I open it, expecting to see anything but what I find, which is Miranda Lawson staring back at me from a live camera feed.
In a clipped voice, she says, “Tabitha West. I’m Miranda Lawson.”
So much for the preliminaries. I look at Connor, who nods at the screen as if to say, Pay attention.
I turn back to Miranda, an elegant, icy-blonde ringer for the actress Sharon Stone. Straight-backed and pale, she’s sitting at a desk in what appears to be a spacious home office. Bookcases and photographs line the wall behind her right shoulder; to her left is the view of a spectacular sunset over the ocean through a wall of glass.
If she’s cutting right to the chase, I am too. “I understand you have a situation.”
She offers me a pinched, unhappy smile. “Yes. My situation is that Mr. Hughes requires you to assist him in a job I’ve hired him to do, and he informs me you’ve refused.”
With a clenched jaw, I look over my shoulder at Connor. He blows me a kiss.
I turn back to Miranda. “Correct.”
“What is your reason for refusal?” she demands.
This entire situation is really starting to chap my ass. “Well, if you must know, I despise him.”
She makes an elegant little movement of her hand as if she’s swatting away a fly. “Your personal feelings about Mr. Hughes are immaterial.”
I can see why this woman has such a bad reputation. I understand that highly intelligent people are more often than not absolute disasters with interpersonal skills. All I have to do is take a look in a mirror to get that. But that isn’t what I take offense to. It’s the arrogance that gets me. The presumption that what she wants is more important than what I want.
Before I can speak, she says coolly, “No, I don’t care about your feelings. And you don’t care about mine, nor should you. We’re strangers, after all. What I do care about is that you are regarded highly by a person I regard highly, and therefore I’m willing to negotiate on price. I authorized Connor to offer you five hundred thousand. Now I’m offering a million. Will that be sufficient?”
I’m surprised she actually stooped to ask my opinion. I take great pleasure in saying, “I’m not interested in the job, Ms. Lawson. At any price.”
Her icy-blue eyes don’t blink. Her elegant features don’t move. But I feel her disapproval, like a glass of cold water poured down my spine. “You,” she says, barely moving her lips, “are being unreasonable.”
If she’s an iceberg, I’m a forest fire. I feel heat sweep up my neck from my chest, feel my ears go hot, feel the pressure build behind my eyeballs. “And you, Ms. Lawson, along with that high horse you rode in on, can go fuck yourself.”
I slap the laptop closed.
Behind me, Connor sighs.
I glare at him. “That was beyond, jarhead, even for you.”
“Well, my finesse didn’t work, so I thought I’d bring in the big guns.”
“Your finesse?” I repeat, astonished. “I didn’t realize you were familiar with the word.”
“The letter,” he replies patiently, as if it should be obvious.
“Ah yes. The letter. I wonder, how many tries did it take before you could actually bring yourself to write the dreaded words ‘I owe you an apology’?”
At the sarcasm in my tone, his brows lift. “You think I lied?”
“I think you’d rather stab yourself in the eye than admit you were wrong.”
“Well, yeah.” He shrugs. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the truth.”
I narrow my eyes and inspect his expression, which remains suspiciously bland. I can’t tell if he’s lying.
I hate it that I can’t tell if he’s lying.
He says mildly, “You have trust issues, you know that?”
“Ha! Me? With you? No!”
His smile is wry, that amusement again. He inclines his head, as if to say Fair enough.
“Are we done here? Because I’d really like to get back to my life now.”
“There’s really nothing I can do to persuade you? Nothing you want from me in exchange for doing this job?”
The way he said that last part, the hint of innuendo along with a sparkle in his eyes, makes me grimace. “Please tell me you didn’t just offer to service me sexually. Tell me I’m wrong, jarhead. Restore my faith in humanity and tell me you’re not that much of a pig.”
He makes big, innocent doe eyes at me. “What? Geez, Tabby. Sex on the brain much? How long has it been since you’ve gotten some?”
