by Ravenna Tate
She sighed against his chest. Why was this so damn confusing? She’d never been in love before. She hadn’t let herself get that close to anyone. It was difficult enough fighting for credibility in your work, especially as a woman writing for a tech magazine. She’d never wanted to feel her worth depended on a man, but that’s not what was going on and she finally realized that.
Julianne didn’t need Kane’s approval to know she was worthy in her job, or in her life for that matter. She didn’t need it, but she wanted it. She wanted him to include her in his life, and that meant all of it. His work was no exception.
She pulled away to look into his eyes. It was time to stop behaving like a lovesick teen and talk to this man. If she demanded total trust and inclusion from him, she owed him the same in return.
“I do believe you. I have something to say to you, and I have no clue how you’re going to react, but I have to get this out. Then again, this might be the worst possible time to say it, but I can’t wait any longer. I want you to trust me, too, and I’ve been holding this inside far too long now. I have no right to ask you to trust me if I can’t even tell you what’s in my heart.”
Kane gave her such a tender, encouraging look that she found new strength.
“I love you, Kane. I’m so crazy in love with you that I can’t even put it into words.”
The complete delight on his face sent her pulse racing. What the hell had she been so afraid of? “Oh, baby. Julianne, I love you, too. I think I’ve loved you for five years.”
She made a sound that was part gasp, part laugh. “Really? Oh my God. But what about your family? You father hates me. He thinks I’m—”
His powerful kiss cut her off. Julianne moaned into Kane’s open mouth and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. The fuck with everyone else. Her pussy was soaked now, and she wanted him, right here and now, on the damn floor.
He released the kiss and cupped her face, his eyes full of desperation. “I’m not going to let my father tell me who I can or can’t love. Dammit! I’m forty-one years old.”
She nodded because words weren’t necessary right now.
“I don’t want you worrying about him. Do you hear me? I love you and fuck anyone who has a problem with that.
Images of a knight on a white horse raced through her mind. Julianne peeled off her top and bra, and then she dropped her jeans and panties. She stepped out of her sandals and stood before Kane, naked as a jaybird. The lust in his beautiful eyes took her breath away.
“You trying to solve this with sex?”
She bit back the giggle. “Yes.”
“This is why I love you.”
“I figured as much.”
As she watched him take off his glasses and place them in his jeans pocket, then begin to undress slowly, she knew that everything had just changed between them. They’d braved the world and said the words. Now, no matter what happened, there would be no more doubt in her mind or his about the commitment they each had to this relationship. And that was all Julianne needed to know. That he wanted this as much as she did.
Everything else was simply called life, and together they would deal with it.
Chapter Eighteen
Kane was so busy the first week that he and Julianne barely had time to exchange a quick kiss in the mornings. There were tux fittings and last minute details to work out for the rehearsal dinner, not to mention all the things going on back at the office that were blowing up in his absence.
Ace didn’t want a traditional stag party, and had instead opted for an afternoon get-together with the other Weathermen, two days before the wedding. Harper and her bridesmaids, plus Liane, Angela, and Julianne, spent time together back at the apartment. After the expected ribbing of Ace one last time from his friends, the talk turned to Emmett’s and Dominic’s upcoming weddings.
“I have an announcement,” said Emmett, “Dominic and I had the same wedding dates set. When we realized that, Liane and I pushed ours up six months.”
Everyone started talking at once until Barclay whistled loudly and they stopped.
“That’s right,” said Emmett. “In just six short months I expect to see all of you in SouthEast for the next wedding. Then six months after that, we’re on our way to CentralWest for Dominic’s and Angela’s wedding.”
“I hope this trend doesn’t continue,” said Blaine, the ever-present smirk on his face. “A wedding every six months might kill me.”
“By the time you get around to having one,” said Viggo, “you’ll have one foot in the grave anyway, so don’t worry about it.”
The men laughed. Of the twelve, Blaine was definitely the one they all agreed would never settle down. “Seriously, though,” said Kane, “tell us the truth, you three. Are you happy? I mean really happy? Is this everything you had hoped it would be?”
“Absolutely,” said Emmett.
“It’s better than that,” said Dominic.
“I have no regrets,” said Ace. “Harper is the woman I’ve waited for.”
Emmett raised his glass. “To our women. They bring us to our knees … and sometimes we manage to get them on theirs.” Raucous laughter filled the room. “But at the end of the day, they hold our hearts and our lives in their hands, and they know it. Boy, do they know it!”
More laughter, and then everyone clinked glasses and drank a toast.
Dominic eyed Kane with a thoughtful expression. “I think our friend needs a more drawn-out answer.”
“It would help.”
Dominic leaned forward. “There isn’t anyone else I could have trusted enough to spend the rest of my life with. I’m not talking about the friendship we each have with the others. I’m talking about baring your soul to someone. I didn’t know I could love someone that much until I looked into Angela’s eyes for the first time.”
“I can vouch for that,” said Viggo. He also lived in CentralWest, and Kane knew he and Dominic were very close. “Dominic is a changed man. He’s a better person.”
