by Tia Lewis
Dirty Hacker
An Alpha Billionaire Romance
Tia Lewis
Roxy Sinclaire
Salted Pen Publications
Contents
Mailing List
About This Book
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Thank You
About Tia Lewis
Also by Tia Lewis
About Roxy Sinclaire
Also by Roxy Sinclaire
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Tia Lewis and Roxy Sinclaire. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
First Published in December 2016.
First Edition.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please contact: [email protected]. www.AuthorTiaLewis.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is a crime punishable by law. No part of the book may be scanned, uploaded to or downloaded from file sharing sites, or distributed in any other way via the Internet or any other means, electronic, or print, without the publisher’s permission. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000 (www.fbi.gov/ipr/).
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
Published by Salted Pen Publications, Minnesota.
Dirty Hacker: An Alpha Billionaire Romance
Editor: Nik. S.
Proofreader: Charity Chimni
Cover Designed by: RBA Designs
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About This Book
I dug too deep. Now, I'm buried in the truth.
Recent high school graduate and computer genius, Sophie Hanson wants nothing more than to be part of an online hacker group. Spending her life behind a computer screen or with her nose in a book hasn't been all that thrilling. Sophie's ready for some excitement.
But how far will she go to get what she wants?
When the irresistible and mysterious billionaire, Preston Phillips finally relents and welcomes the young virgin into his prestigious hacker group, things take a dangerous turn. Selling her soul—and giving her body—to the devil wasn't in her plans. Suddenly, Sophie is a pawn in Preston's perilous and erotic games—with no escape in sight.
Dirty Hacker is a full length standalone romance novel. There are no cliffhangers and no cheating. There are NO cliffhangers. NO cheating.
Be prepared for a wild ride of self-discovery and not just your traditional girl meets boy love story.
Prologue
"I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow morning. Tell me what to do tomorrow morning when I can't look through my window to see you?" Tears began to prick the back of my eyes as I tilted my head back to look into his.
The move had been lingering in our future for months, and now it was here—twisting my heart into knots—taking the only love I'd ever known away from me.
Bradley's father was in the Army and had gotten overseas orders. Not the kind of news a couple of 10-year-old best friends wants to hear, but it was happening, and it was happening tomorrow.
I'd come to the conclusion I'd never see Bradley again. After all, a whole ocean was going to be separating us—an entire damn ocean. There was no way we were going to make it. The friendship we shared grew during our quiet moments together, and no amount of phone calls could replicate it.
He cupped his palm to my cheek, pressing his lips to my forehead as he breathed me in.
We stood there in silence for a moment, but I couldn’t take it anymore. "Say something."
He didn’t reply.
I pulled away from his grip, angry he wouldn’t comfort me the way I needed. "Say something, Bradley! You’re my best friend!"
He shook his head as a tear escaped the corner of his eye and cascaded down his cheek. Stepping toward me, he snaked his arms around my waist, resting his hands on the small of my back.
He leaned over, pressing his cheek against mine. "I'll find you, Sophie. I'll find you…" his words trailed off as he squeezed me tightly between his arms.
The pain in his voice hurt my soul, and I could do nothing but stand there and cherish the last few hours we had together…
Months went by and being without my best friend was unbearable, and talking to him over the phone every day made my stomach churn. I wanted to touch him—to hug him—to feel his skin against mine. But there would be no more of that. Then one day I didn’t answer the phone when he called. It was a rash decision, but I made it. I stared at the screen until the ringing stopped—until it went black. The next day—I did it again. It only took a few more missed calls before he stopped calling, and that's when I closed that chapter of my life.
Chapter 1
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be anonymous?
Have you ever fantasized about disappearing? Choosing a new name? Even stripping your fingerprints? You could start over. Fresh. Clean. Brand new. After losing my best friend, that's exactly what I wanted to do.
I also had always wanted to be anonymous. It helped that I lived in New York. It was an easy city in which to blend in. There were always people shuffling around, cars at a virtual standstill thanks to traffic—no matter what time of the day or night. And there was always a siren somewhere in the distance regardless of where I went. It felt like the closest thing to disappearing. People don’t really look at each other in a city that big. They don’t really make eye contact or even remember the people they brushed past in the street that day. I liked it that way.
