Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1)

by Smartypants Romance

  Somehow, her mea culpa diminished her candle wattage by just enough that I could properly look at her without fear of getting fried by pure luminescence. “I do it all the time,” I said, the same chagrin in my own voice. “I make up stories in my head about who someone is based on what they look like, what they’re wearing, how they walk. It’s a terrible habit, made even worse because I’m usually right.”

  Sandra exhaled with a quiet chuckle and held her closed fist up for a fist bump. “Sisterhood,” she said, when I bumped knuckles with her.

  The elevator dinged at the third floor and the doors opened, and Gabriel stood there waiting for me. “Hey,” he said in low tones that made my toes curl up in my boot.

  I gave Sandra a quick smile as I stepped out of the elevator, and she winked back at me before the doors closed.

  Gabriel was wearing another gorgeous suit – light gray with a lavender shirt and a purple-and-silver tie – and I suddenly felt underdressed, even in my favorite long coral cardigan with a Chinese silk scarf that made my eyes go really green.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, as he gestured for me to precede him, and then guided me with a hand at my low back. I could feel the heat of his hand through the thin knit of my sweater, and he smelled faintly of something spicy. I tried to pay attention to the room we walked through – I really did – but two of my senses were busy trying to pretend they weren’t captivated by him, and the other three were wishing they could be wrapped up in essence of Gabriel too.

  I was in serious trouble.

  Gabriel directed me toward a conference room with a long table and a big window that looked out onto open space. His waxed canvas bag was on the table next to a laptop and a stack of files, and he pulled out the chair for me at the end of the table, next to his seat. Then he moved his laptop out of the way and studied me with searching eyes.

  “You came,” he said, almost as if he couldn’t believe it.

  “You expected me,” I answered, a little defensively.

  “I hoped.”

  Oh.

  All those stern lectures to myself about how this wasn’t a thing and thinking otherwise was just setting myself up for disappointment flew out of my brain and landed, flopping like a fish, on the table between us. I had to look away from his gaze so I didn’t accidentally lean over the flopping fish of managed expectations and kiss him.

  Because I really, really wanted to kiss Gabriel Eze.

  And to make sure I didn’t do something stupid and impetuous, like actually kiss him, I did something even dumber.

  “Do you want to run with me tonight?” I asked, before I had the sense to bite my tongue. And then I winced and screwed my eyes shut. “No, never mind. It’s a bad idea—”

  “Yes,” he said quickly, cutting me off.

  I opened my eyes and peered at him warily. “Why?”

  I clearly had no business opening my mouth around him, because only the most inane things managed to find their way out. I shook my head at my own idiocy. “No, don’t say anything else. I’ll just answer with something ridiculous and embarrassing, and I won’t be able to look you in the eye.” I was already having trouble seeing past the haze of mortification that blurred my vision and knocked whatever discretion I might have had right off my tongue.

  Gabriel laughed, and the sound was velvety and smooth.

  “I like watching you run. You’re fast, probably faster than me, and that intrigues me,” he said, his gaze never leaving mine. “You intrigue me.”

  My heart was beating too fast. I blew out a breath and looked away. “Okay,” I whispered, not really sure why I said it.

  A knock sounded on the glass, and I was grateful for the interruption. I looked up to see the tattoo-necked guy standing in the open doorway.

  Gabriel didn’t shift away from me, though I had the sense we were sitting much too close for casual conversation, but his expression held no guilt when he looked up at the guy.

  “Come in.”

  The guy, whose name I assumed was Dan based on my former deductions, flicked a look at me. What was probably meant as a casual glance turned into laser focus when Dan realized who I was. “You’re Quimby’s date,” he said in a distinctively Bostonian growl.

  “What do you need, O’Malley?” Gabriel said. There was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before, and it got Dan’s attention.

  “I need you to tell me what the fuck’s going on,” he responded, minus the growl. Then, improbably, Dan held a hand out to me. “Dan O’Malley, Cipher Security.”

