What in the ever fucking fuck? Skylar knows Devolin?
My stance widened, my arms crossed over my chest, and my eyes studied the woman in front of me. Skylar bit her lip nervously, her eyes darting between me and my partner, who was diligently tapping away on one laptop, then switching to the other, muttering nonsensical things to himself, all the while oblivious to this latest development.
“How do you know her?”
“She told me she was fine,” Skylar explained, and tried to move past me to get to Brycen, but I shot out an arm to stop her. She sighed and looked up into my eyes. “Dalton…is she in trouble?”
Despite her evident concern, I didn’t answer. Instead, I repeated my earlier question. “No bullshit, Sky. How do you know her?”
Fire flashed through her eyes as my sister’s trademark stubbornness kicked in.
Getting onto the tips of her toes, her index poked me in the chest. “She’s a friend.” Another poke. “A good friend. The best I’ve had in the last two years as a matter of fact.” She kept punctuating each point with that finger of hers. “Tell me what’s going on. Whatever you think she’s done—”
“Sky—”
“No! Listen to me, D.” She wasn’t backing down. Like a dog with a bone that one. “She wouldn’t do—”
I was officially past the point of exasperation. “Would you shut the fuck up and listen to what I need to say?”
“You can’t take this away from her, D,” she whispered. “It’s all she’s got. She’s been sick for—”
“Sick?”
“Yeah, sick, and not the cold or flu kind, D. You do realize you’re in the Chronic Care Ward, right?” She paused, shaking her head before letting it drop to her chest. “I just…” A sigh. “I just thought that this last time would be it,” she whispered, but I heard her loud and clear. “She doesn’t deserve this to be happening to her. She doesn’t need more shit in her life.” Her eyes flew up to mine and I was faced with a protective Skylar. “You need to leave her alone. Whatever it is that you caught her doing, she’s doing it for good, you get me? Leave. Her. Be. Dalton.” She finished this with her chest rising and falling rapidly, eyes shining with unshed tears.
Grabbing onto her shoulders, I pulled her into me, hugging her, offering her comfort. “Had you given me a word in edgewise,” I said softly into her hair, “I’d have told you that Brycen, the guys, and I have been looking for Devolin for quite some time now.” Skylar’s body went solid as a rock. Nodding against her head, I continued, “She helped me out a while back.” I chuckled. “She’s given us quite the runaround, too.” Pulling away, I set her back, a subtle smile on my face. “Aside from the fact that I wanted to track her down to thank her for getting involved, I—”
Skylar’s eyes widened. “This is about Theo and Morgan, isn’t it?”
What the fuck?
“I heard her that night, D.” Her voice shook. “I was working the nightshift, and planned to stop by on my break like usual, but I heard her. The panic in her voice. The resolve in it…her defeat. I had no idea what she was doing, but I knew it had something to do with her computers.”
“Skylar?” She turned to face the same nurse who’d given me Devolin’s message earlier. “Your girl’s looking for you.”
Skylar nodded to the woman, “Thanks, Doris,” then turned to me once more. “I…”
“Go,” I told her. “Make sure she’s alright. We can talk about this later.”
She nodded. “Can I ask you something?”
Smirking, I nodded. “Doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”
“D…” She rolled her eyes.
“Fine.”
“She’s the one with the flowers and gifts, isn’t she?” Her lips quirked up at my slight nod in response. “I’m going to tell you this, but I swear, I’ll hunt you down in your sleep and kill you if you tell her this came from me…”
That’s when I knew I had an ally in Skylar.
Chapter 5
Devolin
I stared down at the note Doris had handed me.
I’m staying. –D
Funny how those two words incited a gamut of conflicting emotions. At first, dread filled me, quickly being replaced by excitement, only for that to shift to nervousness, then to doubt, followed by excitement yet again, then to depression as thoughts of my most likely failing health interrupted the merry-go-round that was Dalton Kippers.
Now, I was making myself busy, staring at the far wall of my hospital room, trying to figure out how I could evade the man in question.
That’s when Skylar came barreling through the door, a murderous look upon her face. “When were you going to tell me that you knew D?”
My body went rigid, my shoulders bunching up to my ears as I whispered, “What?” D was Dalton? What the fuck were the odds?
“Those are your bag and your laptops out there, are they not?”
“Well—”
“He’s the one you’ve been hung up on all these months, isn’t he?”
Mouth hanging open, I nodded, then tried my luck. “Sky—”
The woman threw her hands in the air. “I can’t believe this!” She began to pace the room. “What the hell are you doing, Dev?” Skylar aimed a perplexed gaze my way. “I told you that you’d get in trouble with your little—”
“Let me—”
Skylar’s feet halted, pivoting abruptly to face me. “You know you’ll be lucky to escape jail this time, right? D isn’t someone to mess with. He’s by the book. He’s black and white…ain’t any shades of gray with that man. Fuck, Dev, what did you do?”
“You don’t understand.” I bit my lip, trying to figure out what to say. Skylar gave me a look that demanded an explanation. “It’s not like I planned to get involved on purpose. I had no idea he was your brother; you two don’t even share the same last name.”
