by Janie Crouch
Cain was about to put his binoculars away, since there obviously was no danger to national security here, when Hayley pulled the kid in for a hug, her fingers threading in his slightly-too-long hair at the nape of his neck, lifting it.
A dark brown birthmark about an inch in diameter could be seen before she let him go and his hair fell back in place, covering it.
Cain felt like all the air had been sucked out of his car.
He had a birthmark just like that at the exact same place on his neck.
Chapter Nine
Cain started his car and drove back to his house in a daze. His brain struggled to do the math. It wasn’t possible that Hayley had a child, was it?
He was on the phone to Ren McClement in the Omega DC office, the only other person besides Steve Drackett who knew what was going on, before he even got inside the house. He needed info he couldn’t get himself in case it led the mole to them.
“What’s up, Cain? Any progress? Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Ren, I need you to do something for me personally.” Cain skipped any sort of greeting.
“Yes,” Ren said immediately. No stipulations, just whatever Cain needed. Sign of a true friend. “Tell me.”
“I need you to check Hayley Green’s medical records from the first year she was in prison.”
“I’m pulling them up now. Anything in particular I’m looking for?”
“You’ll know it when you see it. Trust me.”
“It’s running. Hayley is the same Hayley Green that we got the court order for yesterday, right? The one you’re working with?”
“Yeah.” Cain paced as he waited for Ren to access the info.
“Okay, I’ve got the records. Looks like she... Oh my gosh.”
Cain closed his eyes. “Tell me.”
“Baby boy was born five months after Hayley arrived at the Georgia Women’s Correctional Institute. No father listed on the birth certificate. Custody given to an Ariel Green upon birth of child.”
Hayley had given birth to a baby, Cain’s baby. In jail. Oh dear God.
“Cain? You okay? I don’t want to pry, but...”
Cain blew out a breath. “Yeah, looks like this case just got a little more complicated.”
“Um, are congratulations in order?”
Cain’s short bark of laughter held very little humor. “It would seem so. I haven’t talked to her about it, so I don’t know much more than the fact that the kid has the exact same birthmark in the exact same place I do.”
“That’s a pretty sure sign.”
“I’ll let you know if this changes anything for the case. Thanks, Ren. I owe you one.”
“Nah, brother, that one’s a freebie for sure.”
Cain stared at nothing for a long time after he got off the phone, trying to remember all the details from four years ago.
How the hell could he have not known Hayley was pregnant?
The case had been expedited, thanks to public scrutiny of the CET exam, led mostly by Senator Ralph Nelligar. Under normal circumstances her cybercrime case might have sat for months before being heard by a jury. Hayley would’ve been in a county holding cell and there would’ve been no way she could’ve kept him in the dark about the baby.
But once a US senator was involved things had moved along much more quickly. Then, Hayley had pleaded no contest at her arraignment, eliminating the need for a longer trial. By the time she was at the Georgia Women’s Correctional, she was probably four months pregnant. Not quite showing if someone wasn’t looking for it.
Cain definitely hadn’t been looking for it.
He began pacing back and forth, his fingers going to the birthmark on his neck. No wonder she’d refused to see him when he’d visited her the first year. After that he’d kept tabs on her, made sure she hadn’t run into any trouble or had any health issues, but had thought it better not to try to see her.
How could she have not told him? How could he have missed this?
He was furious. With her. With himself. With the entire situation.
But part of him was relieved that he at least now knew her secret. Knew why she’d been sneaking around. Was thrilled that she wasn’t falling back into hacking.
But he was still furious.
When Hayley arrived back at his house a couple hours later, Cain had gotten himself under control. Yelling wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
Although exactly what Cain hoped to accomplish he wasn’t sure at all.
“Cain?” Hayley called out as she entered through the door.
Most of the lights were off in the house. “I’m in the kitchen.”
She looked more relaxed, looser, than she had before she left. She stopped in the hallway, not quite all the way into the eating area where he sat.
“Feeling better?” he asked. “Good break?”
“Yeah. Ready to get to it.” She took a step closer. “Look, I’m sorry about before. I will explain everything more clearly. Show you what I’m doing so you don’t have to be worried that it’s something on the computer I’m not supposed to.”
Oh, they had much different problems to worry about now.
“Sit down.”
She sat opposite him, holding out her foot for him to remove the anklet. Instead he slid the photo album he’d placed on the table toward her.
Hayley smiled as she looked down at the twenty-five-year-old pictures.
“Oh my gosh, is that your mom? Look at that hair!”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I know. Styles have changed a lot since then.”
“What’s the matter, Bennett? You have so much time on your hands that you had to go reminiscing?”
He flipped the page over and pointed to a particular picture. “Actually, this was the picture I was studying. Wanted to show you.”
It was one someone had taken of him when he was about three. His dad was ruffling his hair, which made the birthmark—the exact one he’d seen on the little boy today—more noticeable.
