The Hero and the Hacktivist
Page 23
She thinks I’m a little nuts to leave with only five years left until I’m eligible for retirement, but I have a new job, and it pays better, plus the benefits can’t be beat.
Yeah, I mean that kind of benefits.
But not all of Eloise’s employees get that kind of benefits.
Namely, Pigpen and Rascal don’t.
The DA cut her a sweet deal on her hacking since it led to a massive human trafficking ring being taken down, so now she’s investing in a startup private security firm that me and my buddies are running for celebrities in the city.
Plus, we’re physically located at the ground floor of Eloise’s new apartment complex, which means if she gets herself into any trouble, we’re there.
Not that she’s getting herself into trouble.
At least, not so far as the cops know.
The ladies switch from a Backstreet Boys song to “MMMBop,” and Knox lights up. “I love this one,” he says.
“Me too,” I agree.
“You’re both totally whipped,” Gavin says.
I share a look with my brother-in-law. He grins. I grin back.
“Yep,” we agree.
Jack leans his elbow on the table and ignores the guava wheatgrass juice that one of the ladies at another table sent over for him. “You see the news yesterday?” he asks.
“See it most days.”
He gives me the you know what I’m talking about, don’t bullshit me look.
Yeah, I know what he’s talking about. The war of words brewing between our government and that European country’s government over some hacking allegations.
Yeah, it was Eloise’s fault.
But scam robocalls are down sixty percent worldwide, and I can’t really find a reason to be upset about that.
“The news about the aliens invading Jersey?” Knox asks. “My Nana’s all over that shit. She wants to go interview people to get inspiration for her next book.”
“Let us know if she needs a security detail,” I tell him.
“You know my Nana…”
I do, which is why I offered.
Jack rolls his eyes and goes back to watching the band. Dax Gallagher sneaks into his usual spot while the lights are low. And the ladies finish up their set to hoots and hollers and demands for encores.
After the show, they make their way through the crowd. Sia slides onto Chase’s lap. Parker slides onto Knox’s lap.
Eloise slides onto Dax’s lap.
“Very funny.” Willow pokes her. “Go get your own man.”
She grins, then gives Jack the suggestive eyebrows.
“Funny,” I tell her, snagging her hand and pulling her to my side. I love that she’s so short, we’re almost at eye level even when I’m sitting. “Nice banging.”
“You think that was something, wait until I get naked later.”
Jack, Brooks, and Gavin all cover their ears.
“You go, girl.” Sia gives her a high five.
“I love seeing you in love,” Willow gushes.
“As long as I pretend he’s not my brother, I can handle this,” Parker concedes.
“What? They’re adorable,” Knox tells her. “It’s like an overexcited, tatted poodle falling for a golden retriever.”
“Dude. He’s a bull mastiff.” Eloise flicks a sugar packet at him and beans him in the ear.
“Oh my god! It’s Dax Gallagher!” someone shrieks.
“And here we go again,” Willow sighs.
“Party at our place?” Dax offers.
Sia and Chase share a look.
Parker and Knox share a look.
And I lift a brow at Eloise.
“Maybe next week,” she says.
My brothers and I climb to our feet.
“Oh my god! It’s Brooks Elliott!” someone else shrieks.
“Let’s do this,” I say as we crowd around Brooks and Dax and head for the stairs.
Eloise slips her hand in mine. “Can you still do that trick where you unlock the server room with your brain?” she asks.
“You doubting me now?”
She grins. “Only if it makes you prove you’ve still got it.”
“The server room? Really?” Parker sighs behind me.
“Binary’s hot,” I tell her, which earns me a slap on the butt from Eloise.
“Damn right it is.”
I hook an arm around her shoulders while we all file into the elevator.
We’ll do this all over again next week.
But until then, I’m going to have the time of my life with the love of my life.
And forever be grateful for that time I got to bang a hot bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding.
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Books by Pippa Grant
Mister McHottie (Chase & Ambrosia)
Stud in the Stacks (Parker & Knox)
The Pilot and the Puck-Up (Zeus and Joey)
Royally Pucked (Manning and Gracie)
Beauty and the Beefcake (Ares and Felicity)
Rockaway Bride (Willow and Dax)
Hot Heir (Viktor and Peach)
The Hero and the Hacktivist (Rhett and Eloise)
Charming as Puck (Nick and Kami)
Exes and Ho Ho Hos (Jake and Kaitlyn)
And more…
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CHARMING AS PUCK TEASER
If you love hockey players and friends with benefits romance, read on for an excerpt of Charming as Puck…
Nick Murphy (aka a hockey god on the verge of being demoted back to mortal status)
Kami stayed over. That’s weird. I must’ve drank too much last night. Or she did.
Actually, is she still drunk?
She doesn’t usually lick my ear. Or sleep in my bed. We don’t do breakfast together unless it’s some godawful early morning meeting demanded by my sister, in which case we pretend we’re just the same old friends who don’t bump uglies, because Felicity would fucking kill me.