  I took his hand and shook it, surprisingly not intimidated by him despite the gruff street manner – or maybe because of it. “Shane. P.I.”

  He smirked. “Shane P.I.? That a name, or a string of single-syllables to confuse perps into forgetting they didn’t get a straight answer?”

  My scoff had a smile attached. “Both. You can call me Shane, and I’m a licensed private investigator.”

  Dan’s eyes flicked to Gabriel’s, and I followed his gaze. Gabriel was stone-faced.

  “So, Shane of the no-last-name, what brings you to Cipher?” Dan said, ignoring Gabriel. He spun a chair around backward and dropped onto it.

  The tension seeping off Gabriel raised the temperature in the room, and I knew Dan wasn’t oblivious to it. The neck tattoos stood in stark contrast to his crisp white dress shirt, and I thought that contrast was exactly who Dan was – a ruffian in a nice suit, and the kind of guy who deliberately pushed buttons just to see what a person was made of.

  I leaned forward, and I heard Gabriel inhale softly. “I’m here to see Gabriel.” I held Dan’s gaze deliberately, with an appearance of ease I didn’t actually feel, and the moment stretched far beyond the realm of a comfortable pause in conversation. I sensed that Gabriel’s gaze was locked on Dan, but I didn’t dare break my eye contact in this dominance game. I wondered where Gabriel stood in this particular pack, considering that his hands twitched like he wanted to clench his fists.

  “Enough, O’Malley,” Gabriel growled, and Dan suddenly broke into a beatific smile. I could see hints of the scruffy little boy he’d been who used smiles like that to get out of punishments he’d undeniably earned.

  Dan pushed back from the table and stood in a fluid motion, breaking eye contact, the dominance game done. “Nice to meet you, Shane P.I.”

  “Really?” I asked. I watched myself inserting my own foot into my mouth, and yet seemed powerless to stop my own snark. “Was it really nice to meet me? Because I felt like you just sniffed my ass and raised your hackles to see if I’d submit.”

  I had clearly been reading too many dog training manuals and needed to rethink my whole going-out-in-public strategy. Both men stared at me for the one second it took me to flush in mortification from head to toe, and I stood up quickly. “Sorry, I’m going to go now.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Dan said, taking a step backward. “You’re right. It’s a fucking bad habit, and my wife keeps calling me out on it. I apologize, Shane P.I. Hackles and ass-sniffing I’m good at, polite conversations, not so much.”

  He shot Gabriel a contrite look over my shoulder, then gave me a quick nod and left the room. Gabriel had gotten to his feet when I did, and he touched my hand. “Don’t go.”

  I turned to face him. His expression was stony and grim, and the part of me that hated confrontation was yelling “run away!” in my brain. I inhaled and forced my legs to lock so I didn’t head straight for the door.

  “How long did you say you’ve worked here?” I asked.

  “A month.” His voice grated, and he was still trying not to clench his hands.

  “You’re pissed that you let him do that.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I really looked at him – not just the tension in his face and body. His bronze skin stretched tightly over sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw that clenched with tension. His black hair was cropped short and looked like a leftover military habit, and his broad shoul
ders filled out his well-cut suit as powerfully as they would have filled fatigues. This was a strong man who had taken orders he didn’t like from men he maybe didn’t respect, and some part of him was still locked in that pattern.

  I sat down with a sigh. “The rules are different for both of us, and I can’t pretend to know what your rules are, just as mine must be baffling to you. I assume you’ve never been a woman—” he smiled at that, which let some of the tension seep out of his features “—and you appear to be in possession of all of your limbs, while I have no idea what it’s like to be black in America, nor how an English Jamaican Nigerian man navigates a landscape full of assumptions that have nothing to do with who he actually is.”

  Gabriel finally sat down next to me again and allowed his hands to rest on the table without involuntarily clenching into fists. His expression had relaxed into attentiveness and interest rather than the fight-or-flight look he’d been sporting a moment before.

