Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) (5 page)

“Nothing. We’re done here. Get out.” My voice is empty of all emotion. My eyes unflinchingly meet his.

For a moment, his mask slips. I see disappointment. I see frustration. I see something that might be defeat. But he quickly gathers himself, pushes off the counter, runs a hand through his dark hair. He shakes his head like a dog shaking off water and huffs a short breath through his nose. To himself, he mutters, “Roger that. We’ll get Maelstr0m some other way.”

He looks up at me, gives me a tight smile along with a curt salute. “See you in another life, maybe. Sorry to have wasted your time.”

He moves past me, graceful even at his size, his step improbably silent against the floor, but I can’t focus on the elegance of his movement because I’m too busy rewinding and replaying what he just said.

“Wait!”

In the doorway, Connor pauses. He looks at me over his shoulder.

With my heart in my throat I whisper, “Did you say…Maelstr0m?”

Connor frowns. “Yeah. Some hacker who goes by the alias Maelstr0m, with a zero for the ‘o.’ He’s Miranda’s situation.” A heartbeat, and then, sharper, “Why?”

I inhale. It’s like trying to breathe underwater. The room seems too warm, too bright, too close.

“I hope you’re prepared to go to war, Connor.
I’m in
.”

T
he trendy French
restaurant Tabby insists I take her to before she’ll talk is way too froufrou for my taste, but I have to admit the food is incredible. And the pair of young, hot chicks at the bar who’ve been staring at me since we got here are incredible too.

Not because I’m interested. Because Tabby’s noticed the way they’ve been looking at me and is making a valiant effort to pretend not only that she hasn’t, but that she doesn’t care.

It’s fucking beautiful is what it is. This is my new favorite place.

I say, “Enough with the suspense. Tell me what you know about this Maelstr0m.”

Tabby delicately licks her fingers clean of truffle salt from the
pommes frites
she’s been scarfing down. I shouldn’t be surprised that she could make such a simple act look sexy as fuck, but she does. And she’s not even trying.

I shove aside the picture that pops into my mind of my hard cock in place of her fingers. Unfortunately, the big guy downstairs has already started to react to the brief but incredible illusion and twitches against my thigh.

I don’t know what it is about this woman—bad-tempered, foul-mouthed Hello Kitty fiend with a constellation of tattoos on her body and a mind like a maze—but she really does it for me.

“I was living in Boston, in my third year of college—”

“MIT,” I clarify, just because it’s incredible to me that any person would be smart
and
self-confident enough to graduate high school at fifteen and go right into the most intellectually rigorous college in the nation.

She glances at me with a wry smile. “I take it you’ve been reading about me in a file.”

“It’s my business to know things about people I work with. Information is power. You know that. Although I have to admit I was surprised there was any information to be found at all after how perfectly you scraped Victoria’s past clean.”

Tabby’s smile falters. When she looks away, I know I’ve hit a nerve.

Victoria Price was Tabby’s best friend and a Bitch with a capital B. She had more skeletons in her closet than shoes. Until a few years ago when Victoria’s past finally caught up with her and she fled to Mexico, Tabby’s existence revolved around erasing information about Victoria, hiding her past, making sure no one discovered her entire identity had been manufactured. Tabby did her job so well, even
I
couldn’t find anything on Victoria, and that was unprecedented.

Tabby says in a hollow voice, “I don’t have anything interesting enough to hide.”

“This from the woman who single-handedly shut down the government’s space program for three weeks.”

She dismissively waves her hand. “I meant personally. My hacks are another story, but Polaroid can’t be traced back to me.”

Polaroid is her hacker alias, so named for her photographic memory. She’s infamous in hacker circles, revered not only for the brilliance of the jobs she pulls off, but also for never getting caught. She went legit after her time with Victoria, started doing white hat corporate jobs for guys like Roger Hamilton, and Polaroid went dark.

Curiosity prompts me to ask, “You still talk to Victoria?”

Toying with her fork, Tabby shrugs. “Yeah. I saw her a while back too. Darcy and Kai honeymooned in Mexico, and we all got together. It was fun.”

I sense the sadness behind her words. “But?”

Looking uncomfortable, Tabby hesitates before she answers. “But she’s busy living her happily-ever-after, and I’m busy…doing my thing.”

