“Could you pull over a second?”
Donovan didn’t hesitate, thank God. The moment the SUV stopped its forward motion, I opened the door, not bothering to release my seatbelt, and leaned over to empty my stomach of what I’d eaten that morning for breakfast. Granola didn’t look as nice coming up as it had going down.
Donovan didn’t get out. He didn’t even put the SUV in park. He just waited until I had myself under control, then he pulled back into traffic, signaling to move into the left lane so he could catch the onramp to Interstate-10. Then he handed me a handkerchief to wipe my chin.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“No problem.”
But it was a problem. I felt like a damn child. I felt like I’d been pushed to my limits. Normal people could get into a car and do their job without issue. I had to be cajoled into the car, and then I couldn’t go ten miles without losing my damn breakfast!
Maybe Ash was right. Maybe I was losing it. Maybe I did need to see someone.
Or maybe I just needed to put myself—and everyone around me—out of our misery.
I’d always believed that I should have died in that car wreck with my parents. Maybe it was time to rectify what God got wrong.
Chapter 5
Ricki
“They’re here,” Jacy said, curiosity written all over her pretty face.
“Thanks.”
“Do you want me to meet them at the elevator?”
“I’m sure the receptionist can guide them.”
She nodded, but there was a wisp of disappointment. I suppose things were often boring up here on the executive floor. The idea that a couple of guys from a security firm were on their way must have brightened her mundane day. I wondered if she was already imagining that they’d look like Ryan Reynolds or something.
Jacy was something of a romantic. She was always pushing me to accept the many offers that came into my office in roundabout ways. The Apple executive who hinted that he’d like to take me to dinner. The actor who was wondering if I was registered on one of my own dating sites. The reporter who suggested an off-the-record conversation at his vacation home in Tahoe. She always seemed disappointed when I didn’t follow up, but she didn’t understand that a lot of these offers came from people who had no clue who I was behind the CEO façade.
She studied me a second, then nodded. “I’ll be out here then.”
Jacy was a good assistant. She was probably the closest thing I had to a friend at this point in my life—and that was kind of pathetic. I knew that. My only friend was a paid employee. I used to have innumerable friends. Some of them were other hackers I’d met over the internet, but the rest were the kinds of friends who’d come over with a pizza when they knew I was feeling low. However, all that changed when I chose to get out of the hacker business and go legit.
I sighed as I turned and looked down on the world below me again. I hadn’t thought about Belle in a long time. Must be this security business bringing her back.
“Ms. Dennison?”
I turned as someone—or something—banged against the heavy, ornate wood of my office door. Sitting there in a compact wheelchair, heavy fingerless gloves on his hands, a man with the most intense green eyes I’d ever seen looked over at me, the expression in those eyes daring me to comment on his circumstances.
What the hell?
I stood and walked around my desk, feeling both incredibly tall and impossibly petite all at the same time because of the giant of a man who stood behind my new wheelchair-bound acquaintance. He was at least six feet tall, his dirty blond hair cut short and his blue eyes intense, taking in everything about my office in one, quick glance.
Ex-military. It was unmistakable.
“You must be Donovan Pritchard,” I said, holding out my hand to the tall blond.
“I am.”
“And you must be David Grayson.”
There was definitely some resemblance between the brothers. They both had the same dark hair that tended toward curls, but David wore his much longer than his brother did. And there was something about the eyes, the angle of the jaw, and the broad shoulders. They were both incredibly handsome, and they both had this air about them of loss.
I knew about the car accident that took their parents’ lives, of course. It had been widely reported at the time because of their father’s position as the newly elected congressman from Texas. And I’d known that David was driving the car that fateful night. But I hadn’t known it’d left him wheelchair bound. Sometimes the media wasn’t as thorough in their reporting as might be desired.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Dennison,” David Grayson said, as he took my proffered hand briefly. However, there was something about the way he spoke the words that left me wondering if it really was a pleasure. He seemed distracted. Displeased.
Jacy was standing just inside the door watching closely. Her eyes were moving over Donovan Pritchard, admiring the muscles that bulged from under his short sleeves. Or maybe it was the obvious six-pack he was barely hiding under his skintight t-shirt that had her attention. Whatever it was, he was aware of it and he shifted, turning away from her so that her view was blocked. But then she became just fascinated with his ass, a fact he probably wasn’t aware of.
“Can we get you something to drink?” I asked, being both polite and trying to move things along so that I could ask Jacy to leave.
Donovan shook his head, but David asked for a lemon-lime soda. Jacy disappeared briefly, then returned, cutting her eyes at Donovan as she held the drink out to David.
“If you’ll excuse us, Jacy,” I said as sternly as I could.
She hesitated but finally left the room, closing the door securely behind her.
