by Low, Gennita
A wooden picnic table stood under an elm oak with dipping branches. He recognized Jaymee’s shirts on a clothesline nearby. The lake was quite big, shared by surrounding properties, and he could see an upside down canoe on the bank.
If he stood quietly at the porch, he could hear the lazy buzz of summer all around — the bees and the frogs competing, the creaky clothesline, the hushing whispers of leaves as they rubbed each other, even the occasional watery plop from the lake. Nick paused for a long moment on the steps. He could see it very well. A laughing Jaymee sitting at that picnic table with her three kids quarreling and fighting in this backyard. They would all have curly dark auburn hair like their mother’s, with the same green and brown eyes, and be just as feisty, probably just as stubborn; and in the middle of all the bedlam, Jaymee would raise her laughing eyes at him and —
He almost fell off the steps. He had no business fantasizing about Jaymee Barrows like that. It wasn’t like him to make up scenarios that could never be. The moment Command found out he was alive, the instant he was briefed about the situation, he would be gone, with new orders. And Jaymee would still be here, running her small business like it was part of a grand plan. She’d meet a safe man, someone who would give her those things she wanted, and it’d be his eyes she’d seek over the noisy chatter of her children.
Nick calmly crushed the aluminum can in his hand, and turning away from the backyard, he tapped on the back door. It was Bob Barrows who came to answer, his gaze turning suspicious at the sight of the visitor.
“She ain’t here.”
“She told me to meet her here,” Nick informed him. He wondered what it was that made this old man so hostile toward his hard-working daughter. “I was just making sure she isn’t home yet.”
“She’s busy enough without you taking up her time,” Bob said, not opening the door any wider. “You ain’t no good for her, man. Why don’t you just leave her be, so she won’t get her heart broken?”
“That’s a strange way of caring about your daughter, isn’t it?” Nick politely asked. And because he wanted more details about Jaymee’s past, he added, “Could it be you’re just making sure there’s no possibility of her abandoning the business, and therefore, you?”
Bull’s eye, Nick thought, as he took note of the man’s sharp intake of breath. The old guy’s switch, he disdainfully concluded, was pathetically easy to find. He knew there was more to the story. Jaymee apparently wasn’t knuckling under a bullying father; she was doing this of her own free will, and he intended to find out the reason.
“Well, is that Miss High and Mighty’s story to you?” Bob Barrows’ runny eyes narrowed into malicious slits. “You may fall for all that college knowledge she pretends to have, but if she was so smart, how come she’s in the hole she’s in?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Nick leaned nonchalantly against the railing.
A crafty smile fanned the wrinkles on the old man’s face. “I can still see pretty good with my old eyes. You want my daughter, don’t you? You got the same look Danny boy had whenever he cast his wicked eyes in her direction.”
Bob pushed open the screen door and came out, shuffling his feet as if he wasn’t sure how far the floor was. He squinted up at Nick.
Sloshed. Probably been so since last night. Nick studied him for a second. “Who is Danny?”
Sitting down slowly in the rocking chair, Bob gave him that shifty, knowing look again. “Why, her fiancé, of course.” And he laughed, enjoying Nick’s surprise. “I knew I could get you with that one, boy! She already got herself a pretty boy, she doesn’t need a second one.”
Nick was unprepared for the surge of anger that swamped him. A fiancé. He hadn’t expected that piece of information at all. Reason told him the old man was lying, but his own reaction to the news, even if it were untrue, jarred him. This wasn’t him at all. The Programmer rarely acted on emotions. Through the years, he’d gotten used to efficiently studying a system and taking it apart, and out of habit, he did it to people around him. It helped him put distance between him and his targets. This jumble of emotions—anger and yes, jealousy—startled him.
Before he could probe Bob further, he heard footsteps coming from the side of the house, then Jaymee rounded the corner, with her usual fast strides. She stopped abruptly at the sight of him and her father, looking from one to the other as if to gauge what was happening. Wearing rumpled clothing and with her hair in its usual untidy ponytail, she looked tired.