“It’s a sore point with Dad, mom gave me her last name when I was born. I’m thinking about having it changed though.” She snorted. “I don’t want any ties to her, my genetics are enough.”
I nodded. “When I looked into him, I didn’t need to know about his family affiliations. Plus, you call him D! How was I supposed to know that was short for Dalton?” Pausing to take a breath, I continued, “I had to make sure that I was helping out a group of good guys. That night, I was creeping online and saw the video footage. I couldn’t sit there and do nothing!” I hated confrontation when it came to me having to justify the ethics I abided by with regards to my work. The term hacker wasn’t one taken in a positive light, that’s for sure, but people needed to know that there was a difference in the stereotypical hacker and one known as a white hat. I knew that Skylar was aware of the differences, but my friend was too blinded by her emotions that she was no longer thinking straight.
“You should have let Brycen handle things,” Skylar bit out.
“He didn’t have a handle on things,” I growled my defence. “That’s the point I’m trying to make. He underestimated the target and got tagged. There wasn’t any time, Sky. Morgan would have died. I didn’t know about Jasper until after the men pulled him out of that old garage, and I had just joined the party by then.” Party, yeah. We’d had a rockin’ good time that night. Not!
As quick as Skylar was to rage, the woman’s temper was diffused just as fast, if the look of empathy strewn across her face was anything to go by.
“Then explain to me, why it is that my brother’s computer guru has his hands on your precious computers right now? Tell me that you haven’t found trouble. Devolin, I warned you—”
“I’m not the one in trouble,” I whispered.
Skylar’s eyes rounded. “You mean—When you left earlier…”
I nodded. “There’s a case he landed recently…”
“Have you been working together all this time and you haven’t told me?” The woman’s brows furrowed. “No, that isn’t right.”
Right then, I thought it best to
answer the question my friend had yet to ask. “We haven’t been in touch since Morgan’s kidnapping. I gave him the slip, and I’ve been giving Brycen and the rest of the guys working for your brother the same treatment since that night.”
Skylar’s eyes widened. “That’s just over a year ago now!”
I nodded. “I know.”
On a sigh, Skylar let herself drop into the chair at my bedside. “Then how’d you know about this new case of his?” she asked.
I knew guilt centered in my expression. “I referred that particular client to Dalton. The authorities haven’t been able to make heads or tails of anything, so I sent him to your brother. For the last year, I’ve been…” I had to find a way to explain to her, in a manner that didn’t make me seem as creepy as it did in my head. “I, uh…the night when Morgan was taken…” I looked down at my hands, my fingers clutching at each other, knuckles turning white. “We…that is, I felt a connection to them. After everything went down, I just couldn’t let them go.” It had become somewhat of an obsession. It hadn’t been with just Dalton. I’d felt protective of the entire NSI team.
“Oh, honey.” Skylar’s hand covered mine. “You’ve been watching over them, haven’t you?” I avoided her gaze but nodded, relieved that she had figured it out without my having to explain further. “Thank you.”
My head snapped up. “What?” I whispered.
Skylar’s eyes glittered with unshed tears. “You had my brother’s back. The shooting, the flowers…the other gifts—” Skylar’s eyes rounded as she emitted a gasp. “You need to forget what I’ve been telling you.”
“You’ve been telling me to do a lot of things since we’ve known each other, Sky.”
“Don’t move on, Dev,” she whispered.
“What?” I choked out.
“Woman, he’s just as obsessed with you as you’ve been with him. Don’t move on,” she repeated.
“What?” I parroted my earlier words.
Oh no! This wasn’t good. Not. Good. At. All. The last thing I needed was a man. A man that set my motor running more than any other man, and that was before even meeting him face-to-face, but a man nonetheless. I didn’t know any other way to deal with my friend’s request other than to panic.
“Just hear me out…” Skylar began.
So what if he likes my quirkiness? It doesn’t make him Mr. Right.
“How do you know?” Skylar broke me from my musings.
“Huh?”
“How do you know that he’s not, Dev? He’s a good guy. He—”
I cut her off. “It’s not him. It’s me. It’s because I don’t do well with people. I’ve been stuck here for months, and when I’m not here, I’m at my mother’s. My mother’s, Sky! I’m a socially awkward dork. I’m anxious all the time, and I don’t trust easily. I don’t trust—”
Skylar made a grab for my hands, stopping that incessant finger twisting of mine and whispered, “You don’t think that your health is going to get any better, do you?” I shook my head, no. “And today is freaking you out?”
“Yeah,” I sniffled, my voice having gone thick. “You know my history, Sky. You know that just when things start looking up, they usually fall to pieces. Aside from my mom and you, I’m better off alone. I can’t relate to anything in Dalton’s world or yours, for that matter. I don’t know what it is to be normal anymore.”
“Something happened that night, didn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t play coy with me, Dev.” Skylar crossed her arms over her chest, her chin jutting out in defiance. “You two formed some kind of bond working that case.”
