Code of Honor

by Smartypants Romance

  And suddenly the points of contact were too many, and I wanted – no, I needed them to be just one. I pulled my face back and looked into the pools of heat in his eyes.

  “Now’s a good time to find a condom,” I said, trying for conversational. My voice sounded alarmingly sultry to my own ears, and I cleared my throat. “Just in case.”

  His mouth quirked up on one side again. “In case?”

  “You know, in case we need some way to catch rainwater, or the boat springs a leak, or … something.”

  He tried not to laugh, and the urge to tickle him to distract him from the sheer nonsense coming out of my mouth was so strong I had to sit on my hands.

  “Mmm, do that again,” he said.

  I realized I was still straddling him. “Find a condom.”

  “Inside one of the Bareknuckle Bastards books. Brazen and the Beast, I think,” he said in total seriousness.

  I knew the book. I’d read the book. And I laughed out loud as I reached for the one he meant. “Using it as a bookmark?”

  He smirked at my expression when I opened the book to find a hollowed out middle with six foil packets inside. “Best way to keep my brother from stealing my supply. He doesn’t read romance.”

  “But you cut up a Sarah MacLean book.”

  “I have it on my kindle,” he said, as if that made up for the vandalism of a book I’d loved. It did though, kind of, especially since I was currently sitting on the man without a bit of clothing between us and he’d just admitted to buying Regency romance in ebook and paperback formats.

  He plucked one foil-wrapped package from its hiding spot in the book, and then held it up. “Now what?” There was a mischievous grin lurking in his expression.

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said as I casually leaned over him to put the book back on the shelf.

  He thought of many somethings, the first of which involved his mouth capturing a nipple that flew too close to it. His tongue and the pressure of his suction sent electrical currents straight down my body, and I ground myself against him.

  “Mmm, you’d better put that condom on in case you accidently slip inside me.” Those words sounded far too confident to actually have come from my mouth, so I figured he read my mind when he opened the package without losing his place on my breast.

  He was apparently not someone to go up against in a game of blind man’s bluff, because he had no problem navigating the condom or himself with his eyes closed. He continued to savor my nipple as my hands moved his aside and guided him into me.

  My brain ceased talking to me as my body adjusted to the fit of him, and then the music started. A song from the Twilight movie, “A Thousand Years,” played on a loop in my mind as we moved together, and the lyrics said what I felt. I’d waited a thousand years to love like this, or maybe just a lifetime to actually make love. What had started as pure butterfly-induced lust was now consuming all the air in my lungs and turning the bright flames into blue fire that danced in my veins and that filled me with heat.

  He watched me with his smoky-quartz eyes, and every one of my senses focused on the most intense point of contact between us. Our eyes. All the other senses – the deliciousness of building pressure, the scent of our bodies, and wood polish, and the lake, the sound of his breathing, growing deeper with every rock of our hips, the taste of his lips still on my tongue – they found focus in the gaze that was locked on mine. His eyes held a kind of wonder that I felt all the way down to the center of my being. I sensed a connection that went far beyond the place our bodies joined, and I could see the tendrils of soul that reached out through his skin toward mine. When I came with him, a gasp of surprise went through us both. My own bits of soul had found his and recognized them as known.

  I collapsed down onto him, and the music stilled in my brain, and the words stayed silent while I felt our heartbeats calm through our skin. His hand traced lazy circles on my back, and the first and last thought I was conscious of having was that his skin smelled like the bark of a cinnamon tree.

  12

  Darius

  “Sometimes it’s not your accomplishments that define you, it’s your scars.”

  Reza Masoud

  I couldn’t stop staring.

  I crouched at the top of the stairs and looked below deck to where she still lay, utterly asleep and perfectly bare-assed on my bed.

  She was a stomach sleeper; one leg was bent to the side in a pose that made her look like a sprinter about to take off. She hadn’t moved when I’d slid out of bed and started up the engine, and didn’t even twitch when I’d docked the boat in its slip and tied off. We’d been gone from the city for three hours, and somehow everything had changed. Who was this woman, and how had she gotten past the guards at the door?

