“Show off.”
David laughed. “You’d be surprised the things I know, my love,” he said, pulling my hair to one side and kissing my neck.
I sighed, as I leaned back into him. “We could sneak out of here and you could teach me a few things.”
“I could. But then my brother would come knocking on my door and that could potentially lead to a few embarrassing moments.”
I laughed. “Okay. Then we stay.”
And we did. And it was a quite enjoyable afternoon. There was a lot of good food, a lot of good wine, and a lot of wonderful conversation. I spoke to a Los Angeles cop who actually knew quite a bit about social networking and the head of a local bank who liked to go square dancing on the weekends. He even showed us a few moves that I was able to imitate better than I’d expected. Donovan came around a few times and Kirkland—what could I say about Kirkland? He was beautiful with skin like melted caramel and eyes that seemed to look right through you. And that charming smile? I could understand why his bed was never empty.
I might have considered just one night if it weren’t for the fact that I was pretty sure no one could be as gentle and affectionate with me as David was.
I was in the kitchen helping organize the dirty dishes when Kate found me again.
“Quite a day, huh?”
I smiled. “They are an amazing group of people.”
She laughed a deep, warm laugh. “I remember the first time I met them all. It was quite overwhelming.”
“Kirkland is something, isn’t he?”
Her smile was big and bright, a smile that said things I couldn’t even begin to explain. “Kirkland is going to break a lot of hearts when he finally finds that one girl that tames him.”
“Do you think he will?”
“Yes, I do. And I think whoever she is, she’s going to be someone quite special.”
I nodded. I had to agree. He was too special not to fall in love one day. However, he was also one of those guys who would fall hard when he did fall. I just hoped the girl knew what she was doing.
“And Joss?”
A little sadness came into Kate’s eyes. “After everything she’s been through, it amazes me how happy she always seems to be.”
“Losing her family must have been devastating.”
“They were all she had.”
“It’s pretty great what Ash did for her.”
“Ash is another who falls hard when he falls. He’s loyal to a fault.”
“He is.”
“Like David, I suppose.”
“What do you mean?”
“David takes so much on himself. He feels guilty over every little thing. When things went wrong in my case, he was the first to call me and apologize, to tell me that he would be there for me if Donovan didn’t recover from his injuries.”
“He has a big heart.”
“Too big, if you ask me. To avoid surgery just because of the guilt of the accident—”
“What do you mean, surgery?”
Kate looked at me, her eyes widening when she realized I hadn’t known. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“But you did. So finish it. What surgery?”
She looked over her shoulder as though hoping someone would come and save her from herself. Then she took a deep breath and said in something of a rush, “The doctor says that he can help David walk again if he would submit to a surgery to remove fragments around his spine. But David’s refusing, and Donovan thinks it’s because he feels guilty about his parents’ deaths.”
“He could walk again?”
“There’s a fifty percent chance they could make things worse. But if it were to work, he could regain as much as eighty percent mobility.”
Almost as though he knew we were talking about him, David burst through the back doors, laughing at something someone had said to him. Ash and Rose were with him, each carrying a huge platter of leftover food. Ash was laughing, too, but his humor slipped a little when he saw me watching him.
Something had changed between us. He didn’t trust me.
But my eyes, my thoughts, were on David.
He could fix his legs? Why the hell hadn’t he?
Then again, did I want him to?
***
I lay on the bed and watched him wheel toward me, only a towel around his waist. His hair was wet, the curls thick and heavy around his face. I wanted to touch them.
“Everyone liked you,” he said.
“I hope so.”
“They were happy to finally meet the woman who has been sneaking in and out of my place most nights.”
I smiled. “Was I some sort of mystery woman?”
“Pretty much. You should have heard some of the gossip going around about you.”
“Were they kind to me?”
“For the most part.”
“I hope I didn’t ruin the mystery by giving them a face to put with the rumors.”
“I don’t think so.”
He moved his chair up alongside the bed and snapped the brakes into place before lifting himself onto the mattress, his towel slipping to the floor. I watched him pull his legs into place and found myself wondering what it would be like to see him stand. There was a picture I’d seen of him standing between his parents on the night of the accident. He looked like a totally different person, a tall young man with hardly a care in the world.
Would he be the same if he had the surgery and they fixed his legs?
Somehow, I didn’t think so.
I had intended to ask him about it, to confront him with another of his long list of secrets. But there was this little fear that ran its cold fingers up and down my spine whenever I thought of it.
I’d always made a point of dating men who were weak, who, by some physical or mental insufficiency, could not intimidate me. Large men, strong men, men who were intimidating were too much like my stepfather. They frightened me.
I didn’t want to be frightened of David.
He stretched out on the mattress beside me, a sigh slipping from between his lips as he did. I moved into his arms, lying my head on his chest, close to his beating heart.
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“I am,” he said immediately.