“If we could have a seat,” I said, gesturing toward the couch.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here,” David said.
I glanced at him, heat burning over my cheeks as I realized what I’d said. Donovan shot David a look that he ignored, his eyes hard on mine.
I was suddenly nervous, wondering what the hell I’d just gotten myself into.
I sat on the edge of the couch. Donovan took a seat in a straight-backed chair across from me, crossing one leg over his knee. David simply rolled his chair next to Donovan, making a bit of a show of locking his wheels and crossing his arms to listen to what I had to say.
“I realized last night that someone’s installed a back door in my corporation’s computer system. Somehow they broke through the security system and granted themselves access to the program that monitors everything…” I sighed as I thought about it, about the things this hacker could get into and change. “I’ve gone through it, looking for the break in the code, but I can’t find it. We’ve had attacks like this before, but usually it takes very little to find where they got in and secure the hole. Not this time.”
“And you think it might be someone who works for you?” David asked.
“It’s possible. Whoever did it knows my code well.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because they knew how to hide the breach well enough that I couldn’t spot it right away.”
Donovan leaned forward. “Do you have any suspects?” he asked.
I stood and returned to my desk, picking up a file folder I’d had waiting there. I handed it to him when I returned to the couch and watched as he opened it.
“There are a couple of programmers who still work here. And a few who left the corporation over the last few years for various reasons. I’ve written almost everything I know about them there.”
Donovan nodded as he pursued the material. Then he handed the file to David. He glanced over it, too, but only in a cursory way.
“We’ll run background checks on them,” he said, handing the file back to Donovan.
“Background checks? You don’t think we do background checks?”
“Of course we realized that, Ms. Dennison,” Donovan said.
But David looked me in the ey
e and said, “Not as thoroughly as we can do them.”
“What does that mean?”
“It just means we have access to more databases. We can go deeper than the agency that you likely outsourced your background checks to can go.”
“What makes you think I don’t do them myself?”
“Because you’re the CEO.”
My eyebrows rose. “I’m the boss so I don’t have time for the more basic, routine procedures.”
“No, you don’t.”
He didn’t back down. He stared me in the eye as if he was daring me to be the first to look away. The man obviously thought highly of himself. Like he could do my job better than I could. Did I seriously ask these people into my office to insult me?
I stood up and started across the room, ready to pick up the phone and ask Jacy to send security to show these gentlemen out.
“You were born in a rural town outside of Springfield, Illinois. Virden, I believe it was called. You had two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister. You tell the press you left home at seventeen because you got a scholarship to MIT, but the truth is, you left at sixteen because you weren’t getting along with your stepfather. You lived with a friend for a few months, saving up money, then you bought a car and made your way to Cambridge where you hacked their computer system and gave yourself a scholarship.”
I spun on my heels and stared at him. No one knew those things about me.
How the hell…?
“I got that after just an hour at my computer. Imagine what I could do with a few more hours of time on my hands.”
I tilted my head and studied him, seeing him in a new light.
“You hacked my personal computer.”
“No. I hacked the county records in Sangamon County. The rest I already knew.”
“How?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Like I said before, I’m a fan.”
What?
I wanted to wrap my hands around his throat and choke the life out of him, but at the same time I wanted to know what else he knew about me. It’d been a long time since I’d talked to someone who knew about that part of my life. I missed talking about that time, about the excitement of breaking into something that was supposed to be unbreakable. But I’d left all that behind me when I started Friend or Foe.
“You invaded my privacy.”
“That’s what we have to do in order to protect you.”
“No, you don’t.” I looked from him to Donovan. “You’re not here to protect me. You’re here to protect my corporation.”
“It’s one in the same,” David insisted.
Donovan shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable.
“I won’t be bullied by someone I hired. How insulting! To pay someone to invade my privacy!”
David wheeled his chair around and approached me. “I’m sorry you feel insulted, but this is our job—and we do it better than anyone else.”
“You think highly of yourself.”
“Would you want someone who didn’t?”
We stared at each other for a long moment. Then he again began to wheel his chair, swinging it around me and heading toward the door.
“Wait,” I said. “I do need your help.”
He turned. “Then you do it our way.”
“Okay.”
A small, self-satisfied smile slipped over his lips. “Then we should probably get started.”
I didn’t know what to think, but I knew I wanted to get to know this guy a little better.
Chapter 6
David
Ms. Dennison sent Donovan down to human resources with the name of the woman who was in on our little scam and could set him up with whatever he needed to get close to the IT techs. Then she took me to a room on the executive floor where there was a workstation not unlike my own back at the compound.
“This is where my head developer works, but he’s out of town this week. Vacation with the wife and kids.”
“Convenient.”
She shrugged. “You should be able to access the mainframe from here and anything else you might need.”