  I kept my tone conversational. “What Dan did was just a version of the basic assessments humans do to other humans to categorize them into friend or foe, safe or dangerous, tribe or stranger. As a white man in America, he’s at the top of the food chain, so his check was for dominance. Mine as a woman is usually for threat level, and I can only guess at yours.”

  He was silent for a long moment – long enough that all my noisy self-doubt conversations started talking at once, mostly about how I had no business discussing race because I couldn’t understand what his experience had been.

  “I look for their fear,” he said quietly.

  A whole chasm of unspoken words yawned between us, but he stepped around the edge without looking down.

  “You found something about Quimby’s finances?” His change of subject was smooth, and if he hadn’t just been so tense, it would have seemed completely natural in the flow of conversation.

  “I talked to some guys at ADDATA. They have the programmers scraping data into subsets with a political slant. One set sounded clearly conservative, and another was obviously liberal. The programmers I talked to said Karpov had brought political clients into ADDATA, but the money was getting scarce, and they were likely to start losing people.”

  About halfway through my recitation, Gabriel began taking notes, and when I was done, he stared at the pages he’d written for a long moment before finally meeting my eyes. “This is good work.”

  “Thank you.”

  Gabriel stood and held his hand out to me. I took it, and then felt absurdly like a princess rising from her throne, if the princess was standing on a stick and the throne was hard plastic. “I think it’s time I introduce Alex Greene to you.”

  I raised an eyebrow and balked as Gabriel indicated I should precede him from the room. He smirked. “He’s suspicious of everyone, says almost nothing about himself, has superpowers at which no one can even guess, and he’s a genius. Also, he’s a criminal, so you have that in common too.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “He’s your hacker, isn’t he?”

  Gabriel just smiled cheerfully and closed the door behind us.

  17

  Gabriel

  “Yesterday I changed my wifi password to hackifyoucan. When I checked it today, it was challengeaccepted.” – Sandra Greene’s T-shirt

  It was a tactical decision to direct Shane to the elevators and then walk behind her – not only was the view one to be appreciated, it was an excellent vantage point from which to watch others’ reactions to her. And make no mistake, people reacted to her. It was rare to see a woman of her height, much less one with so much natural grace. Something was different about her walk as well – the limp that had been slight before was nearly indiscernible now.

  Alone in the elevator together, we both stood in the middle, closer than strangers would, but not as close as I wanted to. She smelled good, like vanilla and something tropical, and I imagined her with sun-warmed skin, the gold in her hair glinting on the beach.

  “Have you ever been to California?” I said impulsively. The easy silence between us disappeared, and the question hung in the air like a bad smell.

  She took a quick breath, as though steeling herself, then turned to look at me. “I don’t tell people my stories. They’re done, and I’ve moved on.”

  Her voice was too quiet, and I thought it had cost her something to even say the words. I stepped back from her to give her the space she seemed to require, and her shoulders tensed. The elevator doors opened on the fourth floor. “This is us,” I said. She suddenly seemed fragile in a way I didn’t understand, and I stopped her before she could step out.

  “Wait,” I touched her arm, and she finally met my eyes. “Whatever it was that just happened, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  She exhaled sharply. “I don’t know why I’m here. Whatever this job is, it’s not mine – I’m not getting paid for it, and I haven’t even been paid for the initial work I did. This isn’t personal, Gabriel, it’s a job, and I don’t work for free.”

  I studied her for a long moment, and though she met my eyes, she wouldn’t hold my gaze. The elevator doors began to close, so I thrust out an arm to hold them open.

  “Okay,” I said quietly. She did meet my eyes then, and she looked equal parts fierce and vulnerable. I wanted to gather her into my arms and protect her from whatever haunted her, even as I knew she’d never allow it. I reached in front of her and pressed the button for the lobby.

  “Thank you for all your help. The information you gave me today was excellent, and I’ll pass it along to Greene and O’Malley myself.”