She looked back and forth between him and the picture, color leaching from her face. She slid her chair back farther from him and stood, looking like she might bolt at any second.
“Wh-why are you showing me that picture?”
He wasn’t going to beat around the bush. “I know about the boy, Hayley.”
All remaining color left. She gripped the back of the chair like she might fall over. “How?”
“I thought you were trying to get back in touch with your hacker friends. That’s why I was so suspicious about all the work you were doing for me.”
Confusion was clear on her face. “I wasn’t.”
“When you wanted to leave yesterday, I was convinced you were meeting someone. The same this afternoon.”
“You followed me,” she whispered.
He nodded. “My intentions were good. I wanted to see what I could do to help. Even had binoculars to watch you. I wanted to keep you away from whatever big baddies you were meeting. The big baddies ended up being Ariel and what I thought was her son.”
Hayley stared down at the ground.
“But it wasn’t Ariel’s son, I realized, when I saw the birthmark. It only took a phone call to confirm that you gave birth in prison. That you are the mother of my son.”
Hayley didn’t look at him. “His name is Mason. He’s three and a half.”
Mason.
“How could you not have told me about him?” He slammed his fist against the table.
She looked back up at him, heat in her cheeks. “When was I supposed to do that, Cain? We weren’t exactly speaking to each other at the time.”
“You should’ve made the effort.”
“You’d made it abundantly clear how little I’d meant to you.”
He rolled his eyes. “B
ecause I had you arrested for a crime you actually committed?”
“No. Because you slept with me knowing you were going to be arresting me a few days later. You used the feelings you knew I had for you to get information to put me in jail.” Now she slammed her hand on the table. “So yeah, I took that to mean you didn’t really care about me very much.”
Her words doused his righteous fire. God, was that what she really thought? That he’d gone to bed with her four years ago because he wanted to use that to entrap her?
“Hayley.” The anger had fled from his tone now. “I’ll admit when we discovered the hacker network involved with selling the CET answers, I came to you. But not because I planned to arrest you.”
Disbelief sat clear on her features.
“When I first contacted you, I had no idea you were involved. I’ll admit I planned to use you as a source, but I didn’t know you were actually one of the hackers until later. By then we were already together.”
He—as always—hadn’t been able to stay away from her. They’d been drawn to each other like magnets just like they had been in high school.
He’d stopped it, stayed away, when he’d realized she was one of the people his team would be arresting. But the wheels were already in motion and Cain couldn’t stop it. He’d spent the night before the bust getting piss drunk, so furious that he couldn’t do anything to protect Hayley without compromising everything he’d sworn to uphold as a law enforcement officer.
It had ripped his guts out.
“I was pretty damn mad at you when I found out what you’d done. Couldn’t believe you’d be that stupid.” He stared into her brown eyes. “But I never initiated contact with you with the intent to arrest you.”
The opposite. If he’d found out early enough to help her get out of the situation completely before Omega’s cybercrime division had gotten on her trail, he probably would’ve done it.
She just shook her head. “Yeah, well, it didn’t look that way from where I was sitting in the handcuffs.”
* * *
HE KNEW. Cain finally knew.
Anger, frustration, pain, were radiating off him from across the table. Hayley knew she’d see the same in her features if she looked in the mirror.
But under it all she felt relief. He knew.
“I was so angry,” she told him. “But also afraid. I didn’t know what to do. What was going to happen to me or the baby. I thought you had used me to further your career, to make a name for yourself or whatever.”
“You thought I would deny the baby was mine.”
She turned away, couldn’t even bear to look at him. “I thought I was just a girl from your past who you discovered was doing something illegal. So you slept with me to get close. Plus, I thought if I started making a lot of noise about getting knocked up from one of my arresting officers I might get in even more trouble.”
She’d seen the look in his eyes that day in the courtroom. He hadn’t seemed angry or even cold. He’d seemed so disappointed in her. She’d been disappointed enough in herself. So as weak as it made her seem, she hadn’t wanted to get him in trouble, either.
She heard a low curse from across the table. “Damn it, Hayley, why?”
What other reason could she give him? “I—”
“Not the baby, although I want to know everything there is to know about him. Tell me why you ended up in my pathway to begin with. Why were you involved with something illegal?”
His words were so heartfelt, so desperate, she felt whatever anger she had left melt out of her.
“My dad got sick. Cancer.” She sat down at the table across from Cain. “I had a year left in college when I had to come back home and take care of him. You know how it is, never enough money. His insurance was pitiful.”
God, it sounded like such a cop-out. It had to, especially to Cain, the one who had grown up with such a crystal clear sense of right and wrong, black-and-white. He’d always known he wanted to work in law enforcement.
“I was working at the Bluewater, but couldn’t make ends meet. A friend of mine I’d gone to school with asked if I wanted to do some freelance stuff.”