“That’s how I feel, too,” said Emmett. “Liane’s presence in my life opened my eyes to a whole new dimension. I’m complete with her. That’s the best way I can describe the feeling.”
“Harper made me a better person, no doubt about it,” said Ace. “I was such a smug bastard.”
“You’re still a smug bastard,” said Blaine, “but now you confine that to your business instead of your women.”
There were some chuckles, but Kane knew Blaine was teasing Ace. He’d seen the changes in Ace, Emmett, and Dominic for himself these past few months. They were just as ruthless and efficient in their work, but they no longer drifted from woman to woman, searching for something to fill the loneliness. They were whole men, and he wanted the same thing. He wanted to spend his life with Julianne.
He hadn’t stopped thinking about her all these years, and being with her now was still like living a dream. He wanted this all the time, every single day. It didn’t matter what his father or anyone else in his family thought. He’d deal with it, the same way he’d been dealing with stressful, terrifying situations since the one that changed his life forever at the tender age of seven.
As the talk in the room turned toward work, Kane realized he’d never shared the events of that day with Julianne. He made a mental note to do so later tonight. It was important that she know everything about him before he asked her to make a life-changing decision.
“Have you heard anything further about Isabelle Sharpe?” asked Grayson. Grayson Jensen lived in NorthWest, and owned Jensen Software and Web Development. Between his company and the division of Radcliffe Enterprises that Emmett presided over, they had the entire USA market share in their field.
Grayson’s question drew Kane out of his reverie. “As a matter of fact, I have. My emails have been blowing up over the past forty-eight hours.” Kane took out his phone and scrolled to the folder he’d saved the latest ones in. When he returned to the apartment later, he’d need to catch up on work, but not until after
he and Julianne discussed their future. Kane wasn’t going to wait any longer.
“You all know my father and I decided to sit on Isabelle for a while and watch her, but I can no longer do that. I was alerted by HR two mornings ago that Isabelle attempted to access the system our hacker team uses, which is a great big major company violation.”
“Whoa,” said Addison. “That’s a step up from simply telling Julianne about the new teams.”
Kane had told each of the Weathermen what had happened with Julianne and Isabelle, without revealing anything of a personal nature between him and Julianne. He’d also told them what he and his father had discussed, again without adding the part about his father’s feelings toward Julianne. They all knew his father well enough to guess the truth.
“Yes, it is. She never would have made it into the system, but now I have an excuse to fire her that won’t cast suspicions on Julianne. Part of the reason I kept her on was so that she would never suspect Julianne had named her as a source.”
“Was it worth keeping her on all these weeks?” asked Blaine. “Did she divulge anything else, or bring you closer to more names of hackers?”
“No, but HR did find something very interesting when they hauled her ass into the department to explain what she’d done and why.” He glanced around the room, enjoying the expectant looks on their faces. Within this group, it was a rare moment when any of them got the jump on everyone at the same time. He wanted to savor this for a second or two. “She tried to hack in with the intention of gathering names.”
“Was she going to pass the names to reporters?” asked Barclay.
Kane shook his head. “Nope. Giving Julianne that information wasn’t connected to this. Isabelle had used Olivia as a reference because they’d been former classmates in graduate school, but HR never got that far down the list so Olivia didn’t know she’d been listed as a reference, or that Isabelle was working for me until after Isabelle was hired.”
“Did Isabelle know Olivia had married Rob?” asked Addison.
“I’m not sure. She listed Olivia under her maiden name, and the company she supposedly worked at was fake. Whether Isabelle knew this or not isn’t something we found out, but we did get something useful before she was escorted off the property by security.”
Kane shifted his weight so he could see each of their faces. He was enjoying this. “Olivia and Isabelle did their graduate work together at NorthEast University, and of course you all know that Olivia is now Rob Marin’s wife. Apparently, Isabelle and Olivia knew each other quite well in college, because there was an incident during their second year of grad school that was filmed onto a disc, and Isabelle does not want it splashed all over the Internet.”
“What happened?” asked Damien, his dark eyes gleaming.
“Olivia filmed Isabelle having sex with one of their professors. All three were drunk, and up until Olivia contacted her, Isabelle thought the disc had been destroyed years ago. She was wrong. Olivia and Rob used the threat of that amateur porn movie to blackmail Isabelle. They wanted her to find information on the names of hackers we all had collected. Isabelle’s intention was to start with the hacker system and go as far as breaking into the database Liane built.”
“So hang on,” said Atticus. “Let me make sure I understand this. We don’t know if Isabelle and Olivia kept in touch after college, so her listing Olivia under her maiden name, and at a company which does not exist, as a reference on her app for your company could have merely been a coincidence?”
Kane nodded. “Yes. Isabelle told HR she didn’t contact Olivia until after she started working for me.”
“Why did she contact her at all?” asked Atticus.
“She told HR she called Olivia to ask if we had contacted her for a reference, but Olivia told her they had not. Once Olivia knew where Isabelle was working, she and Rob tried to blackmail her.”
“Which means that Rob and Olivia also know about the teams searching for IP addresses and machine IDs,” said Dominic.
