by J. Kenner
Her brows rise. “A thing,” she repeats, her tone lascivious. “That’s probably TMI.”
“Actually, no.” I draw in a breath and try to get my head on straight. “I did miss you. Truly. Has Winston told you what happened? Why I’m not dead, I mean?”
She nods. The Kelloggs live only a block from the square, and we’ve reached the intersection. Emma points to the bakery in the next block. “Coffee and talk now,” she says. “Kolaches to go.”
I agree, and when we arrive, I take a seat at one of the small sidewalk tables while she goes in to get the coffee. She returns almost immediately, her expression surprised. “I’ve lived in cities too long,” she says. “The coffee’s free with purchase, and they took my word I’d be back for the actual purchasing.”
“It’s nice like that here,” I say. “I always liked Hades, too, even with the shit storm brewing.”
“Well, you had Winston.”
I sigh, wondering how badly I screwed up earlier. “I did. Or at least the illusion of Winston.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
“No,” I say, then immediately add, “He kissed you earlier.”
“Yeah. One of those pecks on the forehead that hide wild, passionate abandon.”
I almost spit the coffee I’ve just sipped. “I’d forgotten how much I like you.”
Her smile widens. “Mutual. And maybe I kissed him to get a rise out of you. I’m brassy as hell, after all.”
I sit up, surprised. “Did you?”
“No. Honestly, I didn’t even think about the fact that you might be watching. But I talked with Winston. Would’ve served you right to try and make you a little jealous.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, come on, Lin. I saw you two together in Hades, remember? And I saw the way he talked about you this morning. And I can see the jealousy on your face right now.”
I sit back. “So?”
“You love him. He loves you. Why is the math so difficult?”
“It’s not love,” I say. “It’s attraction.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But back then it was love.”
“It wasn’t. It was only the illusion of love. We were living a lie.”
“Not a lie. An inconvenient foundation.”
“No, that’s not—”
“Just listen,” she interrupts. “I’ve lived a lot of roles. I think you have, too. But somewhere in all of them, it’s still you, right?”
I want to argue, but I can’t. “Yeah. But that doesn’t mean—”
“Will you let me finish? It’s like you go see a movie. And you end up bawling at the end. I don’t know. An Affair to Remember. Or that press conference scene in Notting Hill. You’re all beat up inside, right?”
“My life isn’t a movie.”
“I’m not saying it is. I’m saying that those emotions you felt are real, right?”
“It’s not the same,” I protest.
“Maybe not, but I’m still right.”
I lean back, my brows rising.
She shrugs. “I’m a pretty confident person,” she says, and I can’t help but laugh.
“Yeah, I guess you are.”
“Honestly, if we’d had this conversation a few months ago, I might be more Team Linda than Team Winston.”
“So what changed?”
“I met a guy. We had to go undercover. Pretend like we had a relationship. Turns out he’s the love of my life.”
I realize I’m smiling. “That’s wonderful.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It really is.” She reaches across the table and brushes my hand. “Trust me,” she says. “Quit fighting it. And quit thinking about the past. Hades is over, but Winston’s still here, and I promise you he’s one of the good ones. Don’t fuck it up, okay?”
I nod, moved by her words.
But I can’t make a promise that I don’t know I can keep.
There’s a car in the driveway when we return, and I meet Emma’s eyes, both of us wondering who it could be.
“You go ahead and take those kolaches into the kitchen,” Miriam says, meeting us on the porch. “An old work friend of Winston’s dropped by. Noah, he said his name was. So we told Winston we’d get out of the way. He said if we saw you on the square, that we should tell you to come join them.” She smiles broadly. “So I guess I’m telling you now.”
I glance toward the kitchen. “Sorry to kick you out of your house. We don’t—”
Dale cuts me off with a wave of his hand. “Nonsense. It’s an excuse to go out for breakfast, and that’s always a treat. Go on, now. I’m sure they’ll enjoy the pastries.”
Minutes later, that prediction proves true, as the men pretty much attack the bag the moment we sit down.
“Do you want me to go?” Emma asks me.
I shake my head as I look at Winston. “Nope,” I say, and see the smile behind his eyes.
He turns to Noah. “How about you? You okay with Emma staying?”
“Kick out Tony’s girlfriend? He’d have my head.”
Emma’s grin lights up her face. “I recognized you right off the bat. Tony has a photo of all the Deliverance guys on his dresser,” she adds, referring to the former vigilante group that Winston told me Noah had been a part of before signing on to work with Damien Stark. “But how did you recognize me?”
“Are you kidding? He talks about you so much I asked for a picture. I’m supposed to officially meet you when I’m in LA next month. Glad we got to make it happen sooner.”
“This is all very cozy,” I tease.
Winston’s eyes meet mine. “Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
I tilt my head, knowing I should still be pissed about shutting us down in the bedroom this morning. And I’ll get back to that eventually. Right now, though, this is about our mission.
I turn to Noah. “You’re here. That means you have something?”
Noah opens his briefcase and pulls out what appears to be a latex finger. “It’s a little more sophisticated than it looks.”