It’s obvious that she’s happy for Victoria, but the undercurrent is loneliness. I want to reach out and squeeze her hand but know I risk losing it, so instead I try to lighten the mood.

“Don’t worry, sweet cheeks, I’m sure you’ll get your happily ever after too.”

Unsmiling, she looks up. “There are no happily ever afters for people like me.”

People like me?
I tilt my head, studying her, fascinated. When she flushes and looks away, I decide to leave that subject for another time.

“Back to you attending MIT barely out of diapers.”

She rolls her eyes. “Getting in at fifteen isn’t that impressive, Connor. My first year there, a twelve-year-old graduated with a PhD in molecular biology. Geniuses are a dime a dozen at that school.”

“Just because you’re used to being surrounded by other stars doesn’t make your star shine any less bright to the rest of us down here on earth.”

Taken aback, she blinks and self-consciously laughs.

I wonder how often she’s been on the receiving end of a compliment. Judging by her surprise, not often.

Why that should irritate me, I don’t know.

She says, “Anyway, as part of a project in my quantum computing class, we were assigned to work on a cryptology software program for businesses that could theoretically be hack proof. Protection for data at banks, universities, hospitals, that kind of thing. Totally hypothetical, of course, but we were supposed to come up with a new way of protecting data, and then test it in a real-world environment.”

“Like with an actual business?”

“Bank of America of all things.” Her lips twist. “I think someone at the bank must’ve been in on it because whoever thought it was a good idea to give a bunch of geeky teenagers with gigantic intellects and no impulse control access to billions of dollars’ worth of financial information was definitely guilty of something. Criminal short-sightedness, at the very least.”

I lean back in my chair and take a swig of my beer. From the corner of my eye, I see one of the girls at the bar who’s been watching me lean over and whisper something behind her hand to her companion. They both look at me and then giggle.

Tabby didn’t miss it either. A muscle in her jaw flexes. That small reaction makes me want to jump from my chair and do a touchdown victory dance, complete with chest pounding and Tarzan roars.

I say mildly, “Go on.”

She takes a breath. “There were four teams of six students. Maelstr0m and I were on the same team. His real name is Søren Killgaard, by the way. But don’t bother looking for him. You won’t find any data about anyone, living or dead, with that name.”

I keep my face and body perfectly neutral. Not even a muscle twitches. I hardly even breathe. But the odds that Tabby went to school with the very man I’m searching for are staggering.

I don’t believe in fate, but there’s something really creepy about this.

I motion for her to continue.

Fingering her fork, Tabby looks down at her plate. “He was different, even in a roomful of kids who were definitions of the word ‘different.’ He was…” She searches for the word. “Wrong, somehow. I don’t know how else to put it. He was wrong.”

“I know exactly what you mean. Some people look right, they say all the right things, on the surface they appear to be normal, adjusted members of society, but you can sense on an animal level that they’re off.”

Tabby’s nodding. “I was the only person who felt that way about Søren. Everyone else was dazzled by him. In complete awe. I think in part it was because he was so beautiful—”

“
Beautiful?
” I drawl. “Did someone have a crush?”

She looks at me for a long, silent moment. She’s not wearing any makeup, and in the candlelight, her bare skin gleams like a polished stone.

“No. I didn’t have a crush. Even at eighteen I knew that beautiful things can be toxic. I’m simply speaking the truth. Søren Killgaard looked like a Renaissance painting of an angel. Golden hair and fair skin and eyes the color of ice in an alpine lake that never thaws. A body so proportionate and perfect, it was made to be sculpted. I always thought he looked like a fairy-tale prince, he had that sort of untouchable, otherworldly beauty.”

Slowly, my brows lift. This Søren Killgaard must be some looker to get the rabid Tabitha West waxing poetic.

I decide I hate him.

“So what happened?”

Tabby’s expression hardens. “He skimmed millions of dollars before they caught on to what was happening. He used a loophole in the bank’s code to divert money into an account he controlled. Fractions of pennies at a time, so no single transaction would be detected—”

“Salami slicing. Classic hacker technique.”

“Yes,” she agrees. “Classic. Except the account he controlled was in my name.”

In the silence that follows, the muted noises of the restaurant seem overly loud. Voices, music, the clatter of silverware against plates, the sounds clang around in my head.

“He set you up.”

Tabby nods.

“Why?”

“Because he could. He could do anything he wanted.”