Thanks to modern technology, it was almost impossible to completely disappear. All the texting, social media, emails, and online banking meant leaving a digital footprint no matter where a person went. Phone numbers, addresses, social security numbers, college records—anything and everything could be tracked down online if a person k
new what to look for. Exploitation happened every day, but nobody knew it.
Somewhere along the line, I became aware of the eyes on me. The worst part was not knowing who the eyes belonged to. Call it paranoia, whatever, but the sense that there were eyes on my personal information creeped me out. But the more I learned about how easy it was for others to access the most intimate details of my life, the more passionate I was about making it impossible for them to do so.
I didn’t want to be just another one of the sheep, blindly lining up for slaughter and all because the internet made life more convenient. So, I tried to hide as much of my information as I could.
It didn’t happen overnight. I had to learn about virtual private networks before I could install one. I deleted my social media accounts. Slowly but surely, I dissolved my presence in the digital world until I was little more than a memory.
I finally found privacy in one of the most public places: the internet.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
When did my aversion to attention start? Probably the moment I was born. I probably shied away from the oohs and ahhs of the nursing staff from that first moment. Don’t look at me, I don’t want to be noticed. Isn’t there another baby being born right now? Can’t you pay attention to them, instead?
It didn’t help that I grew up in a small town about two hours south of Atlanta. Ahh, the South. So much its own little world, it needs a capital-S. The land where beauty queens reign supreme where it’s not considered cliché to enter a pageant or use entirely too much hairspray. Most of the girls in my class were winners of one pageant or another. Imagine the horror for a person like me, who struggled to find anything I was good at and hated attention. Especially attention over my looks, which I never thought were much to brag about. Sure, I was blonde. I had light blue eyes. Aren’t they supposed to be highly desirable? For most people—and I did get more than my share of compliments about my features, which always struck me as hilarious. I didn’t choose to have that shade of hair or that eye color, but people praised me for them like I’d earned them somehow. Then again, people were always weird about things like physical appearance.
No matter how attractive I supposedly was, I never had confidence. Confidence, I quickly realized as I watched even the somewhat plain-looking girls in school win pageants, was the key. If you could carry yourself like a winner, you were in. A pound and a half of makeup didn’t hurt, either. Neither were exactly my style.
And then there was the fact that I couldn’t find an activity I was any good at. I was terrible at sports—any sport; it didn’t matter. No coordination whatsoever. I couldn’t carry a tune to save my life. I had zero rhythm. On a scale of one to ten, my social awkwardness was around twenty-seven. I wasn’t even funny. Nothing fit me. So, I wasn’t exactly swimming in friends.
I did have one good friend in elementary school, Bradley, but he and his family moved to Japan on my tenth birthday. Happy birthday to me. We wrote letters back and forth for a while and even chatted on the phone. However, our lives took different paths, and it was just too hard to continue with limited contact after a while. I could understand that. Even when I was ten years old, I understood a lot of things.
It was okay, being alone. I got more used to it the older I got. I didn’t mind walking home from school on my own. I did my homework in peace, ate dinner with my parents and read a book before bed. I was a loner, and that was all right with me. I liked it that way. I didn’t have to pretend to be somebody I wasn’t, the way the other kids did. I could see it all over them, the fake smiles and exhausting efforts at appearing cool and experienced. How did they manage to keep up that façade? I could never do it, no matter how hard I tried.
That didn’t mean I didn’t want to find my place in the world.
Maybe it was the success of my parents that made me aware of the difference between being somebody and being a nobody. Not that they would ever point out that I was a nobody. They were much better parents and people than that. But when your father is a world-renowned cardiac surgeon, and your mother is a partner in one of the country’s biggest law firms, well, you get a good look at what it’s like to be somebody. They both cast a pretty long shadow over my life, and considering that it didn’t seem like I was good at anything, things looked pretty bleak.
Sometimes I wondered if I should follow in their footsteps. Go to law school, maybe. I was smart enough—grades were the one thing I never had to worry about. And I wasn’t afraid of hard work. But I wasn’t outspoken enough, either. I could never imagine standing in front of a packed courtroom the way my mother did. And I didn’t have a surgeon’s steady hands. So, they were both out.
I’d have to find my own path.
