by Lori Ryan
Chapter 8
“Diya?”
Diya looked up from her computer and raised her eyebrows at Yoshi.
“Yes?” She’d told him not to interrupt her and Peter as they worked, so she knew if Yoshi had chosen to do so it would be important.
Yoshi eyed Peter as he stepped into the room. Diya had a feeling Peter was wholly absorbed in his work, but she trusted him completely, regardless. He had worked for her father over the years as a contact in the United States and had proven himself. She waved Yoshi farther into the room.
“You can speak in front of Peter. Heaven knows he’s learning every secret we have right now,” she said with a smile.
But in reality, Peter wasn’t learning her secrets—he was learning her father’s. Diya discovered her father kept journals filled to overflowing with the secrets of anyone and everyone he’d ever worked with.
Some had been secret codes to establishing contact with those he worked with. Others were secrets those people wouldn’t want getting out. It seemed her father had known the value of information and he’d traded upon that value through the years. She’d always wondered how he’d come to be as powerful as he had, and now she knew.
She fully intended to pick up where he’d left off, but she also planned to bring the endeavor into the present day. She was having Peter Gatorelli computerize everything. He’d begun by setting up firewalls and security. Once he completed that task, he’d be taking all the information Diya’s father had compiled and setting it up in a database she could search and cross-reference at will. She would also be able to add to the database, and she intended to do that as well.
Yoshi sat in a chair across from her. “I’ve had three men on Logan Stone for a week, and I think you’re right about that woman. Samantha Page appears to be dating him. I’m not sure yet how important he is to her, but they’re definitely together.”
Peter’s head shot up. “Samantha Page?”
Yoshi nodded, his mouth pulling down into a frown.
“Where is she from? Connecticut? Like Stone?” Peter looked to Yoshi for an answer. Yoshi nodded again.
“Huh,” Peter said and lowered his head to the laptop in front of him again, talking to himself under his breath, a highly annoying habit he seemed unaware of, or perhaps, unconcerned about.
When he didn’t say anything else, Diya prompted him, her tone not at all patient with the eccentricities of the man. “Peter!”
“Huh?” He looked up from his work, confusion etched on his face.
Diya buried a sigh and rolled her eyes as Yoshi coughed nervously into his hand.
“What about Samantha Page from Connecticut?”
“Oh. It’s probably nothing, but there were rumors a while back that she was BillieBurke, the white hat hacker behind the take down of Mendelow, Alonzo, and a few others.”
Diya stared at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What does that even mean?”
Now it was Peter’s turn to roll his eyes.
“BillieBurke is the hacker name of a white hat hacker. It’s a play on Glinda the Good Witch?”
He stopped and looked at them as though they should know what he was talking about. Diya simply stared.
“Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz. Billie Burke was the actress who played her. You know what? Skip that part. What matters is who she is. There are white hats and black hats. Good hackers and bad hackers. I,” he said with no small amount of pride, “am a black hat. I hack for profit or to fuck with other people when I feel like it. White hats hack for the pleasure of it and to do good for others. They help the government shore up their defenses, and in general try to help undo a lot of the shit we black hats do. Even when they’re hacking for their own pleasure, they don’t actually profit from it or cause harm.
“They’re like the do-gooders of the hacker world. And if these rumors are right, Samantha Page is the best of the best of them. Many hackers’ identities are well known, despite the fact that they use an online name or two. But no one’s ever been able to prove who BillieBurke is. BillieBurke worked with the FBI to take down Mendelow after he hacked into the FDA’s computer system and she’s supposedly worked with them on other things since then. They say she’s taken down criminals no one can build a case on just by hacking into their systems and taking out all their money, screwing with them any way she can. She’s the kind of chick who finds a major security breach in a company’s software and goes and shows them how to fix it, out of the goodness of her heart. It’s disgusting.”
“And there are rumors this Samantha Page is that hacker?” Diya asked.
Peter shrugged. “I don’t buy it. There are very few people who actually believe it, but whatever. Don’t get me wrong, Samantha’s a decent programmer and even a semigood hacker. She’s behind the multiplayer game Tangled Legacy. Makes a shit ton on that, I’m sure.
“When the rumors started, someone hacked her and found out she goes by the name blu33y3dphr3nd—leet speak for blue-eyed friend. She’s got a couple of cool hacks to her credit and Tangled Legacy is sweet as shit, but she’s no BillieBurke. She just isn’t that good. First of all, nobody uses a leet speak name anymore. It’s lame. And BillieBurke is far from lame. I don’t buy it.”
Diya narrowed her eyes in thought. “Or she’s smart enough to make herself look like she’s not that good, like she’s this blue-eyed person instead, when in reality she’s scamming you all. Find out,” Diya said to Peter. “Do whatever you need to track this hacker and see if it leads back to Samantha Page.”
Peter sputtered. “It can’t be done. If it could be done, someone would have done it by now. No one can track BillieBurke.”
“I thought you could do anything,” Diya said, with a raised brow, instantly recognizing the set of his shoulders that said he wouldn’t let her challenge go unanswered.
Peter squinted his eyes her way and uttered a short “fine,” before turning to his computer.
