by Jodie Bailey
“Meg.”
She stiffened. She was either immensely relieved to hear Tate’s voice or furiously angry he’d abandoned her in the first place. “What do you want?” She mumbled the question, refusing to look at him, fully aware she was acting like the worst version of her two-year-old self.
“I’m sorry.”
An apology was the last thing she’d expected. Meghan turned away and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, the tears now pricking her throat. She hadn’t cried since Ethan had called to tell her Tate was dead. Now she’d been fighting tears ever since he stepped into her life. It shouldn’t be that way.
His sigh was loud. “I know it’s not an excuse and I should have warned you, but neither Ethan nor I had a choice. The colonel told him to bring you in. Ethan gave me the chance to question you first, but with Phoenix’s latest round of thugs surprising us, there was no way to ease into it.” He leaned in, but he didn’t touch her. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it from happening.”
More than she wanted to stay angry at him, she wanted him to close the space between them, to tell her he believed in her and he’d get her out of this.
But the job fell to someone higher than either one of them, the same someone she’d been petitioning since Ethan Kincaid wordlessly grabbed her bicep and led her onto a helicopter in the most humiliating moment of her life. At least he hadn’t handcuffed her.
“No, it’s not your job.” Meghan pushed out of the chair and walked around the small desk to stare at a picture she’d studied from a distance all morning. It was the sole decoration in the room. Taken shortly before Meghan left the unit, after a successful mission on the other side of the world, the shot captured a moment in the life of their small military family: Meghan and Tate, Ethan and Jacob, covered in several layers of sweat and desert sand but laughing.
Ethan seemed as if his joy was incomplete, his eyes not quite matching his smile. Meghan ran a finger along the photo, stopping to grieve Jacob, then looked to Ethan’s image. “He’s...different now.”
“He’s not haunted by his choices anymore.” Tate’s voice was close at her shoulder. She hadn’t even realized he’d gotten out of his chair. “He loved Ashley, but he left her thinking he was doing what was best for her. It was killing both of them. He was busy playing God and thinking he knew what was best...” His voice trailed off, as though he was thinking of something else. He reached over her shoulder to tap the left side of the picture, where her own face smiled. “You and Ethan look like you’ve got the same dog hounding you.”
“Maybe I was guilty of the same thing.” She turned to face him for the first time since he walked in the room. It was a couple of days after the photo when she’d confided in Ethan and he’d laid out the dangers inherent in letting emotions run free.
“Falling in love with your partner?” His voice was husky in the quiet of the office, his question loaded, but he didn’t reach for her.
She looked to the side, unable to handle the way his voice fluttered inside her, skittering across her stomach and into her chest, taking the desires she’d buried for so long and magnifying them into something so strong it almost physically hurt. If he kept this up, she’d cave and tell him everything, would speak truths she could never unspeak. She’d sink into the kiss she could hear in the way he breathed, could sense easing in his posture. She could lose herself to Tate Walker and forget pain ever existed.
“You should have told me.” Tate curled his finger under her chin and lifted her face, his eyes skimming her lips before rising to lock in on hers. “There was—”
A knock on the door forced them apart, and Meghan’s skin grew cold. She couldn’t afford to forget where she was and why she was here. Until this was over, she couldn’t offer Tate anything except an uncertain future.
A woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her wavy dark hair flowing to her shoulders, stepped into the room holding Meghan’s laptop.
She glanced between the two of them and hesitated, as though the electricity in the room had jolted her, then crossed the room and swept aside the mess on Ethan’s desk, settling the laptop on the polished wood. She lasered in on Meghan. “I’m guessing you’re Meghan McGuire?”
Meghan nodded and stepped around the desk, itching to dig through her computer to find something, some way to show she hadn’t done anything illegal. Seeing her hard work—work she’d fought to protect—in a stranger’s hands crawled all over her like spiders she couldn’t brush away.
The woman smiled. “I’m Ashley Kincaid. And I think I found the first step to proving you’re innocent.”
FOURTEEN
If Meghan was the hugging type, she’d have thrown her arms around this stranger.
This stranger. The one Ethan Kincaid had loved enough to risk everything for.
Tate beat her to it, anyway. He wrapped an arm around Ashley’s shoulder and laid a kiss on the top of her head. “I knew you could figure this out.”
Ashley tossed him a wink, then motioned Meghan over, pointing to the screen where two separate windows sat open, Meghan’s calendar and an operating system display. “This laptop never left your residence?”
“Once, when I moved it from my apartment to the house. I figured it was safer in the middle of nowhere. Security system was higher tech out there, because I could play with it, unlike at my apartment.”
“And you never downloaded the program to another device until yesterday.” The way Ashley said the words made them sound as though they were the most important Meghan would ever hear.
“I never even backed it up to another server. If the hard drive had died, it would all be gone, but I didn’t want to risk someone else getting it.” She pulled her attention from the screen to other woman. “What are we getting at?”
Ashley expanded the calendar and clicked to a date in last October. “You were at a conference in South Bend, Indiana, for three days.”
