Hacker Exposed (White Hat Security Book 1)

by Linzi Baxter

  “If it were up to me, we would go to the courthouse and get married today. She’s been sick for the last few days, which has me worried because I had planned to fly her to Vail this weekend and ask her at the winter house. That house has the best view. I thought I would ask her at sunset on the deck overlooking the mountains.”

  Asher was quiet for a minute, and then what he said surprised me. “I’m happy you waited. I think Bridget is perfect for our family. I thought you would have married Stacey.”

  Stacey was my last long relationship, maybe a week long, but we had been seen out together often since then. “I couldn’t see myself having kids with her. It was a fling, and she should have known that going in. We’d take each other to social events when we didn’t have other dates.”

  The feelings I had for Bridget were so much more than I could ever explain. If anything ever happened to her, I didn’t know how I would live with myself. She was my everything, and I didn’t care how sappy that made me sound.

  “Enough about me. How are you and CJ doing?” Those two had been inseparable since Bridget had introduced them. It was nice seeing Asher happy.

  The smile that spread across his face when he talked about his partner was amazing. “We’re doing good. I think we’re going to sell his house, and he’s going to move in with me permanently. We’ve been going to Sam’s BDSM club, Sanctorum, and taking classes. We both enjoy it, and it has brought a new dynamic to our relationship.”

  Asher and I were still talking when Antonio came storming into my office with a panicked look on his face. “We have a major issue. Bridget has been kidnapped by Mr. Davis, and we lost the tail on him.” Did my brother just say he lost the love of my life?

  CJ, Sophie, and Patty came running into my office next. They all looked as though they might lose it. Patty’s hair was colored pink and blue, and her shirt said something about daddies. If this weren’t such a dire situation, I might have asked if she was pregnant.

  “When was the last time anyone saw her?” Asher asked.

  “She left our office an hour ago to come speak to Alex,” Patty replied with a strange look on her face.

  “I didn’t see her.”

  Antonio nodded. “We pulled up camera footage of the building. She ran out of your reception area, crying. She went down the stairwell, and then in the next sighting, she’s with Mr. Davis, speeding out of the loading dock area in his van.”

  Why was she crying? Before I had time to think about it, Patty drop-kicked me in the stomach, flipped me on my back, and was yelling at me. Antonio grabbed her from behind and held her while I tried to get myself under control.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Patty?” I didn’t have time for this. Bridget had been kidnapped.

  Patty had tears running down her face. “How could you do this to her? Why would you turn her away on the happiest day of your lives?”

  “I don’t understand what you are talking about? I haven’t seen Bridget since this morning.”

  “She didn’t talk to you before she ran out of your office, crying?” Patty was yelling and looked a little pale.

  “I already said I haven’t seen her since this morning. Why would you think I would make her cry?” I yelled back.

  “Umm, we need to find Bridget fast.” Everyone turned to Patty. She knew something she wasn’t telling us.

  I was ten seconds away from losing it when Asher rounded on Patty. “We are going to find her, but you know something else, so tell us what’s going on.” Asher was using his military voice, which was known to make women cry.

  “Stop being an ass, Asher. Patty, come here and tell us what is going on.” CJ took Patty into a hug.

  “I can’t tell you. It’s not my place,” Patty whispered.

  “You have to tell us, now.”

  Patty whispered something into CJ’s ear that made him go pale.

  “What the fuck is going on? Tell me now!” I screamed at the people in the room.

  CJ looked me straight and the eye and told me I was going to be a dad. The situation went from fucked up to “Holy shit, someone is going to die for touching my future wife and kid.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bridget

  Slowly, I felt as if I were coming out of the clouds. My tongue felt like the Syrian Desert. What the fuck happened? I tried to remember everything. I had a bun in the oven. Alex ripped my heart out of my chest. Every part of my body hurt. My hands were tied together with rope. I was pretty sure being tied up was not in my favor.