  I had been operating on pure instinct where she was concerned since the moment I laid eyes on her, and that disconcerted me. Instinct was fallible, dangerous, and untrustworthy in my experience, and yet it had led me to this remarkable woman. I couldn’t have planned for her even if I’d been able to conceive of her existence. She was the complete opposite of me in every way, and somehow she fit as though every one of her odd angles and strange curves connected perfectly to my straight lines and sharp edges.

  I let my gaze wander one last time up her athletic legs, over her perfect ass with its tan lines that spoke of skin no one else got to see, to the small of her back and up her spine to the tightly-muscled shoulders of a woman with strength. She was so utterly mysterious to me, and yet she seemed to say exactly what she thought without care for the consequence. I was fascinated by her, and just three hours earlier I’d had no interest or time to be fascinated by anyone.

  Impulsively, I took out my phone and shot a picture, just to preserve the beauty of the moment, then promptly felt like a creep. I didn’t erase the photo, but I did move it to the ‘hidden’ file on my phone where no one else could stumble upon it by accident.

  And then I thought about hidden images … and hidden cameras. This incredible woman who had derailed my day so completely had been the co-star in surveillance camera footage during the commission of a crime. Never mind that the footage exonerated her of the crime – the fact that she had, just twelve hours before, been in Sterling Gray’s bed was … troublesome, and not something I particularly wanted to examine at the moment. To be perfectly fair though, it wasn’t the fact of her having had sex with someone else twelve hours before that unsettled me. She could have climbed out of someone else’s bed directly into mine and I wouldn’t have been less mesmerized by our encounter. But there had been a crime committed, and she was indirectly involved in the circumstances around it, and I would have to do my job despite whatever this was that I was feeling.

  I wasn’t quiet when I dug out paper and a pen and left a note on the table, but when she didn’t stir, I let her sleep. There were things we still needed to discuss, but they weren’t appropriate topics to bring up to the naked woman in one’s bed. My email had suddenly populated on our return to cell coverage indicating I had to make an appearance in the office, but I hoped she would accept my invitation to dinner.

  I left the marina humming the tune to an old Abba song covered by Blancmange in the 80s, because “The Day Before You Came” suddenly felt like the soundtrack to my life – a life that had become very strange indeed.

  When I got into my truck I thought I caught a hint of her wildflower scent, and the image of her eyes, lit by something primitive and alive when she came, drove from my head the unsettling thoughts of this case and what she meant to it … and to me. Fortunately, traffic was light through downtown, and I made it to the Cipher building without difficulty. Stan was behind the desk in the lobby, and he held up three slips of paper.

  “Sterling Gray was pretty insistent that you get his messages, and he knows enough to call the lobby desk instead of just relying on email.”

  “It’s quite efficient of him to pack so much arrogance, entitlement, and privilege into one person
,” I said with a frown as I took the slips from my colleague. “I’m sorry you had to be the recipient of his ire.” I liked Stan. He had a ready grin and an easy way about him that big men confident in their power often had. “Is Dan or Quinn in?” I asked, ready to adjust my plan of action according to which owner of Cipher Security I spoke to.

  “Quinn went home early,” he said, and at my raised eyebrow, added, “Janie called to ask him where his electrical wiring toolkit and volt-meter were.”

  I laughed as I pictured the flare of panic in the eyes of a man whose cool was legendary about everything that wasn’t his wife.

  “Dan’s upstairs?”

  “Check the boardroom on the third floor. He’s been working with Shane and Gabriel to tie up the last of the ADDATA case fallout, and they like the Nespresso machine in there.”

  “You want me to bring you one?” I asked as I headed for the elevators.

  “Nah. I have more than a cup a day and I get the jitters,” Stan said.

  I turned and stared at the security agent who topped me by more than five inches. “I could hook up to a caffeine IV and have nary a tremor, and you can’t take more than one cup?”