“I hope so, because it looks like something you would buy in a Halloween store to put on the front porch and make people think that you’ve got dismembered fingers lying around.”
“I’ll see about setting that up as a side business,” Noah says. “It’s actually a new type of substance. And it holds a specific temperature, so we can set it at 98.6.”
“Do we think that the laptop is temperature sensitive?” Winston asks.
“I don’t know. But I’ve got the prints set up, I’ve got the temperature set up, and I’ve got a tiny electrical circuit inside the finger to simulate a pulse. You said it was important. I don’t want to take any chances with whatever it is you’re trying to recover.”
“I appreciate it,” I say. “I don’t have any way to assess the viability of my information, but I was told that any wrong move and this information will self-destruct. And we really need to know what’s on that laptop.”
“Do you want me to try and unlock the machine myself?”
I glance at Winston. I don’t want anything to go wrong, but I also worry about someone other than the two of us seeing what might be on that screen. As I anticipate, Winston seems to read my mind.
He shakes his head. “Thanks anyway, buddy. I think you’ve done enough. If it fucks up now, there’s not anything you could do to stop it, is there?”
“No,” Noah says, “there isn’t. So I may as well leave you two to curse me in absentia.” He pushes his chair back away from the table and Emma does the same
“Are you heading into Austin?” she asks. “I hired a car from the airport, so I could use a lift.”
I glance between them and then over to Winston. “I didn’t mean to run you guys off so quickly,” I say.
“Of course you did,” Noah says. “You need to get on with this.”
I shrug. “Guilty as charged. Go away.”
They both laugh, and Winston and I walk them to Noah’s car. I give Emma a hug, then Noah. “Thank you for
doing this and for not asking questions. Any more than you needed to anyway.”
He tightens the hug and bends in close to my ear. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I do know that man is head over heels for you. I know because I see on his face the same thing I see in the mirror when I’m thinking about my wife.”
I step away, my eyes down. Not sure if I should be annoyed or insulted or what. The truth is, Noah's words make me happy. I raise my head, give him a small smile and a shrug.
Winston shakes hands with Noah, then kisses Emma’s cheek.
We watch as they back out of the drive, then turn to go back inside. As we do, Winston reaches for my hand, then stops, lowering it slowly. “Are you still pissed?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No, you were right to back away. We need—at least, I need—time to figure it out. Us, I mean. And I don’t think either one of us has the bandwidth while we’re in the midst of all this.”
It’s probably a cop-out, but I’m not ready to think about what Emma or Winston have said to me about the past meshing with the present. About emotional truths and literal lies.
I want him—that’s undeniable—but beyond that, I’m still stumbling with our reality.
“So you’re saying no,” he clarifies. “But you’re not saying it forever.”
“I’m saying no for now,” I confirm. “And I guess we’ll go from there.” I flash a saucy grin to lighten the moment. “Unless you just want the sex part now. I can live with that.”
“I’m ignoring that,” he says, but he’s grinning when he extends his hand. “No, for now. It’s a deal.”
Relief floods my body as I take it, accepting an unspoken truce as we go back inside.
The laptop is still in my tote bag where it’s lived ever since we left the Stark Century Hotel. Now, I take it out and put it on the bed in our room. I don’t want to go back to the kitchen table in case Winston’s parents come home. “It just occurred to me that we don’t have a charger for this thing. What if the battery’s dead?”
Winston shakes his head. “There’s no charging portal. The thing runs on regular double A’s. Believe me, my mother has plenty of those lying around the house.”
I laugh. “I guess I’m not surprised. He didn’t want anything electronic coming into that machine. Any possible way to hack it, and he closed it off. Can you hack something through the electrical line?”
Winston shrugs. “Above my pay grade,” he says.
“Enough stalling. You ready?”
I nod, then open the laptop and press the power button. The screen lights up and, as we’d expected, there’s a message demanding that fingerprint access be obtained within the next sixty seconds or else the machine is going to shut down. Three attempts to start without fingerprint access and the information on the hard drive will be erased.
“Here goes nothing.” Winston takes the plastic finger and gingerly presses it onto the keypad. I reach over and squeeze his leg as he sits on the bed beside me. We both hold our breath and then there’s a click and a whir and for a moment I think the screen is going to fade into grizzled static. But then, as if by magic, suddenly we see a single folder icon. It’s labeled Hawthorne.
“I can’t believe it worked.” I realize I’m whispering. I take a breath. “Click it.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’ve come this far.”
He nods, then uses the trackpad to click on the folder. It opens and we both gape at it. “What the hell?” Winston says.
I stare at the screen, my thoughts echoing his question.
It’s a text file with only two lines of text:
Bigelow-247
11-11-11
“What does that mean?” Winston asks.
I take his hand and twine my fingers with his. “I have no idea.”
Even as I say it, there’s something familiar about the message, though I can’t figure out what.
I stare at it for a moment, then tell Winston that I feel like I should know what this means.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But there’s something.” I exhale with frustration. “Maybe I’m thinking about the 247. That’s familiar, right? Stores are open twenty-four/seven. What else?”