Then he smiles.
And he does it with his whole goddamn body.
I shudder. “You’re a real piece of work. How do you ever get a date? No wait, don’t tell me—with cash!”
His lashes lower. He looks at me with so much smugness oozing from his pores, I’m afraid I’ll need to get out the mop. “Never had to pay for it in my life, sweetheart. Though I’ve been on the receiving end of that offer more times than I can count.”
I stare at him, amazed by the sheer size of his ego. “You’re so full of shit.”
His full lips curve into a wicked grin. “You’d like to think I am.”
I cross my arms over my chest, shaking my head in disbelief. “Okay. I give. Uncle! Now vamanos, por favor, and don’t ever darken my doorstep again.”
“She’s bilingual,” he murmurs, as if that’s some kind of giant shock.
Is he fucking with me? Making fun of me? Baiting me? I can’t tell! Fuck!
In spite of myself, I can’t resist correcting him. “Not bilingual. Septalingual.”
He slow blinks, the very definition of droll.
Impatiently, I explain, “Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan. I speak seven languages, not two.”
“The Romance languages,” he says, drawing it out as if he’s expecting me to give an explanation as to the origins of my knowledge. Which, obviously, I’m not.
But I am the tiniest bit impressed he knows what the Romance languages are. I doubt they teach that in jarhead school.
When I don’t reply, Connor prompts, “You forgot English.”
I’m momentarily thrown off balance. “Oh. Right. English. Well, that goes without saying.”
In a tone so banal he could be examining his cuticles, he corrects me. “Actually it doesn’t. Including English, you’re octolingual, not septalingual.” That roguish dent in his cheek makes another appearance. “Technically speaking, that is.”
With a shock like sticking my wet finger into an electrical outlet, I realize several things at once.
First, he’s right. He was right about the police thing earlier too.
Cue brain cells fainting.
Second, he’s much smarter than he lets on. He plays the blunt, sexed-up, muscle-bound military man to absolute perfection so no one will think to look closer. But it’s an act. A brilliantly executed, nuanced disguise.
Third, the preceding realizations rearrange something in my head, and I feel the first stirrings of something other than anger or contempt for Connor Hughes.
The world tilts on its axis. I pull my lips between my teeth and stare at him, for once at a total loss for words.
“Wow,” says Connor. “There’s smoke comin’ outta your ears, sweet cheeks. What gives?”
“I-I…I’m…”
The dent in his cheek becomes an apostrophe.
“Nothing. We’re done here. Get out.” My voice is empty of all emotion. My eyes unflinchingly meet his.
For a moment, his mask slips. I see disappointment. I see frustration. I see something that might be defeat. But he quickly gathers himself, pushes off the counter, runs a hand through his dark hair. He shakes his head like a dog shaking off water and huffs a short breath through his nose. To himself, he mutters, “Roger that. We’ll get Maelstr0m some other way.”
He looks up at me, gives me a tight smile along with a curt salute. “See you in another life, maybe. Sorry to have wasted your time.”
He moves past me, grac
eful even at his size, his step improbably silent against the floor, but I can’t focus on the elegance of his movement because I’m too busy rewinding and replaying what he just said.
“Wait!”
In the doorway, Connor pauses. He looks at me over his shoulder.
With my heart in my throat I whisper, “Did you say…Maelstr0m?”
Connor frowns. “Yeah. Some hacker who goes by the alias Maelstr0m, with a zero for the ‘o.’ He’s Miranda’s situation.” A heartbeat, and then, sharper, “Why?”
I inhale. It’s like trying to breathe underwater. The room seems too warm, too bright, too close.
“I hope you’re prepared to go to war, Connor. I’m in.”
Five
Connor
The trendy French restaurant Tabby insists I take her to before she’ll talk is way too froufrou for my taste, but I have to admit the food is incredible. And the pair of young, hot chicks at the bar who’ve been staring at me since we got here are incredible too.