The ball started rolling when I turned twelve. My father accepted a job at a top cardiac hospital in New York. Less than a month after my birthday, we packed up and headed north to the Big Apple. No more hair sprayed beauty queens. No more fake smiles and talk of the latest pageants and who won what and when and where. I was so excited at the chance to get out of town and start over fresh, somewhere miles away from where I’d started out. Nobody would know me. I could get a clean start.
But I was a southern girl, too. I talked funny—well, to New Yorkers. To me, they were the ones with an accent. It worried me that I’d have just as difficult of a time fitting in there as I had in Georgia.
My parents knew how anxious I was. Sure, starting over was great, but we were moving to a city with millions and millions of people. It was a whole new world, and I was still just a kid. So, on the day we arrived at our new apartment, they presented me with a gift that changed my life: my first laptop computer.
The computer was one of the best things that ever happened to me. For once, something made sense. For once, I tasted freedom. Sure, I never had to leave my desk, but I could travel all over the world. I could learn anything and everything. I became obsessed with the endless possibilities of the internet. After a little while, what fascinated me more was what made it all work. How did people all over the world visit websites, chat, download music, send emails? How was that possible? How could we talk to each other when we were thousands of miles apart?
That was when I started taking online coding classes. Three hours a night, three days a week. It was fascinating. Every session was more exciting than the last.
I started taking my laptop with me everywhere. I was like a sponge, absorbing every bit of information I could get my hands on. Finally, I knew the satisfaction, the sense of accomplishment that comes with creating something, something better and new. I became obsessed, plain, and simple. As soon as I got my first “hit,” I needed more and more. It became more of an addiction than anything else.
I had to know everything. It wasn’t enough for me to rest on my laurels and enjoy what I learned. I needed to find out more. And each skill, each operating principle I discovered led the way to more. Like a huge tree with millions of branches. Each new branch opened up into several others. On and on and on.
For years, I was content to feel like a superhero. A magician. I could make things happen. I knew what went on behind the scenes of what mere mortals took for granted. They signed into their accounts, visited websites, made purchases, chatted. They assumed that when they clicked a button or entered text, things would work smoothly. They trusted the process. I understood that process and knew how tenuous the entire thing was. One misplaced character, one rogue line of code and the whole thing could come tumbling down. And they had no idea. I finally felt special, like I could contribute something. Maybe, one day, I could make it possible for people to do their work or their banking or something else essential to their lives. Maybe I would invent an entirely new system. I could be the next Steve Jobs, even. The sky was the limit.
Then I found The Alliance. That was the day everything changed all over again.
Chapter 2
When did I first come across The Alliance’s blog? I couldn’t remember the day of the week or the month of t
he year, whether it was cold or warm, sunny or raining. I couldn’t remember what I was wearing or even if it was night or day.
What I could remember was how I felt. If my first laptop was the key to my future, finding The Alliance was like finding the door the key unlocked. That entire time in between, I’d thought I knew what I was meant to do. I’d thought that finding out the inner machinations of technology was enough. After that, I’d pictured myself blending in for the first time—if only from behind a computer screen. I’d imagined going with the flow, working within the system.
Only because I didn’t know there was a flip side to the coin.
The Alliance, I quickly found out, was a group of hackers. The blog outlined their mission, how they desired to solve problems and overcome limits. All right. I could get onboard with that. They were a community, a shared culture of expert programmers and networking ninjas, working together to build something from nothing. I could get behind that, too, since I’d never felt like I was part of anything before. Maybe that was why I gravitated toward them so quickly, and so thoroughly.
The internet, according to this group of hackers, was built by another group of hackers. It was they who created what billions of people used every day, all day long. There was no higher, noble purpose. The Alliance wanted to take things even further. They wanted nothing more than to harness what they saw as the unlimited freedom provided by the digital age.
In plain, simple English: I was hooked. They had me from the word “go.” If they’d asked me to pack up my things and move elsewhere to work with them, I would have done it without thinking twice. Maybe a little scary, maybe not exactly something a rational person would do, but that was where I was at that point in my life. I’d gotten as far as I could as a teenager playing by the rules. My online courses had taught me everything they could, and the tinkering I did night and day had taught me even more. Until I stumbled across The Alliance, I never knew there was a whole new level to play in. Once I had seen the Promised Land, I couldn’t forget it existed.