“Gas stations,” he says. “Some restaurants, hotels, airports, ATM machines. The list is pretty long. It could be—”
“No. No, that’s it,” I say, feeling as though I should actually shout Eureka!
“ATMs?”
“The Bigelow Hotel.” I turn to him eagerly. “That’s where Billy Hawthorne stays when he goes to Los Angeles. The Bigelow Hotel on Sunset.”
“So 247 is what?” he asks.
“I don’t know, a room?” I frown. “Except that’s not safe. All those people coming and going.”
“A vault,” Winston says. “That’s got to be it.”
“A vault?”
He nods. “I’ve used them before on various assignments. They’re easier to gain access to than a bank safe deposit box, and those hotels have long-term services. He has something stored in vault 247. I’d bet money on it.”
“You may be betting our lives,” I say. “If we’re wrong…”
“We don’t have another option. And if we check it out and fail, neither Hawthorne nor Bartlett will know, much less Seagrave or Collins.”
“You’re right,” I say with a frown. “We’re not in danger if we’re wrong, but we’re going to attract a lot of attention if we’re right.”
“Unbreakable laptop,” he says with more confidence than I feel. “They won’t even see us coming.”
“So the series of ones is probably the passcode for the vault,” I say, and Winston nods.
“You know what this means?” I continue.
“We’re going to Los Angeles?”
“Not just LA,” I tell him. “We’re going to the hottest party of the year.”
He shakes his head, obviously confused.
“The Bigelow Hotel hosts a huge annual party. The whole hotel is taken over by people who want to see and be seen. Bartlett has gone for the last two years.”
“And you know this because…”
“I read his file before Hawthorne sent me after him. He does accounting work for celebrities, the filthy rich, that kind of thing. From what I hear, it’s a huge crush. Very wild. Alcohol, drugs, anything goes. No one would pay attention to us at all if we try to slip back to the vaults.”
“Excellent.”
“Except we have two problems. One, the party is tonight, which means we’re in the wrong damn state. And two, it’s ridiculously exclusive. I don’t know how we can possibly get in on such short notice.”
Winston frowns, his brow furrowing as he clearly tries to figure out a solution to that little problem. Then, as if he swallowed a ball of sunshine, his face lights up with his smile. “Sugar,” he says, “I think I know how we can make this happen.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ryan Hunter opened his front door and raised his brows as Winston thrust the white box at him. “I come bearing gifts,” Winston said.
“I take it this is a bribe?”
Winston shrugged. “You could call it that. I need a favor. I just came back from Texas bearing my mother’s cupcakes. Linda helped make some,” he added, watching his boss’s face for a reaction. It didn’t take long. Ryan’s blue eyes widened, and for a moment he was speechless. As far as Winston was concerned, that was a first.
Ryan stepped back holding the door open for Winston to enter. “What’s going on?”
“Can we talk here? Confidentially I mean?” Ryan held up a finger, and gestured for Winston to follow him to the kitchen.
Ryan’s wife, Jamie Archer Hunter was standing by a coffee maker, apparently waiting for it to finish brewing. She looked up, her camera-friendly smile bright. “Winston. I thought you were out of town.”
“I am. Back for awhile, but not yet back at the office. I have a favor to ask your husband.”<
br />
“I think that’s my cue to leave.”
“Sorry, kitten,” Ryan said, as he casually brushed her fingertips in a way that sent melancholy rushing through Winston. He’d had that easy familiarity with Linda once. He wanted it again.
“No problem,” Jamie said. “I just need a to-go cup, then I have to get to the set. A night shoot.”
From what Winston knew, Jamie worked as an on-air reporter, but more recently she’d taken on some acting jobs. She was talented enough—and pretty enough—that he assumed she’d end up a huge success.
She put a lid on her coffee, then flashed that smile again at Winston. “I hope whatever you need, Ryan can take care of for you.” She drew her husband close and gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “I'll see you when I get back,” she said, then left them alone.
“I'm sorry to bother you at home in the evening, but I need a favor and it's urgent.”
“Mission related?” Ryan asked. “Isn’t the SOC running this show?”
“Yes, but this isn’t something I can bring Seagrave in on.”
Ryan's brows rose, and he gestured for Winston to take a seat at the kitchen table. “Well, you have my attention."
Winston cleared his throat, not wanting to suggest that Seagrave might be dirty. He didn't want to taint Ryan's impression of the man until he was absolutely certain. “Let's just say I'm cutting some corners on this assignment, and I'd rather he not know."
“All right, we’ll say that. Later on you can tell me the real truth. Deal?"
Winston had to fight a smile. “Deal."
Ryan leaned back in his chair, his legs stretched out. “I don't mean it, you know. I trust you. If you need something, I'll help you get it. No strings attached."
“I appreciate that. But I’ll tell you eventually. If everything turns out okay, I'll tell you simply because I'll want to give you the whole story. If everything doesn't turn out okay, you'll hear about it anyway, and not just from me.”
Ryan nodded slowly. “Okay then. What exactly do you need?"
“Leah mentioned that you added some Hollywood guy to the team? Is that true?"