“Great. If you could just move the chair.”
“Oh, yeah…”
She grabbed the office chair and slid it over, watching as I wheeled my chair into place at the keyboard. I was sort of hoping she would make herself scarce now that I’d proven to her that I knew what I was doing. But she didn’t. She stood there, hugging the back of that chair against her ample chest and watched every keystroke.
She was different from what I’d expected. All the stories I’d heard about her, I expected her to be tall. And broad shouldered. I kind of expected her to be one of those women—sort of like Brigitte Nielson—who just seems larger than life in more ways than one. But she wasn’t like that. She was small, a petite woman who couldn’t have been much taller than maybe five four. And she had the most feminine features—a delicate little nose, a button mouth, and wide, gorgeous blue eyes. Her hair was a delicate golden brown, long and simply pulled back into the kind of ponytail that was once only popular for little girls. And she was almost soft spoken, even when she was angry.
Beautiful and intelligent and incredibly talented. She was exactly the kind of woman who would have had me drooling on my pillow before the accident.
But that was before.
She asked me a few questions as I worked my way through her system looking for evidence of the security breach. Computer questions. She was checking to make sure I knew what I was doing despite what I’d told her earlier. She still didn’t trust me.
And then she abruptly changed the subject.
“How long have you been in the chair?”
I glanced at her, my fingers stilling for a second. “What?”
“The wheelchair. How long?”
I shrugged, focusing on the computer monitor as my fingers began to fly over the keyboard again. “Just over two years.”
“Did you sever your spinal cord in the accident?”
I glanced at her. She was sitting in the chair now, leaning forward, her hands on her knees.
I wondered if she knew she was revealing quite a bit of her lovely cleavage with that position.
“No.”
“But it was the accident, right? The one that killed your parents?”
“You’ve obviously done your research, too.”
“Yeah, but the articles I read didn’t have much information on you.”
“My brother’s doing. He created something of a media blackout around me after the accident.”
“I guess he was a natural for this line of work then.”
I turned back to the computer, my fingers flying over the keyboard as I decided to ignore whatever else she had to say. However, I wasn’t prepared for what came next.
“Can you still have sex?”
I pushed back from the workstation and turned to face her.
“You are pretty curious, aren’t you?”
“Well, you know more about me than my closest friend in college knew, so it only seems fair.”
“Does it?”
“Can you have sex?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, offering her a dark look that I was hoping would stop the questions. But it didn’t. She just met my eyes and waited, her toe beginning to tap against the floor.
“Yes,” I finally admitted. “The paralysis begins in my upper thighs. Everything above that is still normal.”
“Have you? Since the accident, I mean.”
“I never asked you about your sex life.”
“I’m not in a wheelchair. But I’m sure you know all about the reasons I didn’t get along with my stepfather.”
I dropped my eyes at the memory of what I’d read in the two police reports she’d filed with the police department in her small town. The man was not kind. In fact, he was particularly brutal, but for some reason his brutality seemed reserved for just his eldest stepdaughter. The other two children denied ever suffering at his hands, an
d no other police reports were ever filed—either before or after Ricki left the home.
“Why just you?”
“Maybe there was something about my face he didn’t like.” She shrugged. “Why do people like that do anything?”
“Why didn’t your mother do anything?”
“Because we were practically living on the streets before she met him. He had a four-bedroom house, a good job, a couple of cars she had full access to. He was everything she’d prayed for since my dad died. Why give that up just for me?”
There was bitterness in her voice, but not as much as I might have expected. I watched her, watched the unpleasant memories dance over her face. It was like peeking through the crack in a wall. I was seeing a piece of her that I doubted she ever showed to anyone else.
“No,” I said softly.
“No what?”
“No, I haven’t had sex since the accident. Not a lot of women out there who want the work of sleeping with a disabled man.”
“Oh, I don’t know. We have a whole section on one of our dating sites reserved for people looking for someone with specific situations. People in wheelchairs is one of the subcategories.”
“Of course it is.”
I turned back to the computer, my fingers poised and ready to begin again.
“You should check it out. I bet you’d get a dozen dates in the first twenty-four hours,” she said. “You’re pretty good looking.”
I snorted. “Yeah, the handsome man with the dead legs.”
“Like I said, some people get off on that sort of thing.”
She stood up and wandered around the dark room, pausing by the thin, tinted window in the corner, looking down on the street below. I wondered what it was she saw.
“You seem tall.”
“Not so much anymore.”
“At least six foot.”
“Six four.”
She smiled. “I never liked to date guys who towered over me. Too intimidating.”
“I doubt you ever truly feel intimidated.”
“Men intimidate without trying to. Just standing over a woman, a guy like you can be incredibly threatening.”
DAVID: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security) Page 3