Our Happily Ever After: BWWM Interracial Romance Black Women White Men (That Forbidden Love Book 3)

by Ellie Etienne

  “Well, it looks like somebody’s either got a grudge or a point to prove. Whoever it is, he’s very smart. Or she, of course. But I’m smarter. I’d let my guard down. I hadn’t been alert. That will change now. There’s no way anybody could hack me if I’m expecting it.”

  Leigh narrowed her eyes as she surveyed him. He had definitely lost that glazed look of slight shock. She was glad for that. She was very annoyed with him, of course, but she preferred this to the lost look he’d had earlier.

  “Since I am already involved, Harrison, I need you to tell me what you find. I know that you don’t know much right now, but if you have any suspicions or any hunches, I can’t have you keeping it to yourself. Is that clear?”

  “Yes ma’am,” drawled Harrison, and Leigh seriously contemplated buying the cherry and whipped cream pie just for the pleasure of shoving it into his face.

  “This is not a joke, Harrison. I’m very glad you’re amused now, but it’s not funny. Do you have the slightest idea what it was like to get a call from Portia? That you were being questioned, and that it all looked serious? Anyway, how is it that they didn’t charge you with anything if you were so thoroughly fooled?”

  Harrison frowned. He didn’t like being referred to as a fool, but under the circumstances, he could see why, so he let it go.

  “I don’t know. They should have, if they’d wanted to. But I pointed out that if I’d meant to hack into anything classified, for one thing, I wouldn’t have gotten caught. Really, do they think I’m naïve enough and stupid enough to do it so ham-handedly? I know much better than that. I was obviously being framed. But then it occurred to me that it could’ve been a kind of a double-bluff. But I pointed out that I wouldn’t have needed a double-bluff, because I would never have been caught. I offered to demonstrate, but they didn’t take that all that well.”

  “I wonder why that was,” said Leigh, a little weakly.

  “Harrison, you’re such an idiot,” she declared, after a moment of silence when Harrison ate the two carrot sticks and the piece of lettuce that masqueraded as a salad with her now eaten sandwich.

  “I thought I was cooperating, so it made sense to me. I saw it as helping with the investigation. It’s not my fault they didn’t see it that way.”

  Leigh shook her head, wondering how a man so wonderful and intelligent could be so frankly idiotic sometimes.

  “You do see that that was the wrong tack to take altogether, don’t you?”

  Harrison nodded.

  “Obviously. Now I know better. Leigh, I am glad that you helped me. I needed you. But I can handle the rest of it.”

  Leigh suddenly realized what was going on – his big, manly ego had been hurt. That was what all of this posturing was about. Somebody had outsmarted him, and Harrison was not used to being outsmarted. It had become very personal.

  Leigh could’ve screamed in frustration. He was going to have some kind of a grudge hacking match with some anonymous idiot with some reason to pull Harrison down. It was ridiculous.

  But Leigh also knew her husband well enough to know that there was no point trying to drill some sense into him. He had made up his mind about it. He would do what he would.

  Well, then, she didn’t need to tell him that she could do a few things, too. She might not be able to hold her own in a hackathon – she was well aware that even finding a strong password was beyond her at times – but she had resources.

  In this particular instance, she had a secret weapon named Darius Bomer. If Harrison thought that he could go into some kind of a personal war and expect Leigh to stand aside, wringing her hands, then he didn’t know her, did he!

  “Let’s go. I need to get back to work,” said Leigh, abruptly, getting to her feet. She had made up her mind. Now she needed a way to keep an eye on Harrison to be sure that he wouldn’t break any more laws, and she needed a way to get Harrison’s name cleared.

  She would do both, whether he liked it or not.

  “All right. I must say, Leigh, I am glad that you’ve accepted that I need to handle this alone. The business is important to me, but before that, before I had any of that, I was a coder. I was a hacker, too. I didn’t always do it for fun – I did it for favors sometimes. I’m honestly annoyed that I was caught by something so juvenile. I should’ve seen it.”

  Leigh nodded, knowing that there was no point arguing.

  “Promise me that you will be careful. Promise me that you won’t walk into any traps now. I don’t know how this works, Harrison, but I do know how law enforcement works. They have people who are geniuses, too. They will be on the watch now, and they will be hoping that you make a mistake. You won’t get lucky next time. We got seriously lucky, I hope you understand that.”

  Harrison nodded.

  “I know. I know I worried you. I’m sorry about that, Leigh. It’s the last thing I wanted. You know that. I know you have plenty to worry about already.”

  He looked contrite and affronted all at once, as if the prospect of needing her help was something he could do without. Leigh wanted to shake him, and hard. She loved his independence and his strength, but she had strength to lend him, too. He should lean on her when he needed to. Why was he so stubborn?

  Would she love him so much isf he weren’t?

  She sighed.

  “Let’s go, Harrison. You have work. So do I. You should call Anna. I texted her as soon as I got you out, but she’ll be worried.”

