Tempt Me (29 page)

She yanked her hands away. “I was thinking I couldn’t allow another incubus lover to jerk me around like a dog on a leash!”

“A dog on a leash? Are you serious? Does Scarlett look unhappy and controlled? Does Claudette?”

“They’re sirens. They have some natural defenses.” She sagged back against the upraised head of the bed like her bones wouldn’t support her anymore. “What do I have? Nothing.”

So sad, so lost. And so, so exhausted. Jesus, what was he doing, fighting with her while she lay in a hospital bed, less than a day out of surgery? Remorse threatened to swamp him. Maybe he was as big an asshole as Cooper after all.

“Bailey, is it fair to make me pay for another man’s crimes?” His words produced a whiff of guilt, and he chanced taking her hand again. Her pulse bumped under his thumb. “And you’re wrong, you know.”

“About what?”

“About not having natural defenses—”

Lukas burst in without knocking, carrying Bailey's computer case and her chirping mini, his own screeching a duet. Jack followed close behind him, fumbling at the unit clipped to his waistband.

Ignoring him, Lukas slapped Bailey’s mini into her hand like a nurse handing a surgeon a scalpel. “Incursion at Sebastiani Labs,” he rapped out. “He’s in.”

“Damn it.” Fingers and thumbs flew as she read, swiped, and clicked tiny keys. Rafe stepped away from the bed as Lukas unzipped her computer case and booted up her workhorse of a laptop, the one she’d told him was loaded with her own tooling, and the souped-up suite that allowed her to tunnel anywhere she damn well pleased.

She peered at the mini. Swore. “Looks like an inside-out.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“One of the basic tenets of network security is to protect the perimeter, but the whole approach is built upon a sometimes erroneous assumption—that all outsiders are bad, and all insiders are trusted.” She stared at the mini. “Someone launched this attack from the inside.”

Lukas looked pissed off enough to chop wood with his bare hands. “How the hell did he—”

“I don't know yet.” There was a different chirp as Bailey received a phone call. “Cheyenne. Cheyenne, calm down. What...” As she listened to what the other woman said, her eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “Tell me what he looks like.” After several seconds, she closed her eyes momentarily, mouthing a silent
fuck
. “Hang on a sec.” She covered the mouthpiece with her thumb. “Guess who Cheyenne's been dating.” She banged her fist against the bed, stretching the IV tubing taut.

“Jeez, be careful—”

“Wyatt pretexted her,” she said, disgusted. “Classic approach. Start dating Sebastiani Labs’ network architect, maybe exchange some pillow talk, build up some trust, and...”

“How the fuck did he get in?” Lukas asked.

“Apparently she told him that she could really use a massage. He sent her an e-mail at work containing a link to a spa coupon. First twenty responders get fifty percent off kind of thing. She trusted him and clicked on it. The link brought her to a website
he’d
set up, with an embedded, malicious—” She made a slashing motion with her hand. “Never mind the details. Bottom line, he’s seen and recorded everything she's done at work for at least a day. Passwords, architecture, email, source code, contracts.”

“Next steps?” Lukas bit out. “Your call.”

Her eyes glittered. Adrenaline filled the room; he couldn’t help but absorb it. She was as jacked up as Lukas or Lorin got when they sparred. This was a different kind of battle, but it was a battle nonetheless.

As Bailey spilled a stream of acronyms and jargon to Cheyenne, Antonia burst in, wearing painted-on jeans, skyscraper heels and too much makeup. “My mini is blowing up.”

Bailey kept talking to Cheyenne, but pointed at her laptop, gesturing for Antonia to finish setting it up.

The door opened again. “What in the world is going on in here?”

Uh-oh. The charge nurse, with her tightly-permed gray curls and even more tightly pursed lips, was a tiny termagant. He and Lukas had taken to calling her The Admiral during the time Lukas was in the hospital. To say she ran a tight ship was a massive understatement.

“I don't care what your last name is, or how much money your family donates to this hospital,” she snapped, hands on her polyester-clad hips. “You will follow the rules. You will keep to two visitors at a time. You will keep those infernal devices on vibrate or turn them off so they do not disturb other patients.” She shot Rafe a suspicious glance. “And none of your shenanigans, either.”