  “I know you’re awake. Open your eyes, you little bitch.” I knew that voice. What the fuck is he doing out of jail, and why do my eyelids feel so heavy?

  I needed to see if I had my phone on me. If I did, CJ, Patty, or Sophie could ping my phone when they realized I was missing. I hoped they would figure it out quickly because I wouldn’t last long. I needed to protect the little one. I had taken a few classes from Asher in self-defense. But my hands were tied together. We hadn’t gotten to the classes yet about what to do if you were tied up. Since I’d now been tied up twice, maybe we needed to move that class up on the schedule.

  “Stop acting like you’re not awake…” I didn’t hear everything he had to say because he kicked my side. I needed to protect my little peanut. It’s you, me, and the hackers at work, little one. We can get through this.

  “What do you want, Mr. Davis? Why are you trying to kill me again? Why not go after Alex?” I really didn’t want him to go after Alex, even if the ogre ripped out my heart.

  “You have what we need.”

  “I’m sorry. We? Do you have an imaginary friend with you?”

  He grabbed the back of my head and dragged me across the disgustingly dirty floor to a laptop. Why don’t kidnappers ever have clean accommodations? They always want something out of the kidnappee. Why not at least give us a clean working surface? And could the dumbass not bring the laptop to me?

  Once deposited in front of the laptop, I took stock of my location. The room smelled like someone had left dead fish carcasses out in the sun for a few days. There were no overhead lights, just a candle lighting the room. Really? He couldn’t have picked a location with working lights?

  “We, as in your father and I. We need you to pull up his old servers.” So this was about the data I stole and locked down good so no one would get to it.

  I wasn’t sure how I wanted to play this out. If I gave Mr. Davis the data, he would fuck over a lot of people and probably kill me. If I didn’t give him the data, he would definitely kill me. This was a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation.

  Why can’t my white knight ride in and save me? Oh, that’s right. I don’t have a white knight. He thinks we entered into this relationship, knowing there was an end date. I didn’t get the memo about that, and I’m still pissed. I’m not sure how I’m going to seek my revenge. Can you seek revenge on your baby’s daddy?

  I thought I would try stalling to give my friends time to find me. “That will take me hours to get back.” It wouldn’t, really. I could have it pulled up in ten seconds. But I was going to make it take six hours. Hackers or computer nerds could take the long route to retrieve data, but it really took no time at all. We just needed to make our jobs look hard, or everyone would have been learning to hack. We were protecting the world.

  Mr. Davis pointed to the laptop, and I started to type. If only he knew I was also sending CJ a code in the background. Don’t ever kidnap a hacker and then give them a laptop.

  Alex

  “What do you mean her signal dropped and you can’t find her?” I was ready to kill someone. The only problem was I needed all the people in this room.

  CJ looked at me like I was stupid. I understood what he’d said. I just hadn’t liked it. Then his cell made a pinging noise. CJ looked down, and a large smile appeared on his face. “We can work with this. Sophie, grab a laptop. We need to get to work.”

  I was getting angrier by the minute. “You want to tell me
what you can work with?”

  Asher looked over CJ’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”

  “Bridget just sent a message about needing help. Psycho kidnapped her and is trying to get her to pull old server stuff.”

  CJ’s fingers were flying across the keyboard, and different screens were flashing by. None of it made sense, and no one was saying anything, which was really starting to piss me off.

  “Where is Bridget?”

  CJ huffed and held up a finger, telling me he needed a minute. Two minutes later, he turned the laptop toward me and said, “Right here.”

  I wanted to kiss CJ, even though I didn’t swing that way.

  “Let’s go.” I was grabbing my keys when Asher put his hand on my shoulder to stop me. “If you think for one second I’m not going with, you’ve lost your ever-fucking mind.”

  Antonio was the one who jumped to my aid. “You can go, but you stay in the SUV until we bring her out. We don’t need any of this ‘let’s save the day’ shit.”