Nick narrowed his eyes. She looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. He squeezed the crushed aluminum in his hand tighter.
“Hi,” Jaymee greeted, climbing the porch steps. “’Morning, Dad. Feeling better?”
Her father just grunted, rocking the chair, his eyes half closed.
“Hi,” Nick said.
“Come on into the house. I need a glass of water. God, it’s hot today.”
Jaymee frowned slightly, sensing something wasn’t right. Nick had followed her silently into the kitchen and watched her pour water into two glasses. He was angry about something. She could feel it, even though his face was cool and unreadable.
Nick waited till she drank down the glass of water. “You look tired.” He studied at her disheveled appearance again. Wherever she’d spent the night, she hadn’t taken her truck with her, which meant someone had picked her up and dropped her off. The seed of suspicion put a scowl on his face. “Busy morning?”
She was looking away, so he didn’t bother hiding his black stare.
“Hmm,” she agreed, yawning on cue. “Nothing a cup of coffee won’t fix, though. Go ahead and make yourself comfortable in the study. I’ll be right there as soon as I wash up.”
He wanted to grab her by the shoulders, turn her around and demand to know where she’d spent the night. Was it with this Danny person? Without a word, he did as she told him, sitting himself in front of the new computer. He didn’t wait for her, turning on the machine.
Jaymee quickly ran a brush through her tangles and pulled at her clothes in an effort to look less unkempt. Normally, she wouldn’t care what she looked like, but then, she hadn’t acted normal since Nick showed up. She gave herself a critical lookover in the mirror. She made a face. She wasn’t a fresh-faced twenty year-old any more. Eight years of the kind of work she did had dissolved the baby fat around her face, leaving her far too lean and hollow-cheeked. There was nothing there to attract a man. Boring hazel eyes. Boring lips. Bad hair. She sighed. Maybe some lipstick would help. And definitely keep that tangled mess of hair off her face.
The sound of fingers tapping on the keyboard came from the study as she crossed the kitchen, her hands busy securing the pin in her hair. She could hear the rocking chair outside the kitchen window, and she stuck her head out to check on her father. He had dozed off, as was his mid-morning habit. Good. She didn’t want him confronting Nick again. He probably hadn’t even noticed him standing on the porch.
“Any progress?” she asked, walking in and standing beside Nick.
She had no idea what he was doing as he kept typing senseless sentences. It must be the right thing since the computer seemed to be talking back to him, flashing messages on its screen and blipping encouraging noises.
“Mmmhmm.”
Several minutes of silence went by before she tried again. “Is it a serious problem?”
“No.” She found his fast-moving fingers absolutely fascinating.
“Can I do anything?”
“No.”
Jaymee sighed. He was treating the damned machine like some long lost lover, and what was more, it was responding to his touch with a lot more enthusiasm than an inanimate object ought to have. It was obviously a female computer. “Well, I guess I’ll fix us something to eat and do some chores. Holler if you need me.”
“OK.”
She studied him a moment longer. So much for freshening up. What’d it be like to be at the receiving end of that unwavering concentration? At that moment, he raked an i
mpatient hand through those dark, luxuriant too-long locks, muttered something back to the machine, and went back to typing. His eyes hadn’t left the screen since she came in. All that lipstick, she mournfully sighed again. Wasted.
When she left the room, Nick heaved an answering sigh of his own. Frustration dominated the jumbled emotions he felt. Frustration and anger. It was disconcerting. He had, before him, what he needed—easy access to spend time online and break through firewalls so he could leave a message for his contact privately—and he should be feeling elated at his good luck. Instead, all he wanted to do at the moment was lock the study door and kiss a certain woman into telling him her secrets. The memory of the taste of her mouth called him, and the thought of her kissing somebody else after he left her the night before felt like a 100-lb weight on his chest.