Rafe reddened. She’d busted him flirting with one of her nurses, a gorgeous faerie, back when Lukas was a patient. Though enjoyable, the encounter had been going nowhere fast.

The nurse hadn’t been Bailey.

Lukas nudged Jack toward the charge nurse, unabashedly throwing him under the bus.

Annoyance sparked into the room, but Jack’s expression was buttercream-smooth as he engaged the charge nurse in conversation, spilling James Bond charm as he led her from the room.

While Jack did his thing, Lukas turned his back to the room and dialed a number—probably their father’s—and reached for a tube of antacids. Antonia brought Bailey the laptop, now sprouting antennas and peripherals he didn’t recognize, kicking off her shoes and settling on the bed cross-legged. Bailey put Cheyenne on speaker so she could use the keyboard two-handed. Her fingers glided and danced, setting her IV tubing swinging.

When Rafe quietly left the room, no one noticed.

––––––––

“Y
ou're kidding me. I feel fine!” Bailey glared at Penn and Melvin, who’d just dragged her away from the VIP suite’s reception area—where she’d set up a makeshift but functional computer lab—to her hospital room. Between her, Cheyenne and Antonia, they'd contained the worst of the damage, but there was still so much work to do.

Not calling Rafe back when he’d walked out of her room last night was one of the hardest things she'd done in a very long time, but duty called. Since then, he hadn't been anywhere in the vicinity. She yearned for him. Burned for him.

It hadn't been the pheromones, after all.

And now these doctors were informing her that they didn't want to release her, not quite yet. She glanced at the clock mounted next to the hospital room door. “I have a meeting in five minutes.”

“Let me check your incisions.” Penn gestured to the bed, still as crisply made now as it had been last night because it hadn't been slept in.

With an impatient sigh, she obeyed.

“You’ve had a textbook recovery so far,” he said, lifting her turquoise fleece pull-over and tank top and gently pressing on her stomach, “but there are a few additional tests we'd like to run.”

“What tests?” When she tried to sit up, Penn stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. He then performed the most thorough physical exam she'd ever had without completely disrobing first. He moved his cold stethoscope over her heart, lungs, stomach and intestines. He checked her eyes, ears, nose, and throat. He probed her neck and throat with careful fingers before moving on to the lymph nodes in her armpits. He double-checked her pulse again, checked her blood pressure, and took her temperature. Finally, she shoved his hand away. “What's this all about?”

Penn and Melvin exchanged a glance. “We have your full blood panel back,” Penn said. “Your hemoglobin levels are low normal. White count low normal. The experimental meds you took were apparently very fast-acting, and cleared your system within hours. But we found—” Penn paused “—an anomaly we'd like to investigate further.”

Her stomach jumped. “What? What's wrong?”

The doctors glanced at each other again. “Nothing's wrong,” Penn said. “Per se.”

Melvin pushed him aside. “Adnan, your bedside manner is atrocious. Bailey, the pre-surgical workup we ran yielded some unexpected results.”

“What? Tell me.”

“You appear to have succubus lineage.”

“Just the slightest hint,” Penn hastily added. “Greatly diluted.”

Melvin helped her sit up—which was good, because the bed was spinning. As her balance steadied out, an odd calm fell.

Succubus lineage. Wow. Maybe she had some natural defenses, after all. “Why hasn't this...anomaly been picked up before?”

Melvin shrugged. “We all have a lot to learn about the genetic code, but needless to say, human medicine isn’t looking for evidence of other branches on their family tree.”

“You could go to a human hospital for a serious health issue today and they would never know,” Penn assured her. “There's no need for you to worry about exposure—”

“Yet,” Melvin cautioned him. “Don't make any assumptions about how long their ignorance might last.” She fiddled with her badge, hanging around her neck from a beaded lanyard. “Bailey, you're the first human patient we've treated at this hospital. These results made us realize that we’ve been presented with an amazing opportunity—to research the degree to which our species’ DNA has crossed into the human population. We know it happens, of course, but—”

“We'd like your permission to sequence and study your full genome,” Penn said.

There was a soft knock on the door. “Bailey?” After a slight pause, Antonia poked her head around the jamb, a white hospital blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She’d discovered the blanket heater in the small but well-stocked supply room down the hall, declared it awesome, and said she was going to order one she could use at home. “Everyone's here.”

Penn frowned.

Antonia frowned back.