“And you,” Diya said, turning back to Yoshi, “stay on Logan and Samantha. Also find out all you can on her, everything there is to know from what brand of underwear she prefers to how she takes her coffee. Everything.”
“You kissed me.”
Logan looked up at the sound of Sam’s voice.
Hell. The woman was gunning for bear this morning.
She’d twisted her hair up in some complicated thing at the back of her head, neck unprotected, just begging him to reach out and trace it with his tongue. She wore a high-heeled-boots-and-miniskirt combo that sent his fantasies off in cock-hardening directions. Crap like that really made it difficult to work. Scratch that. It made it difficult to breathe, never mind work.
Her talking about the kiss wasn’t helping. “I did,” he said, purposefully making his voice even.
Kissing her had been a mistake. At first, he’d told himself it was only for the benefit of anyone listening in on the devices, but that was a load of crap and he knew it. What would it matter to her eavesdropper if she had a boyfriend or not? If he’d been at her place as a friend or as a lover? It wouldn’t.
No, the kiss had been solely for himself. Solely because he couldn’t help himself any longer.
And then, once it started, he couldn’t stop. She melted into him and moaned and before he knew it, he’d pulled her in close, lining his cock between her legs just right. And it was so freaking right. So ever-loving effing right.
“But then you left.”
Her comment drew him back to the present and once again he had to fight to steady his breathing. Yeah. Leaving hadn’t been easy either. He’d had to draw on every ounce of control he had to walk out that door instead of hauling her upstairs to her bed.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Why did I kiss you or why did I leave?”
“Both.” She shut his office door behind her and stood watching him as though terrified of the answer. Damn, this woman. She really had no idea the kind of power she had over him.
&
nbsp; Logan drew in a deep breath through his nose before answering.
“I kissed you because I couldn’t help myself,” he said quietly, eyes watching hers as they flared in surprise. “And I walked away because I’m not okay.”
She blinked slowly at that. “You’re not okay.”
She said this more as a statement than a question and he got the sense she was acknowledging a fact they’d both known for some time now.
Logan repeated the sentence over in his head. I’m not okay.
He hadn’t actually said that before and he felt a small blow at the acknowledgement. Both a blow, and in some ways, a relief. It was as though saying the words to her somehow helped him to move forward, no matter how small a step it was. I’m not okay.
In the Teams, anyone diagnosed with PTSI got pulled from any assignments requiring security clearance. It was so ingrained in him not to ask for help, not to admit there was a problem, it was hard to do so now, even though his clearance and status as a SEAL was no longer in jeopardy.
Saying the words relieved some of that, though. The stigma was still there, but he could breathe, suddenly.
“And what are you doing about that?” Sam’s question threw him off guard.
“Excuse me?”
“What are you doing about that?” Sam repeated in a tone that told him she thought he was an idiot for not having some plan to address this issue.
But how could he address it? What the hell could he do to get back to, well … he didn’t even know. Normal was what he guessed he should be striving for, but he didn’t even really know what that was. And, he knew after the things he’d seen and done, normal wasn’t an option anymore. Not for him.
“What am I doing about it?” he asked and he felt about as stupid as he sounded. Just keep parroting her words back to her. Freaking brilliant.
Samantha’s face softened and she smiled at him, but there was a sad patience to the smile. “What are you doing to get yourself okay?”
He wanted to get angry, to storm at her and tell her where she could take her suggestions that he simply do something. But he couldn’t.
When he looked at her, he saw she waited with no judgment on her face. Simply watched him as though she expected him to have a plan. When one wasn’t forthcoming, she tilted her head.
Were he not fighting the turmoil her questions seemed to have let loose in him, he might have thought the move adorable. Instead, he just fought the rising tide of panic inside him. Don’t do this, Sam. Don’t go there.
Whether she saw the panic in his eyes or simply knew him well enough by now to know this conversation wouldn’t end well, she turned to leave.
She stopped with her hand on the doorknob and looked back at him.
“You know, Logan, you deserve to be happy. You might not be like a lot of your buddies you talk about with families to feed and no prospects for a job. You might not be fighting critical injuries or learning to walk with a prosthesis or two, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be happy. You have every right to the same counseling and help they do. You need to stop punishing yourself for landing this job with Jack. You need to stop thinking you don’t matter just as much as every one of the men you fought with, even the ones who didn’t come home with you; who won’t ever come home. You deserve peace and happiness and everything you fought for overseas for all of us to have back home. You get to have it now, too. That’s part of the deal.”
Well, damned if she didn’t cut right through all his shit, straight to the freaking issue.
And then she walked out.
Well, hell.
Logan stared at the closed door for a long time and tried to figure out what he was feeling. He didn’t really have a clue, but he knew one thing.
If getting help, if finding a way to be okay again, meant he could have a life with that woman—even only a shot at a life with that woman—he wanted it.
He picked up the phone and dialed Chad’s extension.
“Yeah?” Chad grunted.
“How did you do it?”
“Uh …”
“When you came home,” Logan clarified.