  I could live with that, hopefully.

  I jumped in the SUV with CJ, Alex, and Asher. We sent Patty and Sophie back to the White Hat Security office. We didn’t need more people getting hurt. Neither woman was happy about this. I told them to come over first thing tomorrow so they could see Bridget.

  We got to the warehouse on the other side of town faster than I thought we would. Sam and a couple of his employees were already there. He gave us a report of the intel they had gathered while waiting for us to arrive. “We looked around. The good thing is he’s alone. The bad thing is he has a gun pointed at her.”

  Asher, Antonio, and Sam came up with a game plan. They went in with their men, while CJ and I stood outside. It was the longest ten minutes of my life. I wasn’t even sure what CJ and I talked about. All I wanted was my little nerd back.

  Finally, I saw her walking out. I didn’t wait for the all clear. I ran up, grabbed her, and pulled her into my arms. She started hitting me and cussing at me. What the fuck did I do?

  “Let me go, you asshole. Why are you even here? I heard you say I was a fling. Leave me the fuck alone.” Now things were starting to become clear. Bridget must have heard only part of my talk with Asher. That was why she took off crying.

  “You are not a fling. You are the love of my life, and we need to have a doctor check over you and the baby.”

  Bridget went still. “We want nothing to do with you.”

  “Stop lying. It’s only going to get you into more trouble. You’re already in trouble for eavesdropping. You didn’t catch the whole conversation. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about a past relationship and how it doesn’t compare to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s all? Oh?”

  She looked up at me with her crooked glasses and messed up hair and said, “Pregnancy hormones make you do crazy things.”

  I couldn’t wait to spend the rest of my life with this woman.

  The next hour was spent letting the paramedic look at Bridget and talking to the police. This time, Mr. Davis didn’t make it out of the building alive. I didn’t ask how. I let Sam, Asher, and Antonio explain that to the police.

  There was a lot of tension in the elevator on the ride up to my condo. I wanted Bridget so bad. The mixture of almost losing her and knowing she was the woman carrying my baby was intense.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bridget

  Alex pushed me up against the elevator wall. “We can’t do this here. Alex, we need to stop,” I said weakly.

  Over the past few months, we’d had some good make-out sessions followed by some unbelievable sex. The way Alex was kissing me now was nothing close to what had come before. I was faintly aware of the elevator coming to a stop and Alex carrying me into the penthouse.

  When Alex said I had heard him wrong, I’d wanted him that second. The only thing that had stopped me was the people all around us.

  Thankfully, Asher and Antonio were going to clean everything up with the police. They said they were going to come over tomorrow to tell me what steps I had to take next. We needed to get more information on my father. I needed to go to the police station and let them know everything that was said.

  Even though I half-heartedly asked Alex to stop, he had a different idea. He’d had his hands all over me since the elevator ride, and I certainly wasn’t going to complain. Between kisses, he finally said, “I don’t want to stop. Ever since I saw you walk out of that place, all I can think about is being inside you to make sure you are real and nothing happened to you.”

  No matter how many times Alex and I made love, it felt like the first time. His words always brought a rush of excitement. Slowly, Alex kissed down the nape of my neck, while his fingers worked to pull off the scrub top the paramedics had given me.

  “You’re not wearing a bra?” Alex asked with a groan while dragging his finger down my collarbone to circle my nipple and lightly tug it. Alex’s eyes were dilated with passion. I could feel his dick rubbing against me through his dress pants.

  “No,” I said tenderly.

  “Fuck,” Alex swore quietly in my ear.

  “Well, if you would hurry and move this to the bedroom, we could.” Come on. I’m a horny pregnant lady, and you’re killing me with foreplay.

  Alex swung me over his shoulder with my ass in the air and took off toward our bedroom. “I need to get you into our bed so I can feast on you properly.” Then I was flying through the air, and my body bounced on the bed.