“Adnan.” Melvin put her hand on Penn’s forearm. “Bailey, give it some thought. Let us know if you’d like more information.”

She would, after she cleared some space in her brain. “Thank you.”

What do you know, Dad? Sex demons in our family tree.

Bailey followed Antonia to the family room located on the other side of the VIP suite’s reception area. Jack, Lukas and Cheyenne were already seated at the small oak table. Cheyenne still wore her winter coat, and cupped a mug of hot coffee between her hands.

“I want a piece of him,” Cheyenne said to Lukas, her voice filled with gravel. “The asshole.”

Lukas was watching her carefully. Was Cheyenne fighting a shift?

“I should've known something was off.” Setting down the mug, Cheyenne yanked at the jacket’s neckline. The snap closures released in a fast sequence, sounding like she'd emptied a clip in the small room. A couple of feathers flew.

“How far are you willing to go?” Antonia asked.

All heads swung to where they stood by the door. “There you are.” Cheyenne looked Bailey up and down. “For someone just a day out of surgery and still in the hospital, you look disgustingly healthy.”

“Yeah.” Entering the room, she sat in one of the uncomfortable upholstered armchairs, touching Cheyenne's shoulder in communion as she passed.

“What do you need me to do?” Cheyenne asked Antonia. “Name it.”

“Are you willing to keep sleeping with him, act like nothing’s wrong, and buy us some time?”

Bailey jolted. Whoa, that was cold. “Antonia—”

“Yes.” Cheyenne shrugged, a little too casually. “No hardship; he
is
really good in bed, right?” She glanced at Bailey as if for confirmation before flashing a vicious smile. “Maybe I’ll tie him up. Break out the whips and chains. For the greater good, of course.”

“As a humanitarian gesture,” Antonia agreed, grinning.

Bailey snorted with laughter as she imagined Wyatt trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, a ball gag in his mouth.

Lukas looked at them like they were all crazy as loons. Across the table, Jack sat quietly, observing. This was probably the first time he'd ever heard her laugh about Wyatt Cooper.

“We need to stop playing his game,” Antonio stated, all laughter gone. “He acts, and we react? Screw that. We need to go on the offensive. Play the player. Socially engineer the social engineer.” Her tiny smile was somehow far more frightening than Cheyenne's toothy snarl.

As Antonia laid out her devious plan—God, her ability to so completely immerse herself in someone else's mindset was truly, truly frightening—the energy in the room changed. A fire sparked to life, the flames fed fuel as Lukas, Jack and Antonia authorized a remote incursion of Wyatt’s computer system. Jack translated Antonia’s thoughts to an action plan, complete with resourcing and timeline. Lukas wrangled risks, controlled the burn.

And she was already designing the incursion in her mind.

“Okay,” Jack said, “I think we have a plan.”

If the plan worked, it was entirely possible that Wyatt could be out of her hair—out of
everyone's
hair—for good, in a matter of days, but there was a hell of a lot of work to do between now and then. Antonia would finish the last bit of cleanup on Sebastiani Labs’ network, freeing up Cheyenne to keep Wyatt occupied—”well-occupied,” she drawled suggestively. Lukas would run the plan by his father and obtain his authorization. Jack’s job was to mock up the ‘highly confidential’ documents at the center of the plan, making sure they looked authentic enough to keep Wyatt reading while the malware she’d embed in the documents slithered into his system.

Elegant. Efficient. Deadly.

“I feel so stupid, being taken in by him.” Cheyenne stared down at her lap. “This is my fault.”

Bailey shook her head. “No, it’s mine. I should've realized that he'd try something like this when he couldn't penetrate from the outside. I should have warned you.”

“He’s...good,” Cheyenne said with reluctant admiration. “The ‘accidental’ meeting at Crack House Coffee. The fake employee badge, the spoofed corporate e-mail address. The hot, lonely transfer, trying to make friends in a new town.” Cheyenne’s lips tightened. “He played me like a freaking violin.”

“Don’t blame yourself. Wyatt makes you feel like you're the only woman in the world. He says everything you want to hear. He knows what you want before you do. He’s really good at this.” All the more reason to take him down—and with this plan, the shoe would finally be on the other foot. This time,
she'd
be the one to lure
him
in, dropping dollops of data like chum for a shark. And then, she’d circle in for the kill.