“If you could, would change anything about your life right now?”
He thought about that for a minute. “I don’t suppose so. Why?”
I didn’t answer, but I couldn’t begin to tell him how relieved I was by his answer.
Chapter 20
David
Kirkland was out on a job. A male executive who’d gone through a nasty divorce and was being blackmailed by unknown sources. It didn’t look like a physical threat was eminent, but the man had insisted on twenty-four hour surveillance, so I was watching cameras in the twelve or so rooms of his house, growing bored with staring at fancy furniture all day long.
Ricki’s case was finished. I was relieved, to be honest. Nothing bad had come of it, and we were free to do as we pleased without anyone judging us for getting involved while we were in the middle of a case. Not that anyone had. No one really said much of anything.
Ash forgave me for my little temper tantrum weeks ago. I’d known he would. However, I also saw him watching me wistfully, as if he was hoping I would change my mind about the surgery now that I had a woman in my life. The truth was, though, I’d already made up my mind a long time ago. Having Ricki in my life made me think of all the things that would be easier if I had the use of my legs, but it didn’t mean I was willing to risk further damage just to take a chance that I could walk again.
I just wanted to enjoy this new relationship. Nothing more.
I was thinking about the pasta dish that I’d be making for dinner tonight when an email came across one of my many computer screens. It was from an old friend of mine from the FBI.
Attached is the case file you requested. There are some sections redacted for obvious reasons, but I’m sure you remember enough about it th
at you’ll be able to get what you need from it. Great hearing from you.
I clicked on the attachment and felt for a second as if I’d gone back in time and was sitting at my little desk in my equally little cubicle back at FBI headquarters in Los Angeles.
I joined the FBI straight out of college and was assigned to the cybercrime task force in Los Angeles straight out of Quantico because of my aptitude with computers. I only worked with them for six months, then I was moved to the terror task force as an analyst. My supervisors were concerned that I related to the hackers I was investigating too much.
It was all bullshit, of course. I did a helluva good job. That’s what scared them.
This was the case file of the first case I worked on nearly five years ago.
Arabelle Murphy.
She hacked a computer at a federal bank. Then she broke into the security system at our offices, looking for proof that we were infiltrating the hacker message boards she frequented. And then she hacked into the supercomputer at Stanford. My supervisors were hot to slow her down, worried that her next target would be the CIA or Fort Knox. It was ridiculous, of course. She wasn’t in it for the notoriety or the money. She was in it just to show the government how crazy lax their security really was. But they didn’t see it the same way she did.
I built a case against her, block by block. I infiltrated those message boards, talked to her friends, people she considered family. I even got to know her, sharing trade secrets and bragging about places I’d supposedly hacked, though it was all a cover provided to me by my superiors.
Arabelle trusted me.
They arrested her at her home the same morning they moved me out of cybercrimes. I saw it on the news later that night, played over and over with the newscaster exaggerating her crimes in order to make her arrest seem so much bigger than it really was.
I always had this sense of, what if?
What if I hadn’t done such a stellar job of documenting her crimes?
What if it hadn’t been my first case? What if I wasn’t trying so hard to impress?
What if I had handled the information I gleaned from Ricki and others on the message boards differently?
Arabelle was found innocent by a jury of her peers. But not until after her name was dragged through the mud and hackers all over the world came to believe she’d ratted them all out. Not until she didn’t have a friend left in the world.
Not until after Ricki had gone public with Friend or Foe and left Arabelle in her dust.
I read through the file, so familiar with everything in it that I knew exactly what was redacted and why. The file mentioned a lot of other hackers by their nicknames, including Ricki. But none of them had been charged. None of them had been dragged through the mud despite evidence as solid as the evidence we had against Arabelle.
That fact always bothered me. It was as if they targeted Arabelle specifically.
Had they? Was I just a pawn in some government game?
I’d done a search for Arabelle using both legal and not so legal avenues over the past few weeks and I hadn’t been able to find anything. It was as if she’d fallen off the edge of the earth. Ricki said she thought she’d gotten married, but I couldn’t find her name on any marriage certificate from here to Maine. Arabelle Murphy had just ceased to exist after she was acquitted.
I could ask Ricki. She and Arabelle were roommates until a month or two before Arabelle’s arrest. The rumor was they had a falling out. Many seemed to think it was over Friend or Foe. I’d heard that the code for the dating site was Arabelle’s and Ricki stole it. I’d also heard that Arabelle wanted to sue Ricki after her case was finished, but she couldn’t find a lawyer who would take the case unless she could come up with a sizeable retainer and, after everything she’d just gone through, she couldn’t come up with it. Screwed not once, but twice.
But I couldn’t imagine Ricki would steal anything from Arabelle. They were friends.
There was a touch of code in the case file. I found myself staring at it, recognizing a small line that was highlighted in the file. Her signature.
