Harlequin Intrigue March 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Nichole Severn

  “Why would someone in the States want code for tech that was built for the US military?”

  Summer smiled wickedly, like she was proud he had sniffed something out. “The DOD assigns governmental contracts to only a select handful of companies. These contracts can be extremely lucrative. In essence, this could be a case of corporate espionage—some other US company could be employing Rockwood to get the information so they can undercut ConFlux to gain control of the limited government contracts. But this is all just a hypothesis.”

  Holy crap. He’d had no idea. This information could change everything.

  And he couldn’t tell a single soul.

  He dropped his head into his hands as he tried to make sense of everything she was saying. For now, the only certainty was that he had to know more about what Summer had gotten herself wrapped up in. “What kind of tech is this code actually for?” he asked, a sickening lump forming in his stomach.

  She chewed on her bottom lip. “It is used in the making of IGS—Information Gathering Systems.”

  “Such as?”

  She switched on her blinker, slowing as she turned down a side road leading to their primary suspect’s residence. “They have been helping build nanotechnology the size of bugs and smaller, which can be deployed in a variety of mission settings from combat to civil unrest. Basically, it’s used in building the proverbial flies on the wall. This tech can also be used, however, with whatever chemical weaponry they deem necessary.”

  He tried to control the shock that was undoubtedly marking his face. ConFlux had been profiting from the world of nano warfare. He’d heard whispers of tiny devices that were information collection bugs. There had been talks in Congress sometime in 2009 about such things, but he had yet to have heard of or seen them actually being built or deployed en masse.

  The result of such devices being employed on the battlefield and in intelligence gathering was almost unimaginable. It was potentially as life-changing as bringing the internet to the public. Once this IGS technology was released, everything would change. There would no longer be any safe place. Everywhere and everyone could be compromised.

  And now, the code to create the technology was at the center of their war to get their son back. They couldn’t allow anyone to get their hands on the code—not when it had such potentially cataclysmic ramifications for the world—but they also had to do something to save their baby.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Though Summer had promised herself she wouldn’t compromise Mike by giving him information he shouldn’t be privy to, she had done exactly that. But the DTRA and Kevin were doing little to help Joe, and she needed answers and she needed them fast. As far as she could tell, she would only get them by bringing Mike into her inner circle. Sure, she could potentially lose her job if they found out she had divulged government secrets, but right now she trusted Mike far more than anyone else.

  No one cared about Joe as much as they did. No one would fight as hard as they would. Kevin had proved just that by blowing her off and telling her to just sit still when her son’s life was at stake. If he found out about what she’d told Mike, he only had himself to blame.

  She pulled her car to a stop about a half a block from their first suspect’s house. The man was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t inside with Joe, holed up like the criminal he potentially was while he waited for the ransom demands to be delivered. Well, he could keep waiting; she was done playing Rockwood’s games. Right now, she was the one in control, hunting down the people who wished her and her loved ones harm.

  This was her game now.

  She glanced over at Mike; he looked at odds with everything. She didn’t blame him.

  He’d always had the power to bring her back to reality and make her feel like she was nineteen years old and completely adrift. Had she told him too much? Was he thinking she was a security liability to him? Was he thinking she was untrustworthy? Had she made a mistake in telling him anything?

  Damn, she needed to get out of her head. But ever since she had dropped the info bomb, Mike had been silent. No doubt, he was thinking about all the things she’d said, piecing it all together with whatever his group already knew. He was also probably thinking about how he was going to tell Zoey and his teams at STEALTH about this newly acquired information.

  She didn’t want him to go to them with the details, but at the same time, she was almost sure it would be exactly what he would do.

  “The nanotech they are working on right now at ConFlux is called Mayfly.” She felt bad feeding him a fake code name, but if she heard it from another outside source, she would know if Mike and the STEALTH team used it.

  Here was hoping she never heard the code name Mayfly again.

  She hadn’t wanted to bring Mike in this deep, but the people who had taken Joe had struck low and had left her with no other cards to play. She’d had to call him in; he was one of the only people she knew she could trust. At least with him, she could understand his motives and his driving forces. Understanding those meant she also understood his weaknesses—and his strengths. And right now, she needed every strength he bore as she was barely able to process a single thought. If he proved himself, she would tell him the whole truth. Maybe.

  Though she understood that what was happening, and her inability to focus, was due to her emotional state, it didn’t mean she could control their effects on her mental state. She had been trained to be mentally resilient and deal with stress, but no one had prepared her for a situation like this. Was she strong enough to do what needed to be done? What if she failed? What if Joe ended up getting hurt—or worse?

  Her breathing quickened.

  One step at a time. One task at a time. That’s all she could focus on right now. Anything else and she would lose whatever ground she had managed to gain in her search.

  Resilient. I have to be resilient.