  Stan shrugged. “Can’t drink either. My mom always says the ones who shouldn’t can’t, and we ignore it at our peril.”

  “Your mother sounds like a wise woman,” I said, delighted beyond words at the idea that Stan quoted his mother.

  I rode the elevator up to the third floor and contemplated my approach to the Sterling Gray situation with Dan O’Malley. Dan was a field operative who had partnered with Quinn Sullivan, the big banking corporate man, to start the private security firm. Cipher was moving away from close protection except for special clients, and I’d been brought on specifically for those hand-picked personal clients. The home security systems I designed were part of the layers of protection Cipher offered them, and the fact that one of my systems had been breached did not sit well with me.

  I knocked once for courtesy before opening the glass door to the conference room. Shane had been working with us for less than a year, but she already felt like an integral part of the team. She and Gabriel lived together and usually worked from their apartment, so it was a pleasant surprise to see them both in the office.

  “Hey Darius, how’s the boat?” Shane asked, with a welcoming smile. She was a striking woman; tall, athletic, and graceful in the way long-distance runners can be. I couldn’t help comparing her to the woman currently fast asleep on the boat in question. One was tall, the other, average height. One a brunette with long straight hair, the other a blonde with a wild, curly mane. One was lean and lithe, the other had the kind of curvy, fit build that suggested capability, strength, and endurance. Yet despite every difference, they had the same eyes. Not the color or shape, but the life in them. They fairly crackled with energy and intelligence, and it was their most striking feature.

  “Still floating,” I said with a smile that I hoped didn’t reveal the thought I had about the naked woman on it.

  Shane grinned, “Better than the alternative.” But Gabriel studied me with a raised eyebrow for a moment, and I had the disconcerting impression that he could see the secret behind my smile.

  So I met his eyes with a brief nod, then looked at Dan. “Do you have a minute to talk about Sterling Gray?”

  My boss looked up from the file he’d been studying and met my gaze. Dan O’Malley had the appearance most people would identify as ‘street.’ The top of a tattoo was visible above his collar, and I assumed there were several more underneath the well-tailored suit. He was the type of man who made women feel either attraction or fear at first glance, and his Boston accent gave him an added edge. I’d met his wife though, and she was the most feminine, buttoned-up beautiful waif I’d ever seen. I could almost imagine that she fastened every button not because she was necessarily so modest, but rather to masque something slightly wild and magical.

  I suddenly had the thought that if Colette were here, she might have said something about fairies or woodland sprites, and I barely resisted the accompanying rueful smile.

  “You look like you know something you’re not saying, or you’re planning to beat the bishop in the closet after this. What’s up, man?” Dan gave me a nod that would have seemed curt except for the smirk that went with it.

  “Beat the—” Shane started, but then she scoffed. “Really, Dan? That’s all you’ve got? How about jackin’ the beanstalk, or yanking the doodle dandy.”

  All three of us gawked at her like boys encountering naked breasts for the first time.

  “Is it wrong that I want to learn what else you know such vivid slang for?” Gabriel asked in an awed voice.

  “What do you call it when a woman…” Dan waved his hand at her to fill in the blank, and Shane smirked at him for not saying it out loud.

  “Executes a manual override?” she finished.

  “Come on! From Cryptonomicon? You must be joking!” Gabriel laughed. He was talking about a sci-fi book I’d never read, and it added another point to my respect for him.

  “About menage à moi, I don’t joke,” she said, as if that ended it. And it did.

  Dan laughed and shook his head. “You win this round, Shane P.I. Well done.”

  Shane had the grace not to look smug as she settled back in her seat and took a sip of her coffee. Dan returned his attention to me.

  “So, the rich bastard spending Daddy’s fortune for him. How’d the party go last night?” His tone was back to all business.

  “The party was fine – unremarkable in its pretension. The problem is that a painting was stolen from the panic room sometime last night.”

  As I expected, the mood in the room shifted, and all three sets of eyes turned to me.