It was very similar to the signature I’d seen on the code in Ricki’s server. However, not the code that was used to breach her security. In code that existed on the server prior to the breach.
Ricki’s code.
What the hell?
Chapter 21
Ricki
“Mr. Grayson,” Jacy said, just as David moved around her, wheeling his chair quickly through my office.
“We need to talk.”
My eyebrows rose. He was rarely this assertive. I wasn’t sure if it turned me on or scared the crap out of me.
“You can go, Jacy.”
My assistant looked at me for a long second before backing away, turning her eyes from me only as the door closed in front of her.
“What’s going on?”
Now David was studying me, his eyes moving slowly over my face as if he was trying to read something there that wasn’t there.
“Did you steal Friend or Foe from Arabelle Murphy?”
My heart sank.
“I thought you were done working on my case.”
“Gray Wolf is.”
“But you aren’t?”
“Did you steal it?”
I got up and moved around my desk, sitting on the edge of a straight-backed chair that sat in front of my desk for guests so that David and I were on the same eye level with nothing between us.
“No. She gave it to me.”
“Why?”
“Because she was going to jail and she didn’t need it.”
I knew he didn’t believe me. But I didn’t know what to say to convince him.
“She just willingly handed it over to you?”
I sat back a little and lifted my hair off my neck, suddenly very hot.
“Belle wanted to go legit. She’d been wanting to go legit for a long time, but she didn’t want to work nine to five for some little company that paid squat like I’d done before I met her. She wanted something big, something that would change her life. She’d read about the internet boom back in the late nineties and knew what they did right and what they did wrong. She wanted to do it herself, but do it right.”
“So she created a dating algorithm.”
“Yes. And it was brilliant. No one else was not only connecting people to their dream dates, but also telling them who wasn’t a good match for them. It was a one of a kind at the time.”
“And worth billions.”
“Yes.”
“Did she know that?”
“She did.” Again I lifted my hair, a sigh slipping from between my lips. “She needed money to pay her legal bills.”
“Is that why she gave it to you?”
“Yes. The deal was, I’d take the website public and give her the money she needed to pay her lawyers.”
“What about the rest?”
“She said we’d make a decision on that when she got out of jail. She was pretty certain she’d be convicted.”
“But she wasn’t.”
“I made sure she had some damn good lawyers.”
“You paid for them.”
“You want to see the receipts?”
I almost thought he was going to say yes, but then he turned away, rolling his wheelchair to the far side of the room where there was an old leather couch and a low coffee table.
“Where is Arabelle now?”
That was the question I’d been afraid he would ask. I didn’t answer right away, my thoughts lost in the past. I was a different person back then. I had to keep reminding myself of that fact.
“Ricki?”
“Do you want the truth? Or do you just want to know the whitewashed version?”
He must have heard something in my voice because he came back, pulling his chair to a stop practically at my feet.
“I want the truth. No more secrets.”
I inclined my head slightly. “She was my best friend, David.”
&
nbsp; “I know.”
“No, you don’t. I was not the kind of girl who had a lot of friends. I was the weird girl, the girl who kept to herself at lunch and burst into tears at odd times during class. I was the girl who wore long sleeve in the heat of summer and who spent more time at the public library than at home. No one wanted to be my friend.”
He touched my leg, but I pulled away.
“When I went to MIT, I thought I’d finally found a place where I’d fit in. Most of those people were nerds like I was; they were loners who were considered freaks by their classmates just like me. But the thing was, they were easier to fit in with other people than I was. They were able to interact in a way that I had never learned. The only thing I could interact with was a computer because I understood it. I knew what it would do and how it would do it, you know? Humans were unpredictable. Intimidating. I couldn’t handle interacting with them.”
I stood and began to pace, lifting my hair a third time only to drop it back down again almost immediately. I could feel the tears at the back of my throat. But I didn’t want to cry, not in front of him.
“I graduated the top of my class, a year earlier than everyone else I’d first come there with. I got a good job with a good income. I was doing all right for myself. But I still couldn’t deal with people. My coworkers all talked about me behind my back, called me names that I wouldn’t repeat in polite company. It was just like high school.”
It was all playing out in my mind again, the humiliation that refused to let me go.
“Arabelle was at MIT the same time I was. We had a few classes together, exchanged notes a few times. Turned out she got a job in Chicago, too, not far from where I was. She suggested we get an apartment together to save some money. She was already into hacking, already heavy into joining others in breaking into the systems that were supposed to be unhackable. She talked about it sometimes, but never really encouraged me to do it until I told her how miserable I was at my job.”
“It’s the best rush you’ll ever experience, Ricki. Even better than the best orgasm in the fucking world!”
That was how she described breaking into a federal computer. How was I supposed to resist that?
“You already know most of this,” I said.
DAVID: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security) Page 11