  This step was all about their suspect. If they got lucky, Joe would be inside the gray house with the white covered porch just down the street. Joe would be fine. He would be gurgling and cooing inside with this Cody guy and Rico, who would prove not to be monsters but merely instruments of the bosses who employed them to do their bidding.

  Here was hoping. And here was hoping Mike didn’t figure out she was still keeping things from him. If he did, he would likely never trust her again.

  “Let’s head over there, see if we can get a bead on Joe. If he is in there, we will bust down the door.” She ran her hands over her face as she thought about calling Kevin again and telling him where she was and what they were doing. No. He didn’t need to know she was going against orders. She was an agent for the DTRA and sometimes being an agent meant she had to go a little rogue.

  Mike pulled out his phone from the Faraday bag and started to text someone. Was he already telling Zoey about the nano secrets she had shared? Was he telling her about Mayfly?

  Summer stopped her thoughts before she let out a resigned and pained sigh. This, trusting Mike, would be a test.

  “You ready?” she asked, grabbing her phone out from the Faraday bag.

  By the time they got done here, it was likely that STEALTH would know all about the inner workings of ConFlux and their secret work for the Department of Defense.

  He slipped his phone into his breast pocket as he looked over at her. “Let’s stick together. No matter what happens, we can’t split up. I don’t want to lose sight of you. Got it?”

  She nodded as she looked around. The neighborhood was quiet. It seemed as though everyone in the area was either at work or at school; there wasn’t even a dog outside sniffing around. In fact, if she was forced to describe it, she would have said it was eerily devoid of any evidence of life. How was it possible that there wasn’t even a bird fluttering around, picking at bugs?

  The words “calm before the storm” came to mind.

  Well, they
were that storm.

  She smiled to herself as she stepped out of the car and Mike followed. He walked beside her on the sidewalk. “Hold my hand,” she said, extending it toward him.

  If they wanted to be ignored, the best thing they could do was to look like a happy, normal couple.

  He slipped his hand into hers and, as he did, she thought of the way his fingers had felt on her back as he had loved her last night. The memory made her want to sink into him, to let the warmth of his embrace lull her into a sense of comfort, but they weren’t what they used to be and she would be foolish to think otherwise.

  Without realizing it, she mirrored his walk and they moved in sync. Just another of the subtle body language cues that bespoke a happy couple. It was strange how their bodies had such incredible muscle memories when it came to each other—and especially their hearts.

  She could so easily imagine falling back in love with him. And as she realized it, she wondered if she had ever really fallen out.

  They moved toward the house, strolling along. The suspect’s driveway was empty, but there could be a car parked in the garage.

  The gray house sat back from the road, its yard in desperate need of a mow. Weedy flowers poked up through tall grasses as they angled for the sun. The blades of grass brushed against the cuff of her pants, making a scratching sound that she doubted she would have normally noticed, but now sounded as loud as a semitruck barreling down a dirt road.

  Nearing the door, they could hear the sound of techno music playing inside, the noise thick with rhythm but devoid of anything Summer would have considered enjoyable. She sent Mike a glance. From the quirk of his brow, she could tell he was thinking something similar.

  “Apparently, we are walking up on Studio 54 here,” he joked.

  “You think he has glow sticks and bottled water for us when we join the party?”

  Mike chuckled. “Just the thought of what it must be like in that house makes me worry about catching some kind of communicable disease.”

  “The only thing I think we are going to have to worry about catching from this guy is a case of being chronically single.”

  He started to laugh, the sound a bit too loud and out of place, and he clamped his mouth shut.

  She stopped at the front door. The music rattled the windows and, from where she stood, she spotted a worn leather couch and a forest-green recliner perched in the man’s living room. The floor was cluttered with spent candy wrappers and take-out boxes, but there was nothing to indicate their baby was inside.

  “Let’s walk around back,” she said, making sure that they were still, as of yet, unnoticed.

  Mike hopped down from the porch step, holding out his hand to help her. As she stepped down, she let go of his hand. She wanted to go for her gun, to be ready in case something went sideways here, but she talked herself off that ledge.

  If the man inside saw them stalking around his house with their guns raised, there was no way she could talk herself out of the situation. Someone would undoubtedly get hurt, and the last thing she wanted to do was to put Joe into a situation in which he was in even more danger. Not to mention how things would play out with Kevin.

  She needed to fly just under the radar here.

  They moved quickly around the side of the house, slipping through the wooden fence’s gate, silently clicking the lock open and making sure to keep it slightly ajar in case they needed to make a quick exit.

  Her body tensed as they moved toward the back wall of the house, careful to stay out of sight from anyone who may have been inside. Hopefully the guy was alone or with only his accomplice, as she had assumed. While she was reasonably proficient with a gun, it wasn’t typically her style to put herself into a situation where it could turn into a Wild West shootout. She was more of a “stick to the shadows and take them out at their proverbial knees” kind of woman.