However, risk of death aside, if Kami’s up for something this morning, I could get on board.
My dick’s already showing off.
My eyes are still gritty. I definitely had too much to drink last night. I barely remember Kami showing up at all after the game last night. It was our season opener, at home, our first regular season game after winning the cup last year, and it was fucking brutal.
“Lower,” I tell Kami, my voice ragged in my throat, angling my head, because being licked is nice, but if she’s going to lick me, she could go for somewhere better than my ear.
“Mmmooooooooo,” she answers.
She licks my ear again, reaching the tip of her tongue right into my ear canal, and I lift a heavy arm to guide her face.
And then I freeze.
She’s…furry.
Like a smooth kind of furry.
And I’m king of morning breath, but she smells worse than my sister after one of those vegan wheatgrass garlic avocado smoothies she likes to drink.
“Kami?” I rasp out.
“Mmmooooooo.”
I touch her face.
My eyes fly open.
Kami has brown eyes.
The eyes staring back at me are brown.
But they’re huge.
“Fuck!”
I trip over the tangled sheets while I leap up, my head swimming. The cow watches me with those calm brown orbs. “Mmmmoooooooo,” it says again in its baby cow voice.
Shit shit shit. “Ssshhhh,” I hiss at it.
I can’t decide what to think first. My head’s pounding. I’m going to fucking kill my brother-in-law, who is absolutely behind this, unless Kami’s a shapeshifting cow, which isn’t possible, even when I’m hung over.
Also, after the duck incident, if I get caught with another unapproved animal in my condo, I’m gonna get fucking kicked out of the building.
I don’t have time to move. The season’s just starting. My parents would move me, but I’m thirty fucking years old. My parents aren’t going to move me.
Especially since if they did, they’d probably move me into their house, and that’s not happening.
I might be playing in my home city, but I am not moving in with my parents.
I fumble in the dim light, looking for my phone. “Don’t shit in my bed,” I tell the cow. “I’ll get you out of here, just please don’t shit in my bed.”
My phone’s not where it belongs. It’s not by my bed. It’s not on my dresser. It’s not in the bathroom.
My pants.
Maybe it’s still in my pants.
Where are my—fuck.
My pants are under the cow.
It moos at me again. I fist my hair and stare at it. “Get up,” I tell it.
It stares back.
It also doesn’t move.
Or moooooooove, I can hear my teammates saying.
I grab one pant leg and pull. The cow sniffs at my dangling dick. I move out of the way, because I’m not into getting my family jewels licked by a freaking baby farm animal, even if said baby farm animal weighs three hundred pounds.
I’d wonder where the fuck Ares found a baby cow, except I, too, know a thing or two about delivering unexpected livestock to apartment buildings.
And the fucker just one-upped me.
For a quiet dude, he’s fucking evil. He better never put a baby cow in Felicity’s bed or he’ll wake up strapped to the underside of an elephant halfway around the world.
I tug and pull on my pants, the cow gives an indignant baby moo, and finally, my jeans come free.
Without the phone in the pocket.
I press my palms into my eye sockets and think.
There was the game.
Vegas scored on me twice. We still won, because Ares and Frey and Lavoie were on fire, but I shouldn’t have let Vegas score. Could’ve blocked both shots.
Skipping Chester Green’s with the team afterwards. Opening a bottle of Jack at home. Texting Kami because I knew I shouldn’t drink alone.
She showed up with that wide, borderline innocent smile. I was buzzed. She teased me about it. Said she wasn’t going to take advantage of me.
Turned on The Mighty Ducks.
I fucking love that movie.
I talked her out of her pants before the Ducks won their first game, and—and that’s where my phone is.
Next to the bottle of Jack I finished in the living room after Kami left.
The baby cow stares at me, those eyes bright and friendly and asking for love.
I trip into my jeans and head for the living room. The sun’s telling me I need to get my ass in gear and over to the rink for morning skate before long. I snag my phone off the end table by my leather sofa, and I don’t think twice as I dial a video call.
Kami’s soft brown eyes come into focus, along with that wide smile. “Morning, sunshine. You feeling okay today?”
“How do I get a cow out of my bed?”
She wrinkles her brows at me. She’s walking somewhere—the buildings behind her make me think she’s heading to her office—and her brown hair’s tied back in a ponytail that’s whipping in the wind. “A cow out of your bed?” she repeats.
I flip the camera on my phone and march into my bedroom, watching the screen while I center my bed and the cow for her. “Yeah. A fucking baby cow in my fucking bed.”
She nods thoughtfully. “Huh. That does appear to be a calf. Happy birthday to you too.”
“It’s not my fucking birthday. It’s a fucking prank. Can you take care of it?”
Her expression goes still. “Can I…what?”
“Get it out of my condo. It’s an animal. You’re an animal doctor.”
Silence.
Even her expression is silent, which is odd, because Kami’s expressions are always big and loud and…and expressive and shit. Not because she’s loud. She just likes things.