I shrugged. “I already told you we did. We all did. It doesn’t—”
“Yeah, but there’s something more there with D than the others.” Her gaze softened when she saw me pull my lips in between my teeth, so I couldn’t confirm or deny her allegations. “I heard you that night, Dev.”
“What?” whooshed out of me.
“I’m thinking you must have been wearing a headset, because I could only hear your part of the exchange. Well, the parts after I heard you shrieking someone’s name,” she explained. “You sounded so sad. Like you didn’t know your place in the world.” She was right on her mark. “It’s as if being alone is easier, even though I know it’s been hell on you.”
“Yeah, but the price everyone else pays when I can’t be part of their everyday lives is worth being alone, Sky,” I managed through the lump in my throat. “It hurts less all around in the end.”
“But—”
I shook my head. “No, Sky. It’s bad enough I can’t seem to get him off my mind. You were right. If I can’t bring myself to open up, then I might as well just leave well enough alone. So that’s why I need you to make sure that he goes away and stops looking for me.”
My friend shook her head, eyes locking on mine as she leaned closer. “You don’t know him, Dev. He won’t stop. Now that he knows who you are, he’s not just going to let things go. You’ve just dangled prey in front of the beast. Do you honestly think he’s going to pull up stakes now?”
“He has to,” I whispered.
“No, Dev, that’s where you’re wrong. D doesn’t have to do shit. He does what he does because he wants to. Finding out who you are was only part of the puzzle.” Skylar got up and backed toward the room’s door. “Listen, you need your rest, so I’ll buy you some time. I’ll send him away, but know that he will come looking for you. And when he does find you, you better be ready to answer to him, especially if you keep giving him the runaround. Since you’re so good at disappearing, I suspect he might just threaten to break out the cuffs.”
“Cuffs?” I gulped.
“I know.” She leaned against the doorjamb, sporting a saucy grin. “Kinky, right?”
“Please don’t tell him anything about what I’ve been through.”
“I haven’t. I won’t. That’s something best coming from you, but know that he’s already put two and two together. He will be asking you about you being sick, and why you left the hospital when you are a patient. I suggest that you’re honest about it all. If not, I can bet, now that he knows your identity, he’ll set Brycen to the task of figuring out who you are. I’m going home for a little R&R, and I’ll be back later.”
With that, Skylar disappeared, leaving me with assorted images that worked themselves into one hell of a sexy scenario. It’s too bad I refused to do anything about it.
Chapter 6
Dalton
If it weren’t for Skylar’s promise to help me out with Devolin, I would have never left the hospital that very first day.
The next morning, I was right back in that waiting room, sans Brycen, who was still working on deciphering Devolin’s information. I’d also tasked him with searching for some background on our little white hat hacker.
Suffice to say, after our official meeting, I figured that a gentler approach might be more successful at getting Devolin to spare me some time. It seemed to me that what the woman needed most was a friend.
When she denied me her time and presence that next day, I called up Morgan and had five dozen pink roses delivered to Devolin’s room. It had cost me a small fortune, but how else was I supposed to convey my thanks for everything that she’d done a year ago?
I was again denied entry the following day.
This warranted another five dozen roses. I also got a call from my half-sister, stating that if I was aiming for impact, I’d hit my mark. Skylar also told me that if I wanted to really sweeten Devolin up, stargazer lilies were the way to go.
So that’s what I tried next.
When I walked into the waiting room on that third day, I had a rather large, not to mention, extremely fragrant vase full of stargazer lilies in my hands.
“I see the big guns are out.” Skylar was smirking from her chair. “Did you get the rest?”
I nodded.
She clapped her hands together,
shot to her feet, then extended her arms toward me. “Good. Now, give me those and let me do my thing.”
My third floral delivery must have been a charm—or maybe it was because Skylar got in on things even more and wouldn’t let her friend get away with pushing me out any longer.
My phone was in hand.
The number was dialed.
All I had to do was hit call.
I didn’t. Instead, I found myself so deep in my head, I never noticed Skylar standing right in front of me.
“She said she’ll see you.”
That got my attention. When my head snapped up, the woman was grinning like a loon.
I cancelled out from my calling log, pushed myself up to my feet, and shoved my phone in my back pocket. “She will?”
She nodded. “But I suggest you let her go at her own pace.” I gulped at that. “Don’t push her, D.”
“What made her change her mind?” I asked.
“You mean, beside you proving me right by being a pushy bastard?” She licked her lips before explaining, “I think it was something I said. Then again, she got some great news earlier this morning, so it could have something to do with that, too.” Skylar’s smile brightened her whole face, making me itch to ask her what the good news was about. Call me crazy, but I was hoping that Devolin would be the one to impart that knowledge when I spoke with her. Therefore, I didn’t push.
Taking a few steps toward my sister, I grabbed her by the shoulders, and pulled her toward me in a loose hug. “Thank you, Sky,” I said into her hair before kissing it, then set her back.
“Go get her, tiger. She’s in room 506.” With a wink, she turned to leave. “I’ll be back later to check on things.”
Right as I was going to head toward Devolin’s room, my phone chimed with an incoming text from Brycen.
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