Everything about her told him she was a loner, unattached, and had been for awhile, but he could be wrong. Maybe she did have a fiancé somewhere and he just hadn’t shown his face around the job sites, that was all. And maybe the fiancé would have his face smashed in, if he ever did.
Nick took a deliberate deep breath and exhaled. She was interrupting his focus. With resolute grimness, he pushed everything to the back of his mind, allowing only thoughts about the computer to remain. He was almost done playing with the operating program. Fixing what was wrong was easy enough, but he needed to rewrite parts of the program for his needs.
Just as he’d suspected, Jaymee wasn’t using DSL or wireless. He kind of understood her thinking by now. Hell, he’d seen her cheap cell phone. He’d also noticed the TV antenna on the roof. She was cutting back on every little luxury most people took for granted. That would be over a thousand dollars of savings there in the bank.
He’d come prepared. Looking under the desk, he disengaged the phone line that hooked up the older computer to the wall outlet. Then he stood up and checked the back of the new computer and found the phone line dangling loose. Holding the line in his mouth, he pulled out a small plastic packet from his back pocket and poured its contents onto the table. Several tiny flat microchips the size of fish flake food scattered out.
Nick cocked his head, listening intently for Jaymee’s movements outside the study. He heard her moving around the sink area. Making lunch, from the sounds of it. Pulling out a pair of tweezers from the other back pocket, he used them to pick up a chip. He released the line he was holding in his mouth into his other hand, and with a quick practiced twist, he inserted the microchip into the connector, firmly pressing it into place. He plugged it into the outlet in the wall.
It took another five minutes before his link went through. He hesitated when the password was requested. If he gave it, Command would know he was alive, and so would anyone else monitoring his password. They wouldn't be able to read his message, but they’d know he wasn’t dead, and after the narrow escape from his boat, he had a feeling his demised condition was very important to the enemy. If he’d been betrayed from the inside, then their attempt to kill him had failed.
No. He would have to break in. There were only a few personnel in his agency who could trace or recognize his encryptions, and really, only one who knew how to decode it, and then disguise a similar message back to him. Step by step, his mind took him through the logistics. Override the security checkpoints. Invade through disguise. Disrupt by merging simple commands. Then make sure only one person would come across it.
He plucked at his lips as he manipulated the command strings that moved across the screen in rapid succession. He had no idea when the man for whom he left the code would come across the message, and he was going to need another excuse to play with the computer.
Swiftly, he removed all traces of his activities and returned the screen to MENU. Jaymee probably wouldn’t know he was breaking into the government’s most secured lines even if she was watching him, but Nick didn’t want to bet too heavily on that. His boss had a way of grasping a situation very quickly.
“Lunch is ready! Nick?”
“Yeah, I’m almost done,” he called back as he finished up.
*
Jaymee couldn’t figure him out. It was her source of pride since her unfortunate brush with the deceptive side of the male gender that she’d learned to read every one of them and put them in their rightful category. Through the years, she and Mindy had exchanged notes. There was the Bear, the one she could leave at a job site as long as there was honey, the promise of better pay if the job was done that day. There was the Rabbit, the worker who hurried, hurried, hurried to finish a job. From her list of restaurant adventures, Mindy, in her typical droll sense of humor, had added in the Drunken Monkey, the Snake, and the Peacock. But he wasn’t any of those.
There was one more in her list, the most dangerous animal of all because he was the most deceptive, knowing when to hide under sheep’s clothing and be nice, only to turn around and devour women like her. And nothing about Nick Langley had convinced her he was anything but a wolf, out on a hunt, only after a good time.
But sometimes she wondered whether she was wrong. She couldn’t figure out why he was in her world at all, and most important, why he wanted her. Unlike before, she didn’t have any money or assets now to interest a wolf. Eight years of eluding men had taken away any confidence of how she could affect any male interest.
She flashed him a smile. “How’s it going?”
Nick sat down at the kitchen table. “Almost done. I need a Philips screwdriver to open up the case. I might as well check everything while I’m at it.”