  Without taking his eyes off me, Alex crawled onto the bed and started kissing his way down my body, stopping to suck on each of my nipples, making my clit start to throb.

  “Alex, please,” I moaned, not sure what I wanted him to do. He continued to suck and pull at my nipples, then he slowly moved his mouth and hands down my body, kissing me, until he got to my stomach.

  He worked on removing my pants, slowly ran his index finger along my slit, and lowered his mouth to my clit. The pleasure of his mouth on my clit and his fingers in me lasted only a few minutes before I had an orgasm.

  “Alex, I want to suck on you,” I said after coming out of my orgasm-induced haze.

  “I’m too wound up to have those lips on me. Wrap your legs around me instead.” Alex hurried to take off his clothes and climbed back on top of me.

  I wrapped my legs around his waist. I wanted Alex inside of me more than anything I could think of. I could feel myself getting wetter as I anticipated his entrance.

  Alex put two fingers inside me again to make sure I was still ready. “Damn. You are so wet and eager for me. That turns me on so much.” Alex pulled his fingers from me, and the emptiness made me whimper until I could feel his cock press against me. When he pushed inside, it was pure bliss.

  Alex took me slow and easy at first. I fell into a happy slumber after our lovemaking. He woke me up an hour later and took me hard and fast. “I needed that,” Alex said when we were done.

  We lay there for minutes, maybe hours, listening to each other breathe. When Alex finally broke the silence, I knew we had to talk about what had happened. That didn’t mean I wanted to.

  “I’ve never been more scared in my life than when I found out you were kidnapped. Then Patty told us you were pregnant. I didn’t know what to do, and I was so worried I was going to lose you,” Alex said to me while trailing his hands up and down my spine.

  “Honestly, I was so mad at you for what you said, I wanted to get away from Mr. Davis just so I could take revenge on you.”

  “Bridget, I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” Alex told me.

  “I want to spend my life with you and this little nugget,” I replied, rubbing my stomach.

  Alex leaped out of bed and grabbed something off the dresser. When he came back, he knelt next to the bed. “I wanted to wait until this weekend and do this right at the house in Vale. But I can’t wait any longer. Bridget, I love you with every fiber of my being. Will you marry me?”

  “Y
ou have a house in Vale?”

  “Really, you’re going to leave me hanging?”

  “Of course, I will marry you, but I think we should still go to that house this weekend and celebrate.”

  Epilogue

  Patty

  Bridget looked like a princess straight out of a fairytale in her Vera Wang vintage wedding dress and slight baby bump. The whole crew was at the Waldorf for Alex and Bridget’s wedding. The exchange of vows was unbelievable and didn’t leave a dry eye in the audience.

  Like always, I sneaked in the back and tried to stay under the radar. There was too much press coverage at this wedding. I couldn’t afford for my identity to get out. When Bridget asked me to be in her wedding, it was the hardest day of my life. I said one day I would tell her the story, but until then, I couldn’t let the media get ahold of my picture.

  The reception was on another level. Bridget had left the whole reception up to Alex’s parents to plan. All she wanted was to marry Alex. The Ross family did not leave anything on the table. Pink crystals hung from the ceiling. White lights twinkled around the room. Watching all the people dancing on the floor brought tears to my eyes. All of these people getting to live their lives how they wanted was unfair. I was feeling sorry for myself.

  Bridget was five months pregnant and glowed with happiness. I noticed Alex’s dad was also bragging about getting his first grandbaby, saying it was all because of him.

  On the other side of the room, I saw my sister and her husband arguing once again. Most people would look at them and think they were having an intense conversation. I could tell from my sister’s face that it was an argument. We were twins. I could almost sense it.

  No one knew we were twins or that we even knew each other. If I stood next to my sister, it might have been obvious. We had to keep our identities undercover, or we would lose what life we had. We had agreed that as long as our identities stayed hidden, we could live in the United States. The second our identities were leaked, we would need to move to my father’s home country.