Emmett shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. No one will gain access to that database or to the system the teams use. Liane is a firewall expert. That’s why I hired her to build that database and help us design the system. Both are completely hidden.”
“We know that,” said Kane, “but Isabelle, Olivia, and Rob don’t. It’s a moot point now. Isabelle is canned, and when my PR people get done behind the scenes, no one will hire her to scrub toilets, let alone work in IT.”
“What else did she tell you about Olivia and Rob?” asked Oliver. “Anything we can use?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think she knows anything else. As I said, she only used Olivia’s name as a reference because they had classes together and had once been close friends. HR told me she was very upset at being forced to try to gain information for them, and actually had the gall to ask if my company would be interested in prosecuting Olivia for blackmail.”
Ace snorted. “Right. Because what Isabelle did wasn’t wrong at all.”
“We have plenty of information on Rob and Olivia,” said Kane. “All we need now is solid proof that Rob’s current aliases are BreakingGlass and RisingWater.”
“Those aren’t two of the user names in the data HCS and I intercepted,” said Barclay.
Kane nodded. “I know. I’m not convinced he’s one of the original hackers, but I still believe he’s tied to this.”
“So what happens now?” asked Ace.
Kane shrugged. “We keep doing what we’re doing, and we figure out a way to screen potential employees better I suppose.”
The men all talked at once. Kane heard remarks ranging from “Good luck with that one” to “We’ll never weed out all the losers on the front end.” Kane knew they were right. It was a crapshoot every time each of them hired someone, even into an entry level position. The best any of them could hope for was that the fail-safes in place continued to work.
Isabelle’s attempted entry into a system she had no official access to had triggered one of those fail-safes, and it had shut down her work station, just as it had been designed to do. It had also sent alerts to Kane’s IT department head, to HR, and to Kane himself. She never would have had a chance to do so much as look at sensitive information, let alone copy it.
The fact that Rob and Olivia had gone to such lengths to use Isabelle told Kane without a doubt that Rob was connected to the Tommy Twister virus somehow. He wouldn’t rest until he figured it out.
Later that evening, Kane and Julianne were finally alone. He asked her how the party went, and she talked for nearly two hours about Harper, Liane, Angela, and Harper’s bridesmaids. She was so excited to be here, and to have met Harper, Liane, and Angela. Kane found himself smiling and caught up in her enthusiasm. He loved seeing her so happy.
“I’ve been talking nonstop. I’m so sorry,” she said. “How was your afternoon?”
“Don’t be sorry. I love it that you had such a great time.” He reiterated everything the men had talked about, including the news about Isabelle.
“Wow. I can’t believe she’d try to do something like that. Didn’t she realize there was no way she could get in?”
“She may have suspected as much, but I suppose I’d be pretty desperate, too, if I knew someone still had a porn movie they’d made starring me.”
She grinned. “Should I be worried? Are there any of those that might surface one day?”
“Not a chance, gorgeous.” He took a deep breath. “When Ace, Emmett, and Dominic were talking about how happy they are, it made me realize there is something about my past you’ve never heard. I want to tell you about it now. I don’t want any secrets between us, Julianne.”
“Uh-oh.”
He smiled. “No. It’s not like that, but it will help explain my relationship with my father that lingers to this day.”
Her gaze turned serious. “All right. I’m listening.”
You can do this. “I know we each had terrifying experiences above ground onc
e the storms started to turn frequent and vicious, but before that had you ever been in one? A bad storm, I mean.”
“Not really, unless you count blizzards.”
“I was. When I was seven, my family took a trip to the Dallas area to visit a college friend of my mother’s. Her husband worked in the financial arena, and my parents worshipped this man. He was some sort of pioneer in advanced economics. My father considered it a feather in his personal cap that we’d been invited to visit these people.”
“Is this man still around? Would I know his name?”
Kane shook his head, trying not to gloat inside. “His company was involved in a huge embezzlement scandal about three years before we all moved underground. Last I heard, the family was flat broke, and you’d be hard-pressed now to find his name or his work mentioned in any econ courses at the university level.”
“Karma in action?”
He almost smiled. “A bit. You be the judge when I’m done with the story. While we were visiting, we stayed in their home. The four adults wanted to go out one evening, so they left me in the house with the couple’s children. I didn’t know them. It was the first time we’d met, and they were older than me. The youngest was a girl and she was eleven, and her two brothers were fourteen and seventeen.”
“At seven years old, I would have been terrified of that, let alone storms.”
“I was used to being on my own a lot by then, so I wasn’t happy about being left with bigger kids who basically ignored me. I was watching TV when the tornado warnings for the area came on. I tried to reach my parents, but the cell phone signals were already jammed. Then I went to find the other kids, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to find the basement in the house. It was a huge home, and I was lost. I imagine my terror had plenty to do with that.”
Julianne’s beautiful eyes filled with tears, and she placed a hand over her mouth.
“I hid inside a downstairs closet on the first floor, trying not to cry, and still trying to get at least a text message through to my parents. I could hear the storm outside, and then the power went out.”