Chad had been out of the military for years, but he’d been in spec ops, too. Logan knew Chad had seen some shit, but he seemed to have a life now. He was functioning all right. At least better than Logan was. He had a wife he loved and who loved him back. They had a daughter. Chad didn’t seem plagued by memories like Logan was.
Logan cleared his throat and continued. “When you came home, how did you—”
Chad cut in when Logan floundered again. “Hang on, man. I’ll be right there.”
Logan stared out the window until he heard Chad open the door behind him. Chad didn’t hesitate. He walked in and handed Logan a business card for a counselor. Ernie Green.
“This guy,” Chad said, pointing to the card. “Go see him. He’s a veteran, and he’s become a good friend over the years. He gets it. It doesn’t fix everything right away, but he can help.”
Logan nodded and Chad turned without another word and left the room.
Logan looked down at the card and took another one of those deep breaths he’d seemed to be needing a lot of lately. Sam’s words echoed in his head: What are you doing about it?
He lifted his phone and dialed the number.
Chapter 9
Logan walked into the office four days later feeling just a bit better than he probably had in all his time since his return to civilian status. It had still been a pretty rough drive into the office, but since he was now coming in at a little more normal time of day, he’d hit some traffic.
But he hadn’t broken into a cold sweat sitting in that traffic. He’d handled it. Sure, his grip on the steering wheel had been tighter than a pilot’s ass in a tailspin, but he hadn’t been in a full-blown panic.
He didn’t know if it was the two counseling sessions he’d had in four days or what, but on the off chance it was, he’d be keeping those appointments.
Ernie Green had turned out to be maybe fifteen years older than Logan, a veteran who’d served in Desert Storm. He was so freaking laid-back, he actually managed to get Logan talking. And that was something Logan hadn’t thought anyone would be able to do.
During the first session, Ernie just smiled amiably at Logan and said, “So, what do you feel like doing?”
Logan had looked around at the pool table, the couches, the small refrigerator and the multiple old-school pinball machines that filled the room before answering.
“I thought we were supposed to talk,” Logan said as his gaze came back around to the man in front of him.
“Sure,” Ernie said. “We can talk.” He walked to one of the couches and sat, his khaki pants slipping up to show the barest snippet of a prosthesis on each leg. Logan hadn’t realized he’d been frowning at the man’s ankles until Ernie called him on it.
“Desert Storm. IED. Lost ’em both below the knee.” He said all this with an easy smile that suggested he didn’t give a shit if anyone questioned him about his legs.
Logan nodded before sitting on the other couch. “So, how does this work? I tell you my problems and you tell me how to fix them?”
“Shit,” Ernie answered with a grunt as he reached into the fridge and pulled two bottles of water out, tossing one to Logan and opening the other. He took a long swallow before continuing. “You can tell me your grocery list if you feel like it. You’re the boss in here. We can play pool, shoot the shit, or sit here and stare at each other.”
Logan schooled his face and eyed the man. If anyone other than Chad Thompson had told him to come see this guy, he likely would have walked out the door.
But Logan trusted Chad. Completely. If Chad said he needed this guy, he’d stick around long enough to give him a shot. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t give the guy some shit.
“I thought you were supposed to be a licensed therapist or something. Shouldn’t you be trying to help me?”
“Eh, all right. You want to play it
that way, we can. Tell me about one of the guys who didn’t come home. Out of all the guys you wish you could bring back, out of all the men you would gladly flush your own life down the toilet for, simply for the glimmer of a shot at bringing him back. The guy who was worth all of your lives put together, the whole effing team of you would have thrown yourselves on a grenade to bring this guy—”
“All right! I got it. I got it.” Logan sat and stared open-mouthed. Would it be inappropriate to tell this guy he changed his mind and wanted to play pool?
The silence dragged on. After several long moments, Ernie slapped his hands on the arms of his chair and shoved himself up to his feet. “Pool it is, then!”
The crazy bastard walked to the pool table and began racking the balls, nodding to the pool cues hanging on an adjacent wall. “Pick it. You break.”
And, then they played. And that’s all they’d done. A little small talk here and there, but that was it. They just played. When the fifty-minute hour—what the hell is that about?—was over, Ernie nodded at Logan and said, “I’ll see you in two days. Same time.”
And that was it.
The following session, Logan walked in, caught the bottle of water Ernie tossed his way, and they began to play again. No pressure, no nothing.
And, within twenty minutes, Logan was talking.
“His name was Dopey.”
Ernie grunted. “Back in my day, we had names like Cowboy and Ice Man. Dopey? You guys went with Dopey?”
Logan was surprised to hear himself chuckle and a little of the tension seeped out of him. “Yeah. Nick James. We all called him Dopey because he was so damned much like the dwarf, Dopey. Smiling and happy all the freaking time. Everyone’s friend no matter what. In the beginning, I think people thought he was a bit slow, because he had this way of talking really slow and he didn’t say a whole lot sometimes. He turned out to be the smartest of all of us.”
“How so?” Ernie asked, leaning over the table to line up a bank shot.
Logan shook his head and a bitter half laugh came out of him. “He was actually pretty damned philosophical. One day, we’re all sitting around. They told us to get ready for a call out, then nothing. You know—“