“A teachers’ convention.” Three long days of classes with no way to escape. She remembered it well.
“You have proof?”
“I roomed with Yvonne, but seeing as how she’s turned against me...”
“I can try to track your cell and see if it pinged a tower. Maybe I can locate some security footage. Anything would help at this point. We need to place you in South Bend on those dates.” Ashley clicked to the other screen and pointed to a system file. “On that date, your file was transferred directly to a second laptop with a MAC address that’s never been connected to you. The beauty is—” she winked, totally clueless to the dramatic pause she’d imposed “—I linked the laptop to your internet provider in Flint. They were on your internet at the same time, proof it was done at your residence.”
Meghan leaned closer, her heart beating faster. “The laptop was in a small safe in my apartment.” She turned to Ashley. “Can you track the computer?”
“Working on it now.” Ashley slapped the laptop shut and pierced Meghan with a green-eyed gaze. “It’s a thin piece of evidence, because there’s no proof you didn’t give someone permission to access your machine, but it’s something.” She grabbed Meghan’s hand and squeezed. “I know Ethan’s always trusted you. Tate, too. They believe in you, no matter how it might appear otherwise.” One more squeeze and she was gone, leaving Meghan to wonder how someone investigating her could make her feel like her new best friend.
Hope dared to peek out from the closet where it had been hiding. Maybe she could get out of this. And maybe they’d find Phoenix and tear his plans apart once and for all.
Tate smiled a slow smile, then grew serious. “You want to talk this out?”
There was a small part of her that still wanted to punch him, but she nodded. “God’s answer to prayer.”
He froze, his green eyes sharp. “What?”
Meghan shrugged off the question. They could discuss her revel
ations later, when her brain wasn’t in investigative mode. “Who accessed my machine while I was gone?”
It seemed as though Tate wasn’t going to let her change the subject, but then he reluctantly paced away. “Maintenance workers? A break-in?” He was searching hard for her innocence, and she wasn’t sure how to give it to him.
“The maintenance guys leave notes, and I don’t remember getting one when I got home from Indiana.”
“Roommate?”
“I’ve never...” Shock waved over her, weakening her knees. She reached for Tate and caught him by the arm.
“What?” Tate locked his hands under her elbows, holding on as if she’d thrown him a lifeline. “Meg?”
Meghan’s gaze flickered around the room, seeking solid ground under a world rocking sideways. “Phoebe was working with lawyers to buy the farmhouse, and she stayed in my apartment while I was gone.” Phoebe. Who knew she’d been a whiz with computers. Who had every reason to hate the military and all it stood for.
Tate pulled out his satellite phone and fired off a text.
Fighting a whole new pain, Meghan sank against the desk. Phoebe had been one of the few people she’d trusted. It couldn’t be true. Phoebe was...Phoebe. No way could she be so devious. No way could she make so many plans with Meghan when the whole thing was a lie.
But memories of Phoebe’s anger and bitterness over her brother’s death, her actions in the aftermath... Everything said she could have done all of those things and much more.
The overwhelming magnitude of Phoebe’s betrayal crashed like a tsunami threatening to suck Meghan out to sea.
Peace overran the pain, and she had no doubt where it came from. If she was going to trust, now was the time to start.
Meghan swiped at the thighs of her jeans, then straightened to her full height, ready for battle. But it was going to have to be God giving her the strength. Right now, all she wanted to do was rewind the clock and run away.
“Okay.” She said, her mouth drawn into a grim line. “What do we do?”
“It’s possible Phoenix is blackmailing her.”
Meghan’s chin lifted in defiance of her pain. She had to step into the place she’d lived in the army, the factual place where emotions didn’t run the show. “No.” She swallowed everything but reality, and it sat bitter in her mouth, coating words she hated to say. “I don’t think there’s blackmail involved. If she’s working with him, it’s voluntary.”
The revelation had weight, and Tate’s whole demeanor changed to his own fighting stance. “Why?”
“Her brother was killed in a friendly fire incident when we were sophomores in college. The military deemed it an accident. Phoebe was angry. She grieved hard. Our senior year, she pulled away from everybody. She organized antiwar protests, wrote papers on the dangers of government intervention in business...” Meghan stopped and balled her fists, nails digging into her palms. She’d missed it. She’d missed the most important clues ever laid out in front of her.
Ethan had been right. Emotions clouded your judgment, and she’d let it cloud everything she’d known about Phoebe Snyder. Meghan hadn’t wanted to see one of the people she trusted most was not what she seemed. “Phoebe has all the marks, Tate. But I thought... We lost touch when I went into the army. When she contacted me to say she’d started the foundation and wanted me to work with them, I thought she was over it, that she’d found a way to take her grief and make it productive. She was happy.”
“Wait.” Tate’s eyes narrowed as though he was reading something in the air. “Phoebe contacted you?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I don’t know exactly. About two years ago? We’d been in touch off and on, but she didn’t contact me about the foundation until then.”
“It was Thanksgiving last year when your program was used to hack Jessica Dylan’s computer at Fort Campbell.”
