by Tawny Weber
"Whoever trashed this place must have been really angry to crumple up all his pictures," she said.
"They were looking for something," Jake said, something reassuring in his just-stating-the-facts tone. "They probably crumpled the pictures so they'd know which ones they'd looked through. That's all."
She stepped over one of the drawers that had been emptied on the floor, turning her attention to their scattered contents. Not much for clothing. Not that Robbie had ever been a clotheshorse. Tees emblazoned with his favorite game characters were his usual attire. No such tees here. Too expensive for him? Or too identifying of him now that she knew he was on the run from something or someone?
To the far side of the dresser, she found a pile of unopened burner phones. Jake stepped up beside her and grunted. "Between those and the name change, it's clear he didn't want to be found."
She grunted. "I sure would have never found him. I've been looking for Robbie O'Hara these past two years. This guy I don't know."
She must have sounded pitiful because Mr. Macho dropped a hand on her shoulder and the floor all but heaved beneath her feet. Oddly, her reaction to his touch didn't draw on her hormones but on some deeper need. She'd been a caretaker for so long, she'd forgotten what it was like to have someone comfort her. She wanted to lean into his touch, to sink into his support. Badly.
But he'd likely see it as a swoon. Wouldn't that just feed into his stereotyped idea of a romance writer?
Besides, she was here to find her brother. Not to fall in love. Or lust. So she forced herself to reach deep inside her for the strength she knew she could count on.
Yes, that was working. The floor was no longer undulating under her feet and the room quit spinning before her eyes. Oxygen filled her lungs. She squared her shoulders.
He gave her shoulder a squeeze and the air went out of Bliss again. But mid-exhale, he said, "I have some good news about Rob."
She blinked up at Jake.
"My men have been canvassing the area. They found someone who saw a truck stop in front of your brother's building and its occupants run inside. He gave us a description of the vehicle. Not that it'll help much. Old, dark, rusted like most of them around here, but it's still a lead."
"And Robbie?"
"The kid saw Rob running from the side of the building as the men from the truck stormed the front."
She wobbled a bit with relief. Jake's hand tightened on her shoulder. Damn, this is exactly how she'd have expected Nick Savage to act. And not at all how she wanted Jake the SEAL to see her.
Forcing a steadiness into her voice, she asked, "This kid who saw it all, he's reliable?"
Jake gave a half-shrug. "Below Rob's window facing the side street is a metal storage shed. The roof's dented in. It supports what the kid told my men."
She nodded. "That's what you were looking at from his window, wasn't it?"
The Savage-blue eyes narrowed at her. "You're pretty observant, yourself."
Though it sounded like a compliment, she raised her eyebrows in anticipation of some qualifier. When one didn't come, she supplied, "Pretty observant for what? A woman? A romance writer?"
"I wasn't even thinking—"
"All writers are observers," she ranted on, calling on anger to keep her from crying. "We observe the world for story inspiration. We watch people for traits to give to our characters. We study the reasons why people do what they do and how one action leads to the next."
He dropped his hand from her shoulder. "It was a compliment, nothing more."
Then he turned and strode toward the door, leaving her regretting having jumped to conclusions. How ironic. That's precisely what she'd been accusing him of.
She glanced around the room and, seeing nothing to hold her here any longer, headed out the door after Jake. Catching up to him halfway down the stairs, she asked, "Why are you investing so much manpower into searching for my brother."
"He's part of the team," he said without so much as a backward glance.
She caught him by the arm as he stepped into the light wedging through the open entryway at the base of the stairway where Robbie's motorbike was sill parked. "You didn't make him sound like much of a team member when we were in the back of my limo. So why's he so important now?"
"All members of the team are important," he stated in that just-give-them-your-rank-and-serial-number SEAL voice of his. Even his eyes were shuttered as they'd been every time he'd withheld something from her. Oh, yeah. She'd caught onto that little tell.
She shook her head. "There's more going on here than you're letting on. You said he was only your computer geek."
His pupils flexed ever so slightly and a switch flipped in her head. "That's it. He's your computer guy. He knows everything about your business. You're afraid someone is trying to get to you through him, aren't you?"
"It's a possibility we're considering."
She released his elbow, sank back on her heels. "Making him just another mission."
"Everything I do is a mission," he said and stalked out into the sunlight.
What had she expected, that Jake St. John was her Nick Savage, all-around good guy behind his hardened fighter of injustice façade? Her proverbial knight-in-shining-armor come to rescue her, or rather her brother for her? She was a hopeless romantic.
Chapter 5
Jake scowled at the computer screen as his best computer guy, now that Rob was gone, explained what he'd found on Rob's hard drive…or rather what he hadn't. But it wasn't the failure to find anything useful that stuck in Jake's craw.
Back at the kid's digs, he'd seen the light dim in Bliss' eyes the minute she'd figured out the real reason he'd made finding her brother a top priority. He was a soldier on a mission. No emotions. Just objectives. That's who he was. No apologies.
So, why did it gnaw at him?