  “A system failure?” Gabriel asked.

  I shook my head. “A very clever work-around. The thief used mini spotlights to blind the cameras, and then became virtually invisible in the shadows. Access to the panic room was the same used by the homeowner, and the painting was cut from the frame, rendering the alarm moot. So technically, there was no failure on our part, considering we gave the client exactly what he asked for, but he’s threatening to turn the press against us unless we can recover the painting.”

  Dan’s expression went from thoughtful to severe. “What do the cops say?”

  “He won’t bring them in,” I said. “I told him he couldn’t file a claim without a police report, and he said the painting isn’t insured.”

  “Bag of dicks,” Dan snarled, and I wondered if it was a curse or a title. “Means it’s already dirty, so he’ll be a mud-slinging pig in shit. I assume you’ve already been there?”

  “This morning. There’s video of a party guest discovering the panic room door.”

  “Bring him in,” Dan said with a scowl.

  “It’s a her, and I’m seeing her tonight,” I said, hoping for several reasons that it was true.

  “I can change my plans if you want to take a woman with you,” Shane said.

  “I’ll call you if I need back-up, but I should be good. I actually talked to her at the party last night.” And had amazing sex with her on the lake today, I didn’t say.

  “Right, well, we should run the video from last night past the kid. Maybe he can spot something the low res system missed. You got it on you?” Dan asked, gesturing to me to follow him out of the conference room.

  “Don’t keep Jorge late,” Shane called before the door closed. “He’s taking Oscar for a run when he gets home.” Oscar was her giant dog, and the ‘kid’ was her neighbor, Jorge Gonzales, an eighteen-year-old MIT student who had interned in our tech department over the summer and ended up creating a whole new video surveillance system for us. Dan and Quinn hired him every time he was home on break.

  “Yeah, I have a copy. Gray has already called three times in his unsubtle attempt to light a fire,” I said as Dan opened the door to the stairs.

  The basement of the building was noticeably cooler
and housed the bank of computers that operated as Cipher Security’s nerve center. I didn’t have the details on our cybersecurity, but I knew it was better than the Pentagon’s.

  Jorge was sitting at a table that held three monitors, all of which appeared to show one contiguous image. Next to him was a glass wall that glowed with a faint green light, and the room beyond appeared to hold the Cipher mainframe. The kid was of the tall, skinny, loping variety, but I didn’t doubt that the lope could turn into a prowl as the situation warranted. He wore glasses, which were new since the last time I saw him, and “Schrödinger’s Cat was a Quantum Cheshire” spelled out the grin without a cat on the front of his T-shirt.

  He looked up with a smile and stood to shake our hands. “Hey guys. Welcome to Swordfish.”

  I winced. “You did not name this computer after the movie.”

  He grinned. “Yep. So technologically implausible you had no choice but to sit back and enjoy the ride. And Halle Berry.”

  I shook my head with a laugh. “You’re too young to have dug that thing out of the discount bins.”

  Jorge’s expression turned serious, as if I was missing a very significant point. “Halle. Berry.” His gaze bored into mine until I held up a hand in surrender.

  Jorge’s grin burst out of him like a smile emoji. “What can I do for you guys?”

  I handed him the thumb drives from my pocket. “A painting was stolen last night from a system I designed. I’ve scrubbed through the footage on the original system, but I’m hoping you can pick up any details I might have missed. This one is from the time of the actual theft,” I said, pointing to one of the drives.

  He popped it into his machine and ran through a couple of screens until he’d loaded the file. “Do you have a timecode?”

  “Start at one a.m.” Dan and I flanked Jorge to watch his monitor, which was a much higher resolution screen than the one I’d worked on that morning. “Focus on the second floor hallway first.”

  Jorge pulled up the multi-cam screen to monitor nine views at once, six of which were on the second floor hall. We watched as Sterling and Colette walked through, and I was unpleasantly aware that my fists tightened at the laughter in her expression when she looked at him. Less than two minutes after they’d passed, the first screen went white.