Not because I’m interested. Because Tabby’s noticed the way they’ve been looking at me and is making a valiant effort to pretend not only that she hasn’t, but that she doesn’t care.
It’s fucking beautiful is what it is. This is my new favorite place.
I say, “Enough with the suspense. Tell me what you know about this Maelstr0m.”
Tabby delicately licks her fingers clean of truffle salt from the pommes frites she’s been scarfing down. I shouldn’t be surprised that she could make such a simple act look sexy as fuck, but she does. And she’s not even trying.
I shove aside the picture that pops into my mind of my hard cock in place of her fingers. Unfortunately, the big guy downstairs has already started to react to the brief but incredible illusion and twitches against my thigh.
I don’t know what it is about this woman—bad-tempered, foul-mouthed Hello Kitty fiend with a constellation of tattoos on her body and a mind like a maze—but she really does it for me.
“I was living in Boston, in my third year of college—”
“MIT,” I clarify, just because it’s incredible to me that any person would be smart and self-confident enough to graduate high school at fifteen and go right into the most intellectually rigorous college in the nation.
She glances at me with a wry smile. “I take it you’ve been reading about me in a file.”
“It’s my business to know things about people I work with. Information is power. You know that. Although I have to admit I was surprised there was any information to be found at all after how perfectly you scraped Victoria’s past clean.”
Tabby’s smile falters. When she looks away, I know I’ve hit a nerve.
Victoria Price was Tabby’s best friend and a Bitch with a capital B. She had more skeletons in her closet than shoes. Until a few years ago when Victoria’s past finally caught up with her and she fled to Mexico, Tabby’s existence revolved around erasing information about Victoria, hiding her past, making sure no one discovered her entire identity had been manufactured. Tabby did her job so well, even I couldn’t find anything on Victoria, and that was unprecedented.
Tabby says in a hollow voice, “I don’t have anything interesting enough to hide.”
“This from the woman who single-handedly shut down the government’s space program for three weeks.”
She dismissively waves her hand. “I meant personally. My hacks are another story, but Polaroid can’t be traced back to me.”
Polaroid is her hacker alias, so named for her photographic memory. She’s infamous in hacker circles, revered not only for the brilliance of the jobs she pulls off, but also for never getting caught. She went legit after her time with Victoria, started doing white hat corporate jobs for guys like Roger Hamilton, and Polaroid went dark.
Curiosity prompts me to ask, “You still talk to Victoria?”
Toying with her fork, Tabby shrugs. “Yeah. I saw her a while back too. Darcy and Kai honeymooned in Mexico, and we all got together. It was fun.”
I sense the sadness behind her words. “But?”
Looking uncomfortable, Tabby hesitates before she answers. “But she’s busy living her happily-ever-after, and I’m busy…doing my thing.”
It’s obvious that she’s happy for Victoria, but the undercurrent is loneliness. I want to reach out and squeeze her hand but know I risk losing it, so instead I try to lighten the mood.
“Don’t worry, sweet cheeks, I’m sure you’ll get your happily ever after too.”
Unsmiling, she looks up. “There are no happily ever afters for people like me.”
People like me? I tilt my head, studying her, fascinated. When she flushes and looks away, I decide to leave that subject for another time.
“Back to you attending MIT barely out of diapers.”
She rolls her eyes. “Getting in at fifteen isn’t that impressive, Connor. My first year there, a twelve-year-old graduated with a PhD in molecular biology. Geniuses are a dime a dozen at that school.”
“Just because you’re used to being surrounded by other stars doesn’t make your star shine any less bright to the rest of us down here on earth.”
Taken aback, she blinks and self-consciously laughs.
I wonder how often she’s been on the receiving end of a compliment. Judging by her surprise, not often.
Why that should irritate me, I don’t know.
She says, “Anyway, as part of a project in my quantum computing class, we were assigned to work on a cryptology software program for businesses that could theoretically be hack proof. Protection for data at banks, universities, hospitals, that kind of thing. Totally hypothetical, of course, but we were supposed to come up with a new way of protecting data, and then test it in a real-world environment.”
