen.
“Cross my heart, never again,” I promised.
“Best stick to that,” she warned.
We hit her office.
She opened a cabinet, and this was not clandestine.
There was a fancy shaker, stylish martini glasses and everything.
Even a mini ice maker!
I’d heard a lot of talk about Elvira.
I was now seeing why.
Because straight up.
She was the shit.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Setup
HATTIE
After work that night, I opened the door to the dancers’ dressing room and saw Axl out in the hallway.
He was shoulders to the wall, ankles crossed, arms crossed, and his head was bent in contemplation of his shoes before I walked out, and it came up when I did.
It was not a pose of patient waiting.
It was a pose of annoyed reflection.
I knew two things about seeing him there in that stance.
One, Sly was off duty.
Two, they hadn’t found Laszlo Kovack.
“Hey,” I greeted cautiously. “Hey, baby,” he replied, pushing from the wall, uncrossing his arms but staying put as I made it to him and laid my hand on his chest.
He dipped his head to get my touch on the lips then took my hand and started us to the door as he said, “Caught your last dance. Usual awesome.”
“Thanks,” I murmured.
He pushed through the door and we nearly ran into Ian, who was coming in from escorting Pepper out.
He gave us both a look, a nod, and I said, “’Night, Ian.”
“’Night, Hatz. Pantera.”
“Walker.”
They added chin lifts to their macho, last-name farewells, and I wondered why men used last names instead of first.
I didn’t wonder long because in the end, it was just masculine, and in the case of Axl and Ian, hot.
Axl put me in his Jeep, rounded the hood and angled in beside me.
Dream Spinner (Dream Team Book 3) Page 26