  Mike raised his fist in the air, motioning for her to stop. His body rested on the wall beside the sliding-glass door. His hand lowered to his weapon, readying for the threat, but as he peeked around, his hand moved off his gun and up to his face. Moving back to his position, hidden by the wall, he glanced over at her. His body was convulsing with silent laughter.

  “What?” she asked, wondering what the hell had gotten into him.

  “This is definitely not our dude.”

  “But...he was buying formula and diapers. And he had a history of working overseas and in the Sandbox. Are you sure?” She frowned. The hope she hadn’t known she had been feeling twisted down her chest and pooled at her feet like spent tears.

  “You have to see this. Seriously,” he whispered. He stepped in her direction so they could switch positions on the wall and she could glance inside.

  As she moved around him, she tried to remind herself that she’d known this was a thin lead from the moment she had discovered the man. She had been grasping at straws; she couldn’t be disappointed now when it quite possibly would lead to nothing.

  She leaned around the door frame and peered inside. It took her a minute to make sense of the scene in front of her. There, standing in the middle of what would have been a dining room in most homes, was a man in his midfifties. Around him was a series of white, lattice-style baby gates. The floor was covered with a zoo-animal-patterned blanket. The dining room had been transformed from the heart of the household, where most families had dinner chats and meetings, into a makeshift playpen.

  Her gaze moved to the man. His chest was exposed; a pacifier was laced on a string around his neck. He wore an adult diaper and a pair of duck slippers. Sitting beside the man was a bottle and a can of the yellow-lidded baby formula.

  What in the hell had they walked into?

  She had always thought she was open-minded and relatively nonjudgmental, but standing there staring at this man-baby, she was utterly shocked. And angry. Angry because she’d wanted this to be a kidnapper, wanted to find Joe, and he wasn’t there.

  In her wildest dreams, she had never seen anything even remotely close to the scene in front of her. And though she was aware she should look away—that they should bug out and get as far from this as possible, and get back to their hunt for Joe—all she could do was stare.

  The grown man dressed as a baby sat, blissfully unaware he was being watched. He reached to his left and picked up his cell phone like he was recording himself. He made gurgling sounds and popped the pacifier into his mouth.

  Wow.

  There was a tug on the back of her pants as Mike pulled her away from the door. “You agree this isn’t our guy?”

  She nodded, unable to put words to the flurry of thoughts and feelings she was experiencing.

  Mike took her hand, a smile on his face. “If all your leads are this interesting, we are going to have one hell of a day.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Back in the car, all he could do was look down the road at the unassuming gray house and laugh. “Summer, that has to be one of the craziest things I have ever seen in my damned life.” His words sputtered out from between guttural laughs.

  Damn, it felt good.

  She covered her mouth with her hands, seemingly embarrassed by the situation in which they had found themselves. “I swear, I had no idea. I just put the pieces together. Something was off.” She started to giggle.

  “Oh, I can totally understand how this guy would raise some red flags and how you would want to check him out, but damn.” He roiled with laughter as he thought about the man standing in the middle of a baby-gate playpen dressed like an oversize baby.

  He had heard of infantilism, but...just wow.

  “I... That...” Summer giggled. “Did you...?”

  “Oh, I saw what was going on in there. That was...wow.” Their words filled the spaces between their laughter as they tried to make sense of exactly what they had stumbled upon.

  Tears started to str
eak down Summer’s face as her giggles turned to full-blown roaring laughter. “That...is...the best...thing... I’ve ever seen...in my life.”

  For what must have been five minutes they sat in the car and laughed. Though it was one of the strangest things he had experienced, Mike was grateful. It had been so long since they had laughed together like this, and the tension of the kidnapping had seemed to push away the possibility of laughter until they got Joe back. This, these moments lost in the throes of joy, he wanted a life of with her.

  He wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes then reached over and ran his thumb across Summer’s cheek. “If nothing else, I feel like I need to thank you for that. Seriously,” he said, gaining control over his aching gut, “I will never forget that as long as I live. That was amazing.”

  She dipped her head, moving her face deeper into his palm. “I aim to please.”

  “That, that right there, is something I know all about. You are by far the best woman I have ever met for that, and many other reasons.” The words spilled out of him without his really thinking about it, but as they dripped from his lips, Mike suddenly felt embarrassed.

  He shouldn’t have said that, not right now, and maybe not ever. They were already treading on treacherous ground when it came to their feelings toward one another and any possible future they could have; he shouldn’t be making it any more complicated by opening up to her like he just had. It was just, with levity filling the air had come the desire to be tender and honest. And Summer had opened up to him...she had trusted him with her secret. That had to mean something, didn’t it?

  She reached up and touched the hand that still rested on her face. “Before I had Joe, I always thought you were the greatest gift in my life. I was right, but then you ended up giving me a greater gift than I could have ever imagined. If that is all we ever get to have together, then I will consider my life blessed. You...you made me a mother.”

  His body drove him toward her and he took her lips with his.