“Kenneth Vargas.”
She nodded. “It seemed like an answer to prayer. Jobs I could do from home and still be able to take care of my dad.
“For about six months he paid me pretty well to do some legit computer jobs.” She rubbed her hands across her eyes. “Ends up those jobs were really auditions. When he realized what I could really do, how pretty desperate I was, he mentioned another possibility that would completely take care of my financial woes. Kenneth was a good salesman. Said we wouldn’t be hurting anyone. Selling CET results to rich little brats.”
The test itself couldn’t be hacked, but the results and reporting system could. But it involved programming and had to be done manually each time to avoid detection.
Ended up Vargas was using a dozen other people with Hayley’s skills from all over the country. His greed had made the hacks much more noticeable.
“I’ll be honest, I didn’t need much convincing from Vargas. I liked the challenge of it and it got me the money I needed.”
She looked across the table, but not directly at Cain. Didn’t want to see further disappointment in his eyes.
“I don’t know if you care or if you’ll even believe me, but I was already getting out when the arrest went down. Had taken part in fewer and fewer hacks.”
She saw Cain wipe a hand over his face and chanced a glance at him. “That’s probably why you didn’t show up in my initial suspects list,” he said. “I knew you went to school with Vargas, knew him. But I didn’t know you were a part of the group we were about to arrest.”
Knowing he hadn’t slept with her in order to arrest her changed a lot for Hayley. At least it didn’t make her feel like he cared nothing about her, that their connection hadn’t meant nothing to him.
She shrugged. “Like you said, I was guilty. Regardless of whether I was getting out of it or not, I had committed the crime.”
Her father had died and the desperate need for money had passed. Once the panic had been gone, she’d realized what she was doing. Had been ashamed.
If she’d gotten out just one month earlier her life would’ve been totally different. One month would’ve probably kept her off Cain’s radar. She probably never would’ve gone to jail.
And, maybe even more importantly, if she’d gotten out one month earlier she would’ve never stumbled on to the information that might one day cost her her life.
Someone was using the CET exam at international Department of Defense schools, to sell state secrets. Hayley had discovered the when, where and how, and had been in the process of finding out who when she’d been arrested and banned from computers.
Cain leaned in closer to her. “I never dreamed the judge would sentence you for as long as he did. I thought he would take into consideration your lack of criminal record. I honestly never thought you would go to prison. Especially not for four years.”
She just shrugged. “It was a high-profile case. Besides, would it have really made any difference in your decision to arrest me? I was the bad guy.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “Maybe. I...” He trailed off, then finally shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Mason. I was angry and scared and honestly thought you were completely done with me. Would not want to be associated with me at all, even in this way. I was a criminal. How could you possibly want me after that?”
They stared at each other across the table for a long time, most of the truth finally open between them. She wished she could tell him the rest, but she couldn’t. Not without proof.
His green eyes held her captive as he leaned closer. “I think there’s one thing you better get clear. I have never stopped wanting you.”
Ch
apter Ten
Hours later, Cain sat on the same couch where he’d woken up that morning, but this time Hayley very definitely wasn’t in his arms. They’d talked more before finally reaching some sort of emotional truce and had begun working. They had finally decided to stop when Hayley announced she would probably need to access the Omega servers on-site to definitely be sure about what she was seeing.
Cain’s anger had eased. It was impossible to stay mad when he forced himself to look at the situation from Hayley’s point of view.
They’d both been wrong. Both made bad choices. The past couldn’t be changed, but the future wasn’t yet written.
He had a son.
He wanted to rush in and force himself into Mason’s life. To get to know him. But Cain realized Hayley was also just getting to know the little boy. That she’d lost just as much time as Cain had. More.
He had no doubt after watching Hayley interact with Mason today that she loved the child. Wanted what was best for him. Cain did, too.
So he could wait. Ease himself into the child’s life. But he would be part of it, no matter what he had to do.
He looked down at Hayley, tucked on the opposite side of the couch. He wanted to be part of her life, too. She’d always been important to him, even in the years they were separated while they were in college and then while he was pursuing his law enforcement dreams.
It was why what he’d seen as her betrayal hurt so much. How could she have broken the law when upholding it had always been so important to him? Hearing her explanation helped. Knowing she took responsibility for the choices she’d made helped even more.
But even in the tentative peace they’d made last night, both of them not knowing exactly what to do with it, Hayley seemed to have more secrets. Were the shadows in her eyes because of what had happened in the past? Because part of Cain was afraid there was something she was still hiding from him.
A hand slamming on his front door had Hayley jerking awake and Cain heading toward the door. He grabbed his sidearm on the kitchen counter out of habit.
Cain cracked open the door. Damn. The Georgia state troopers standing on his porch were not who he was expecting at all. And not who he wanted to face with a gun in his hand.