Because she'd also have figured out what he already knew about himself. He didn't belong in the civilized world she lived in.
"Not so much as a suspect email before he left the country," Asher concluded.
"Yet the kid made his way into a job with Saint Security within months of coming to Mexico," Jake said, shifting back into analytical-mind mode.
Bliss huffed. "You're still working on the premise his end goal was to infiltrate your company. Robbie came to Mexico to do environmental research for a game him and his friend were working on. That's all."
"That's what he told you," Jake said.
"My brother doesn't have it in him to pull off infiltrating any business for espionage purposes."
Jake faced her, arms folded high on his chest. "Yet you believe he had it in him to build a high-level interactive game. And, from what I know about simulated interactive programs which operate like games, it takes a lot of skill to build them."
"Building games is different," she said. "It doesn't involve people. Wouldn't he have needed people skills to hide his true intentions if they were to infiltrate your company? Wouldn't it take a lot to hide his true intent for two years from a business full of security experts?"
She had a point, but…
"He kept you in the dark as to where he was for two years."
"I wasn't looking all that hard for him," she said, irritation creeping into her voice. "I figured it was good for him to be on his own for once in his life."
"As long as he kept in weekly contact with you, right?"
She folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin at him. "There's nothing wrong with me wanting to make sure he's okay."
He squared his shoulders. "And him not telling you where he was and using burner phones so you couldn't track him, that didn't concern you?"
Her lips thinned. "I wrote his secretiveness off to his new job in security."
"A job he didn't tell you the whole truth about."
She groaned, the fold of her arms slipping. "I'm telling you, Jake, I don't think this has to do with your business. Something happened while he was researching that game."
Th
e woman was like a dog with a bone and she needed a reality check.
He braced his feet shoulder width apart and folded his arms high on his chest, "And you think somebody cares enough about a computerized game that was in the research phase to still be chasing him two years later?"
"On-line gaming is big business," she countered. "It's competitive. There's a lot of secrecy around the building of new games."
"Or that's when he got recruited. Terrorist groups use on-line gaming to recruit young players into joining their causes. Are you aware of that?"
"I've seen news reports on it," she said, her arms sliding down over her stomach. "But what if it wasn't about the game itself? Maybe he stumbled across something during their research."
"Or he got recruited," Jake maintained, though he filed away her theories in the back of his mind for further exploration. She may be stubborn in her ideals, but she'd presented valid points.
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. "There's something else, something Robbie told me on his last call before he went incommunicado—before he started using those untraceable burner phones." She opened her eyes and met his gaze. "He told me to 'watch my back'."
Her last three words raised the hairs on the back of Jake's neck. The kid was definitely into something that went beyond any game—something that clearly put lives at stake. Damn.
"I didn't think too much about it at the time," she said. "I thought he just meant to be careful in general. You know, watch my step on that dark street of ours, hold my purse close on the El, don't let my crazy publicist turn my career into a sideshow kind of advice."
"And the whole burner phone, clandestine lifestyle didn't flag you?"
Her arms tightened across her stomach, pulling her shoulders forward as if to protect herself. "Yeah. It raised alarms. But I wanted to believe I was just being overly protective. It wasn't until he went missing this time that those alarms combined with his warning came together."
At least she hadn't been in total denial about her brother's new life. Still, being a sister, a very motherly sister, she came from a position of emotion.
Jake turned away from Bliss. Asher raised his eyebrows at him and glanced in Bliss' direction. He'd worked with Ash long enough to recognize his shorthand for "let me dig further with her for a bit."
Emotions aside, she might have some intel. He gave Ash a nod, and Ash swiveled in his seat toward Bliss.
"Did your brother have any backups?" Asher asked. "Flash drives, external drives, The Cloud?"
"A flash drive. He always wore it on a chain around his neck."
"I noticed the chain," Fitch said, his wiry frame unfolding from one of the leather couches between the computer banks and the dining table. Joining the trio, he added, "Teased him about wearing jewelry. He just mumbled about keeping something close and walked away. He was a spooky kid. Secretive."
"You just don't like that you couldn't get a rise out of him, Fitch?" Ash said.
Jake noted Bliss' puckered brow, as though she'd stayed on task instead of letting Fitch distract her.
"He also had a Cloud account," she said. "Though, given he seems to have been trying to hide his identity, I doubt he's maintained it." She looked at Asher. "But I can look."
Jake added analytical to his growing list of Bliss O'Hara's talents. Though he shouldn't be surprised, not given how prepared she'd been to follow him if he hadn't allowed her to accompany him. Then there was how well she'd gotten inside her Savage character's mind. One more layer to the onion.
Asher slid out of the chair, giving Bliss full access to his computer. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, fingers that typed out love scenes in countless romances. The thought rolled through Jake's mind unbidden. If those scenes were anything like the steamy entanglement she'd written in the Cooper book…
He shook off the thought. This was no time to wander off into fantasies.
Fantasies? When the hell had he last fantasized about anything?