“No. Why
you
?”

She looks over my shoulder. I sense she’s deliberately avoiding my eyes.

“You’d have to ask him.”

I stare at her long and hard. “Tabby.”

She glances at me.

“Don’t bullshit me. If we’re gonna work together, there won’t be any lies between us. Why did Søren Killgaard set you up?”

Her expression is unreadable. “Why do some boys like to pull the wings off flies?”

I say bluntly, “You were fucking him.”

Something flickers in her gaze, a deep distaste or disappointment. “Not everything is about sex, Connor.”

“Yes, it is. Except sex itself. That’s about power.”

Her head tilts. She appraises me with those beautiful feline eyes, a long, searching look that’s strangely intimate. The distaste in her gaze changes to something else, something warmer. In a husky voice, she murmurs, “
Finally
, something on which we agree.”

Heat surges through my body.

Desire is a strange animal. Elemental like hunger or thirst, but unlike hunger or thirst, it has the power to rob you of reason with the speed of two fingers snapping, so that you’ll do things so out of character you don’t recognize yourself, the creature you become in service of the primal, irresistible urge to mate.

The tone in her voice, the look in her eyes, the memory of her wet, naked body—all of it conspires to wipe my mind clean of all logic, and suddenly I’m just…
gone
.

I reach across the table, take her face in my hands, pull her toward me—knocking over glasses and rattling plates—and kiss her.

For a moment, there’s nothing. Resistance, her mouth firmly closed, her lips hard. But then a softening, a quick intake of breath through her nose, and she gives in.

Her lips part. She takes my tongue into her mouth. She makes a sound deep in her throat, a low, feminine noise of pleasure, and my cock instantly stiffens to steel.

She tastes sweet, so fucking sweet, warm and soft and yielding, like a ripe piece of fruit. A peach, melting in my mouth. Our tongues sweep against each other, delicious sliding and pressure, suction, gliding, easy and perfect, like they were meant for exactly this. Then it’s more urgent, a rising demand, a jolt of pleasure when she nips my lower lip, my hands tightening around her jaw, her hands fisted in my hair, urgently pulling me closer, deeper, my mind fried as my body throbs and pulses, every beat of my heart a roar in my ears, my blood pounding like drums, wanting wanting wanting—
Sweet Jesus this woman is heaven
—

She yanks away and slaps me.

Hard.

We stare at each other. She’s standing up, I’m sitting down, we’re both panting. Her face is bright red. My cock is so hard, it hurts.

The two girls at the bar are openly gaping at us. So is the waitress, who just arrived to clear our plates.

Tabby staggers back a step. She drags the back of her hand across her mouth. She rips her gaze from mine and looks at the girls at the bar.

“He’s all yours,” she says hoarsely. She spins around and strides away.

“
Goddammit
, Connor,” I mutter. I throw some money down on the table. Ignoring the titters of the girls, I follow Tabby.

* * *

W
hen she walks
in the front door of her house, I’m already there, leaning against the counter in the dark kitchen in the same spot I was standing before we left.

She flicks on the light and stares at me. I’ve seen her angry before, but this…

This is something else altogether.

Eyes glittering, she says with dangerous softness, “Don’t ever do that again.”

Not chancing what might come out of my mouth if I open it, I simply nod.

She slowly exhales. “And no more appearing out of nowhere. Respect my privacy or fuck off. Permanently.”

Again I calmly nod, but my heart leaps with hope. She’s laying down terms, which means she’s still in.

“I don’t travel by plane. Ever. Anywhere. So if the job is in another country—”

“It’s in LA. We can drive. If we leave tonight, we can be there in—”

“Three or four days, give or take,” she says flatly. “I know. I’ve made the trip before. Only not with someone I detested, so I imagine it’ll seem like much longer.”

If a man could be murdered by a look alone, I’d already be dead. I decide to take a gamble and go out on a limb. “It won’t happen again. I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” she replies. “You really are.”

Ouch
.

“Give me the contract.”

Earlier I’d left the job contract, along with my standard, ironclad nondisclosure agreement, beneath the laptop on the counter. I retrieve the paperwork and hand it to Tabby. She flips through it, quickly scanning the pages, her mouth tight, her face pale. When she gets to the end, she finds a pen in a drawer, scratches her name on the signature line, and thrusts the contract back into my hands.