Like an optimist.
Yeah.
She’s cheery. She makes loud, happy faces.
Fuck, I need to quit drinking.
“I said, happy birthday to you too,” she says.
I squint at the phone. Since when does Kami talk in code? In the six months we’ve been banging behind my sister’s back, the only code we’ve ever used is I’m calling it an early night. “Look, I know you probably think I deserve this after the donkey thing, but I have to get to morning skate, and we’re flying out to Colorado after the game tonight, and I don’t want to come home to a dead baby cow. I’ll pay whatever it takes. But it—”
“Fine. Whatever. I’ll take care of it.”
I freeze.
I know that tone.
That’s pissed off woman tone. And yeah, it’s probably rude of me to call Kami first thing in the morning like this, but we’re friends. I’d help her get a cow out of her place if I had time, but during the season, it’s hockey first. Always.
“Thanks, Kami. I owe you—”
“Nothing, Nick. You owe me nothing. In fact, you can consider this a goodbye present. Because this little arrangement we have? It’s over. I’m done.”
She disconnects, and I’m left staring at my official team photo on the background of my phone.
I don’t know what just happened, but I have a feeling it’s worse than waking up with a baby cow.
CLICK HERE to order CHARMING AS PUCK!… And keep reading for a teaser of Rockaway Bride, Dax and Willow’s story!
Books by Pippa Grant
Mister McHottie (Chase & Ambrosia)
Stud in the Stacks (Parker & Knox)
The Pilot and the Puck-Up (Zeus and Joey)
Royally Pucked (Manning and Gracie)
Beauty and the Beefcake (Ares and Felicity)
Rockaway Bride (Willow and Dax)
Hot Heir (Viktor and Peach)
The Hero and the Hacktivist (Rhett and Eloise)
Charming as Puck (Nick and Kami)
Exes and Ho Ho Hos (Jake and Kaitlyn)
And more…
ROCKAWAY BRIDE TEASER
If you love rock stars, runaway brides, and hilarious adventures, read on for an excerpt of Rockaway Bride…
Willow Honeycutt (aka a bride on the verge of a breakdown)
When I was little and dreaming of my wedding day, I always pictured myself with a Mohawk, a tie-dyed fluffy wedding gown cut off at the knees, biker boots, and dashing out the back of a chapel in Vegas to peel off into the sunset on a Harley.
Mostly because I was secretly in love with Davis Remington, the youngest member of the boy band Bro Code, who had tattoos and sometimes shaved parts of his head and made headlines once when he crashed a Harley, and he was just hot, and I assumed that’s what his wedding would be like, and also that I would be his bride, because he was only a few years older than me.
Not that I ever told my mom that. As far as she knows, I always loved Tripp Wilson—you know, the big brother of the group, who was more years older than me and therefore only a silly girl crush—because that helped her sleep at night, and I knew how much she worried.
About everything.
Being a single mother in the city is hard. So I kept my dreams
of marrying a boy band bad boy to myself, I got good grades, I got scholarships for an early childhood education degree and then a job teaching preschool. Meanwhile, Mom married the king of a small Nordic country—yes, seriously—and I stayed in New York and joined a band where we cover our favorite boy band songs and mostly play juice bars some nights and weekends, and tomorrow I’m having the fairytale princess wedding in a palace, exactly like every girl dreams of.
Except me.
And tonight, while I wander the stone hallways of Skyr Castle in my mom’s adopted home country of Stölland, where I’m supposed to be getting my beauty rest after the rehearsal dinner, at which my soon-to-be mother-in-law kissed up to the king so very blatantly that even the palace mice were embarrassed for her, I’m trying really, really hard to convince myself that my regrets and doubts are a result of this wedding’s lack of Mohawk, tattoos, biker boots, and getaway Harleys.
And that my regrets and doubts have nothing to do with Martin.
My fiancé.
Whom I’m marrying.
In eighteen hours.
Eighteen.
Hours.
Eighteen hours until my life and my freedom and my future are forever sealed in the bonds of marriage.
To Martin.
I’m going to throw up.
I breathe through the nausea and turn a corner, passing one of those knight thingies that are in the corners of ancient stone castles everywhere, except this one is all suited up in Viking armor instead of metal armor, so it has a vicious-looking helmet with horns on top and some weird protrusion covering where a person’s nose should be, a shield portraying the Frey family coat of arms, which has a killer sheep carrying a spear and an ax and eating a whale on it—royalty is so weird—and a bearskin rug where a breastplate should be.
Bearskin coat?
Whatever.
The point is, I turn the corner on knees and legs which are rapidly melting to the consistency of slime, wishing I had a paper bag, and I find myself face-to-face with three real Viking princes.
My stepbrothers. Who, thankfully, are all in jeans and casual dress shirts instead of Viking armor, because that truly would be the end of me for the night.
“There’s the lovely blushing bride,” Gunnar, the oldest, says.