This time, he gave himself a mental head slap. Focus.
"The account has been closed," she said.
"Maybe Rob Burns opened a new one," Jake said, bracing one hand on the table next to the keyboard she worked on and the other on the back of her chair, leaning over her.
"Aha," Bliss declared, finding the account on her second try. "He changed hosting sites."
Either she was lucky or she knew her brother better than he'd given her credit for.
"Now for a password," she said.
She tried a few words that made no sense to him and netted no results. Bliss sat back in the chair, stirring the air between them, giving him a whiff of cinnamon. How could that be? They'd left the cinnamon rolls back in Chicago.
Yet, even her sigh hinted of some sweet spice, causing him to barely register her words.
"I've tried the names of his favorite gaming characters, though there's an endless possibility of numbers and symbols he could have added to make the password difficult to break."
While Bliss pondered further possibilities, Jake thought about sweet buns with a spicy tang. Realizing he wasn't thinking about cinnamon rolls any longer, he released the back of Bliss' chair and stepped away. What the hell was this woman doing to him?
Or maybe he'd simply gone too long without having hot, mindless sex with a woman.
"Hmm… We both favored the same character in Game of Thrones." She leaned forward in the chair, typing into the password box Tyrion#1.
The account opened, revealing numerous folders.
Okay, so she did know the kid well.
Bliss moved the cursor over the folder labeled "Saved Emails".
But another file caught Jake's eyes. He covered her hand with his and moved it and the mouse until the cursor highlighted a file labeled "Sister".
"Open this one first," he said, his gut telling him there would be more of an explanation for Rob's actions in this file than any other. Or maybe he was going soft, letting her read the file clearly directed at her.
Feelings. Emotions. What was he doing putting this woman's needs before those of his men and their security? This was why soldiers left their feelings behind when on a mission, and finding Rob Burns was his mission. Jake was about to override his directive about viewing the sister file first when it opened to a letter that filled the screen.
Hey Sis,
I knew if I made it simple enough you'd figure out the password on this one. We both love the tall shadow that little guy casts.
So the kid had intentionally made it easy for her to find and open the account.
Of course, if you're reading this, something has probably gone wrong…again.
Bliss' elbows pressed in on her as though she were hugging herself…or shrinking, like she had on the talk show set before he'd insulted romance writers and she'd fired back at him with a leveling burst of outrage.
But the withdrawal, then as now, how should he read it? Vulnerability? Fear? Distress?
Distress. That would cover it all. So now he knew her go-to place when she was stressed was to withdraw, and when attacked, fight back. He filed away the information.
"Let's give the lady space to read her letter," Jake said, herding Ash and Fitch away.
"Jake," she said in a small voice, stopping him from following the others. "You should stay. There might be something here you can use."
Withdrawing might be her safe place, but she didn't let it get in the way of common sense.
Good girl.
He leaned over the back of her chair again and, along with her, read the letter.
When I left with Munch, it really was to help him work on a game project. I fudged the truth when I said I'd been hired by Immersion Entertainment.
Something about the name of the company stuck in Jake's mind, but he couldn't quite place why.
But Munch promised to pay me, given I came up with the game concept. Actually, I got the idea from some game that'd been left in BETA forever—got it when I hacked the Dev's account.
&nbs
p; "Dev is developer," Bliss explained.
The hairs on the back of Jake's neck bristled. "Your brother was a hacker, too?"
"Um, yeah. Though I thought he'd stopped doing it after he was court ordered to stop."
"He got caught hacking?"
She nodded without taking her eyes from the screen. "He was fourteen. It was just another game to him."
"What did he hack into?"
She sat back and peered up at him through contrite eyes. "Our bank."
"A federally-insured bank," he said a little too loud, the possibilities that presented churning in his gut.
She grimaced. "Yeah."
"Why'd he hack into the bank files?"
She drew a deep breath before she spoke. "We were living pretty tight at the time. I hadn't sold my first book yet and was working a couple jobs, neither paying a living wage. The family home was in foreclosure because I couldn't keep up with the mortgage. Robbie hacked into the bank—into our mortgage account and altered it, making it look like the house was paid off."
Jake rubbed his chin. At least he'd done it for a good reason. But…
"Where were your parents during all this?"
"They were killed in an auto accident when Robbie was twelve. Hit by a drunk driver. Being nine years older than him, I became his legal guardian."
This fact of her life took Jake back to a place and time where he knew what it was like to lose a parent. But his dad had died when he was little more than a toddler, before he was even old enough to miss him. Hell, he barely remembered what struggles his mother might have gone through raising him alone before she married Joe St. John.
"I had just received my teaching degree and was looking for a job for the following school year. But teaching jobs within easy driving distance of the family home were scarce. Still, I didn't want to uproot Robbie when he was already dealing with the death of our parents. So I moved back home in spite of the job situation."
Remembering back to when his father had died Jake—the disruption of their lives—had left him floundering, confused about all the changes in his young world. Bliss had been right to keep her brother in the family home, grounded.