  She nodded and then pressed the button to close the doors as I stepped back out of the way.

  “Hold that elevator, please!” A woman’s voice called from the hallway. My arm automatically shot into the closing doors, halting their path again as I turned to see Greene escorting a beautiful redhead to the elevator. She smiled at me with the kind of gaze that made a man feel seen, then slid into the elevator next to Shane.

  The redhead grinned at Shane and said, “We meet again,” as I let the doors close. I turned to see Greene’s eyes lingering where the redhead and Shane had just been.

  “Was that your wife?” I asked.

  He nodded, and I thought I caught the hint of a smile on his preternaturally stoic face.

  “That your woman?” he asked me. I knew he referred to the woman he had tracked for me on security cameras throughout Chicago.

  I shrugged with no trace of a smile, because honestly, I didn’t know.

  18

  Shane

  Everyone: “Are you a natural redhead?”

  Me: “No, I soak my hair every night in the blood of my enemies.”

  – Sandra Greene’s tote bag

  The stunning woman next to me stuck out her hand. “I’m Sandra, and I think we’re meant to be friends, don’t you?”

  I had just badly overreacted to Gabriel’s question, and I desperately needed to get out of my head. Sandra had just provided me with a welcome distraction, and I shook her hand. “I’m Shane. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Sandra scoffed dramatically and grinned. “You say that now. Get a lemon drop or two into you, and I’ll make you cry.”

  I laughed, and the tightness that had been squeezing my chest eased. “Is that your superpower?”

  “One of them. What’s yours?” Sandra’s magnetic appeal was on full strength again, but actually talking to her instead of gawking at her made it feel slightly less irresistible.

  “Intimidation,” I said, not feeling the slightest bit intimidating, despite the five or six inches I had on her in height.

  She looked me up and down critically. “I can see that. You’d intimidate the hell out of competitive women and short men. Fortunately for us, given the number of lemon drops we’re going to be consuming, I’m neither.” Then she pulled out her phone and handed it to me. “Your number, please.”

  I tried not to laugh and/or stare at her while I typed in my name and actual phone
number. I handed the phone back to her and she looked at it.

  “No last name? Whoever you’re hiding from won’t be joining us for lemon drops, just so you know.”

  I definitely did stare at her then and almost let the elevator doors close on me when she disembarked in the lobby. Sandra was already walking toward the front doors when I finally made my legs move again.

  She blew Van a kiss. “See you soon, handsome.”

  “Not soon enough, Mrs. Greene,” Van said with a grin that lit up his eyes, and maybe a tiny corner of his mouth.

  Mrs. Greene? As in Alex Greene’s wife? Huh. I stored that information away in the mental file I kept on everyone I’d ever met, not sure what I would do with it given the unlikelihood that I would ever run into the magnetic Sandra Greene again. I was just passing Van’s desk when Sandra called back over her shoulder to me.

  “Expect my call tomorrow, Shane.”

  I halted in mid-stride for a second, mentally adjusting to the idea that perhaps I would see Sandra Greene again. Van Hayden sucked his teeth and smirked at the shocked expression that must have been on my face.

  “She makes men cry,” he said.

  I leaned down to adjust the cuff on my pants. There was a smirk in my voice as I answered without meeting his eyes. “So do I.”

  Sparky was in when I let myself into his warehouse. The soundtrack to Guardians of the Galaxy was playing on the speaker, and he was belting along as out of tune as it was possible for a human to sing. There’s something about singing off-key at the top of one’s lungs that simultaneously inspires laughter and cringing pain in one’s audience, but it was the perfectly executed spinning-in-place dance move that finally tipped the scales in favor of laughter.

  He grinned at me like a pre-teen boy caught dancing in a mirror. “’Sup, Shane?”

  “’Sup? Is that a greeting or a command to eat?” I dropped my bag on the desk where his computer sat. “Can I …?” I indicated the laptop, and he waved me to it.