“Not long after I went to the conference in Indiana.” Meghan felt as if her body was on fast forward while her mind swam in Jell-O. Her brain screamed a denial before shifting into hard knowing, an anger that swiped the pain aside in a violent flame. Meghan paced to the door. “She used me from the beginning.” It had been a long time since she’d wanted to put her fist through something, but the door in front of her was in deep danger right now. “She played me. She knew I’d never be able to resist working with kids who were like me, kids who needed what I couldn’t get. She built this whole facade to reel me in like a fish on a hook.” Meghan leaned forward, digging her knuckles into the wood. She was supposed to be trained, too smart to allow someone to sucker her this way.
“She wasn’t happier because she was healing. She was happier because she was doing something to tear at the fabric of the military.”
Tate leaned against the wall beside Meghan and crossed his arms, bicep brushing hers. “Don’t blame yourself for this.”
“But I do.” Meghan turned and mimicked his posture, her spine pressing against the door. “I was trained to notice these things.” Memories poured in on a wave of self-doubt. “What I don’t get is how she could possibly know what I did in the military. How would she know my skills were bigger than what I’ve always told her?”
“We suspected for a long time that Phoenix was working with the same mole who almost got me killed. It’s possible Craig Mitchum found the connection between you two and Phoebe exploited it. The bigger question is how the two of them connected,” Tate said. “What else?”
“When she first contacted me, she was about to buy the house and was excited to get moving. She offered me enough money to allow me to work for her, but not so much that I asked questions. She spent several weekends at my place, planning how to make this work.” Meghan’s cramped apartment’s walls had been covered with sticky notes and poster board, littered with ideas for sponsors and contacts...contacts Phoebe had probably used for their identities or for fraudulent donations to fund her horrible plans.
“And you thought nothing of her crashing at your place while she worked with the lawyer?”
Man, did shame ever burn. Meghan rubbed her stomach where a crater seemed to be forming. “I didn’t keep the laptop as secure then. It was in a small digital keypad safe in the back of my closet, but with me being gone, she had time to get into it. I’d been working on the program the night before she arrived.” Her long weekend away was probably enough time for Phoebe to snoop through her entire apartment. That was probably when she’d stumbled on Meghan’s laptop and downloaded exactly what she needed.
“She targeted you because she knew you were good at what you do. Her skill set could only take her so far. She probably blackmailed you in college to give her more ammo to come at you with later.” Tate scrubbed his chin before crossing his arms again, biceps tight against the sleeves of his gray T-shirt. “And you weren’t involved?”
The question bristled along nerves already sensitive from the sting of betrayal and the burn of shame. Oh, logic knew why he had to ask, but her heart couldn’t believe he was still hammering on her innocence.
“I was not involved.” Along with the tenuous alibi Ashley had found, her word and their history would have to be enough. Though she wondered, in the same position, if it would be enough for her.
Tate watched her, seeming to seek confirmation, before he pressed his lips together and nodded once. “Works for me.”
She wanted to hug him, but she stopped herself, forcing her mind to work. Something was needling, digging, and until she could uncover it, restlessness ate at her. Meghan straightened, needing to move, to work the tension out of muscles so tight they felt as though they might snap.
And then...she knew what it was. Something she never wanted it to be. “What if she’s not working for Phoenix?”
“I think it’s pretty—”
Meghan cut him off with a wave. Sh
e didn’t even want to think these thoughts, but with the lid of her life blown off, she was rational enough to consider every possibility, even the ones threatening to rip her into pieces. She sagged against Ethan’s desk, the weight of revelation too heavy. “What if she is Phoenix?”
* * *
“Sit down, Walker. You’re making me nervous.” Sean Turner didn’t turn from the laptop he was busy clicking away at. After terrorists kidnapped and tortured him, he’d left the military and now worked for Ashley’s company, supporting the team as a civilian.
Tate stopped in the middle of the small dining room and stood with his hands at his sides, useless. Everything had gone to the tech side, his weak point.
The room had been converted into a makeshift command center. Sean Turner and Ashley Kincaid sat on opposite sides of the battered table, clicking through various databases, digging for ways to prove Meghan’s innocence and Phoebe’s guilt.
In the far corner, Meghan stood uncharacteristically silent and edgy, pulling at the hem of her T-shirt. Meghan had always been the one to comb through computers and deal with tracking hackers, tearing apart their systems while Tate provided the muscle.
Now both of them were helpless. As a suspect still, she wasn’t allowed near a tech device. And as the brawn to everyone else’s brains, Tate was no good unless someone kicked in the front door and launched a direct physical attack.
It was an unfamiliar sensation, being the one who had to wait for others to save the day. This was his job, not theirs. What good was he to anybody when all he could do was stand still?
He glanced at his watch for the hundredth time in the past hour, not even reading the numbers. Time didn’t matter. They couldn’t move until someone definitively linked Phoebe to Phoenix. “Where are we?”
Sean kept his attention on the screen before him. “Ashley’s still combing Meghan’s computer trying to find evidence she’s not behind this. I started digging for intel on Phoebe the minute word came she might be our hacker. The girl’s a ticking time bomb.”