“Like with an actual business?”
“Bank of America of all things.” Her lips twist. “I think someone at the bank must’ve been in on it because whoever thought it was a good idea to give a bunch of geeky teenagers with gigantic intellects and no impulse control access to billions of dollars’ worth of financial information was definitely guilty of something. Criminal short-sightedness, at the very least.”
I lean back in my chair and take a swig of my beer. From the corner of my eye, I see one of the girls at the bar who’s been watching me lean over and whisper something behind her hand to her companion. They both look at me and then giggle.
Tabby didn’t miss it either. A muscle in her jaw flexes. That small reaction makes me want to jump from my chair and do a touchdown victory dance, complete with chest pounding and Tarzan roars.
I say mildly, “Go on.”
She takes a breath. “There were four teams of six students. Maelstr0m and I were on the same team. His real name is Søren Killgaard, by the way. But don’t bother looking for him. You won’t find any data about anyone, living or dead, with that name.”
I keep my face and body perfectly neutral. Not even a muscle twitches. I hardly even breathe. But the odds that Tabby went to school with the very man I’m searching for are staggering.
I don’t believe in fate, but there’s something really creepy about this.
I motion for her to continue.
Fingering her fork, Tabby looks down at her plate. “He was different, even in a roomful of kids who were definitions of the word ‘different.’ He was…” She searches for the word. “Wrong, somehow. I don’t know how else to put it. He was wrong.”
“I know exactly what you mean. Some people look right, they say all the right things, on the surface they appear to be normal, adjusted members of society, but you can sense on an animal level that they’re off.”
Tabby’s nodding. “I was the only person who felt that way about Søren. Everyone else was dazzled by him. In complete awe. I think in part it was because he was so beautiful—”
“Beautiful?” I drawl. “Did someone have a crush?”
She looks at me for a long, silent moment. She’s not wearing any makeup, and in the candle
light, her bare skin gleams like a polished stone.
“No. I didn’t have a crush. Even at eighteen I knew that beautiful things can be toxic. I’m simply speaking the truth. Søren Killgaard looked like a Renaissance painting of an angel. Golden hair and fair skin and eyes the color of ice in an alpine lake that never thaws. A body so proportionate and perfect, it was made to be sculpted. I always thought he looked like a fairy-tale prince, he had that sort of untouchable, otherworldly beauty.”
Slowly, my brows lift. This Søren Killgaard must be some looker to get the rabid Tabitha West waxing poetic.
I decide I hate him.
“So what happened?”
Tabby’s expression hardens. “He skimmed millions of dollars before they caught on to what was happening. He used a loophole in the bank’s code to divert money into an account he controlled. Fractions of pennies at a time, so no single transaction would be detected—”
“Salami slicing. Classic hacker technique.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “Classic. Except the account he controlled was in my name.”
In the silence that follows, the muted noises of the restaurant seem overly loud. Voices, music, the clatter of silverware against plates, the sounds clang around in my head.
“He set you up.”
Tabby nods.
“Why?”
“Because he could. He could do anything he wanted.”
“No. Why you?”
She looks over my shoulder. I sense she’s deliberately avoiding my eyes.
“You’d have to ask him.”
I stare at her long and hard. “Tabby.”
She glances at me.
“Don’t bullshit me. If we’re gonna work together, there won’t be any lies between us. Why did Søren Killgaard set you up?”
Her expression is unreadable. “Why do some boys like to pull the wings off flies?”
I say bluntly, “You were fucking him.”
Something flickers in her gaze, a deep distaste or disappointment. “Not everything is about sex, Connor.”
“Yes, it is. Except sex itself. That’s about power.”
Her head tilts. She appraises me with those beautiful feline eyes, a long, searching look that’s strangely intimate. The distaste in her gaze changes to something else, something warmer. In a husky voice, she murmurs, “Finally, something on which we agree.”
Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) Page 4