Jaymee put the plate of cold chicken salad and a glass of milk in front of him. “Go ahead. I’m just glad the the computer isn’t a lemon, even though it’s a refurbished one.”
Nick smiled at the food in front of him. How long had it been since a woman fed him cold chicken salad and milk for a meal? It was an uncomfortably homey gesture, and warm pleasure blunted the anger he’d been carrying.
“It’s not a Z-28,” he agreed, lifting a fork, “but it’ll take you where you want to go.”
He watched her take a sip of milk from his glass. Nice lipstick. Tempting lips.
“Let me get my dad to join us,” Jaymee said, heading for the screen door. “Dad! Dad! Come in and eat your lunch.”
She turned to Nick and warned, “Just ignore his bad manners, all right?”
Nick nodded. Bob shuffled in, giving a wide yawn. He cast a resentful look at Nick.
“Still here? I thought you said he was your laborer, Jaymee, not your bodyguard.”
Jaymee set a place for him, then took the middle seat. “He’s fixing the new computer.” She gestured. “Here, take your medication and get some food in you.”
“I don’t want milk,” the old man growled.
“Sorry, beer and medication don’t go together,” she calmly informed him. “If you end up in the hospital this time, I’ll have to mortgage the house to pay the bills, and then you won’t get your business back in the black for sure.”
Nick suddenly realized Jaymee dangled the roofing business in front of her father like bait. Every time he pushed her too far, she would bring up the subject of getting the business back in the black, and it always had the desired effect. The old man sat and washed down the pills with a glass of milk and obediently started on his meal. Nick wondered what it was all about. The father seemed to have a hold over his daughter, and in a strange way, vice-versa.
“So, will I be able to use the new computer soon?” Jaymee wanted to know.
“As soon as you get everything updated and reconfigured.”
She sighed. “That means another month or so.”
Nick frowned. “What do you mean?” Transferring programs and files was assembly work, like eating.
“My abilities with a computer don’t go beyond turning it on, pointing the mouse, and saving a file,” confessed Jaymee with a wry smile. “Anything more difficult usually means reading a manual, deciphering lots of error messages, redoing the same procedure a dozen times, and God
knows what else. You’ll see. What with all the other chores I’ve to do, it’ll take a month before I get the new computer set up.”
She made it so easy, the operative in him mocked him for taking advantage of her. “I can do it for you,” Nick offered, calmly reaching for a roll. “I can help you out in the evenings, do anything you want.”
Bob grunted at the other end of the table and his watery eyes told him exactly what he thought of the offer. “I’ll bet you would do anything she wants,” he said. Turning to Jaymee, he added, “You ain’t learned a lesson yet, I guess you just ain’t as bright as I thought. Help you out in the evenings, do anything you want. You just stick him back to real work and watch that pretty face wilt in the sun.”
“He does work in the sun,” Jaymee quietly said, but her face was slightly flushed at her father’s none-too-subtle accusations. “You don’t have to like everyone I hire, Dad, and if you’ve nothing good to say, why don’t you just keep it to yourself?”
“He ain’t got much to say to defend himself, does he?” Bob sneered at Nick.
Nick looked across the table, calmly chewing, then swallowing. “What your daughter and I do isn’t your business, Mr. Barrows.”
“Nick...” Jaymee began.
“Ain’t my business?” Bob barked out in sudden wrath. “If I don’t keep an eye on her, she won’t have any business left at all. The last time she mixed business with pleasure, she near bankrupted me! And sent her ma to an early grave, she did!”
“That’s enough,” Jaymee cut in, her voice low. Why, why, why did he have to keep bringing it up?
As if her father heard her, he continued, “I’ve to remind her so she won’t forget. She wants to play, let her do what she promised me, let her pay for her mistake first. My daddy taught us to always pay for our mistakes, and she…”
Nick stood up. He’d had enough. “As far as I can tell, you’ve got the most hard-working daughter around.” His voice was no longer that lazy, gravelly drawl. “Let’s go for a walk, Jay. I need to work off a sudden indigestion.”