  Harrison nodded, looking guilty. He knew he should’ve called Anna the moment he’d gotten out, but he’d been far too rattled.

  Harrison did not care for that feeling, not at all.

  He didn’t speak much as Leigh dropped him off at work. He was already making his plans. He didn’t know that Leigh was, too.

  “Darius?”

  “I was hoping you’d call, Ms. Wells! He really is out, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Yes, he is. I need to talk to you, Darius. I hate to do this, but I need your help.”

  “Sure thing. Just name the place.”

  “I need you to have access to your computer and whatever network you use.”

  “Now you’re talking! Meet me here.”

  He rattled off an address that Leigh quickly jotted down.

  “I’ll see you in about half an hour,” said Leigh, and hung up.

  Roger was going to be pissed off about being left alone to handle everything. They’d have to hire a paralegal at this rate. But at least Harrison was one client who could pay their bills, thought Leigh. Of course, Harrison didn’t quite know yet that he was a client, but he was a smart man. Once she’d gotten her hands on the information they needed, it wouldn’t be difficult to convince him that they did need to work together.

  At least, Leigh hoped that her husband had enough good sense to see that and acknowledge it. Right now, it wasn’t his head he was thinking with.

  Leigh hadn’t jumped out and done it without giving him a chance to change his mind, to be fair. She had given him time – she had given him twenty-four whole hours to figure out that Leigh was right, after all. If he had just done the sensible thing and told Leigh what he was doing, it wouldn’t have been a problem at all.

  Instead, she had seen him getting more and more frustrated, and with it more and more stubborn. Whoever they were up against was smarter and wilier, and more prepared, than Harrison seemed to want to give him credit for. If Harrison wouldn’t ask for help, he’d just have to deal with it when he got it given to him.

  Leigh was still arguing with herself when she turned up at the address. It looked like a storage facility, of all things.

  “Yo, Ms. Wells, you’re here. This is my office today.”

  Leigh frowned.

  “I can tap into five different networks with more than a hundred people in them from here. It can’t be traced back to me. I have my own set-up here, too. I’ll make sure everything is encrypted and we use at least five proxies to bounce off our signals. I can tell you, Ms. Wells, I’m really, really
looking forward to this.”

  So he was. Leigh had to smile.

  “I need you to tell me just how you got involved, and what you did, Darius. This is all a little strange to me.”

  It was also strange to see how much like a regular teenager Darius was now. A couple of weeks ago, he had seemed so tense and so afraid, but so defiant and determined to be an adult. Now he looked like he had been promised a joyride.

  “I will. Here, settle down. It’s not much, but…”

  The storage facility, saw Leigh to her surprise, had a couple of chairs, what looked like three laptops, a router, and a few things that she didn’t really recognize. There was also a mini-refrigerator. Leigh took the chair he’d indicated and waited.

  “Now, the explanation. There are forums and then there are forums, Ms. Wells. When somebody starts doing something big, it always leaks. Somebody notices something a little strange, they talk, and finally you can put things together. We knew somebody was planning something. But it’s the strangest thing. We don’t know who. I mean, we don’t often know each other IRL – in real life, I mean.”

  Leigh rolled her eyes at him.

  “I’m not completely clueless. I know that much.”

  “Right, right. Of course you do. But we know each other’s handles. We all have signatures, in how we talk and how we code, the kind of hacking we do. So we can usually recognize each other’s work. But there’s been somebody new lurking. He does some stuff, leaves a message taking responsibility – bragging, really – and then he vanishes. A few weeks later, we see a new handle doing something with a completely different style, but at the end the bragging message they leave after we can’t put it together, that’s the same. We… Well, we set each other challenges sometimes,” said Darius, with a sideways glance at her.

  “Say, we still have lawyer-client confidentiality, don’t we?”

  Leigh grinned.

  “I suppose we do, Darius. Now, what about these challenges?”

  “There’s no harm done. Sometimes we hack in and leave harmless code that does nothing but send a pingback, just to say that we’ve been there. The higher the security of the target, the more difficult the challenge. In the last few months, I saw five involving Harrison Bloom in one way or another. At first, I thought it was him trying to recruit, really. I kind of hoped it was. But it soon looked like somebody was trying to use our little game to find weaknesses. A couple of days ago, I found that somebody did manage to find it. Anyway, I did some digging, and I’m not sure just what was going on. I think I could’ve warned him about the tripwire but I was too late. I wasn’t in his system then, he was in a… Well, you wouldn’t really be interested in that, Ms. Wells, but it was all pretty elaborate.”

  Leigh nodded, her head swimming. He was right that she wouldn’t understand.

  “So you used that virus you were telling me about that day,” guessed Leigh.

  Darius nodded.

  “I needed to do some work on it before I could use it. I needed to change some stuff. So it took me some time. But I made sure that all traces of Harrison Bloom were erased completely from everywhere. And I wiped my own tracks, too. So they shouldn’t have any reason to come after him again. At least, they’ll have reason but they shouldn’t have an excuse.”

  Leigh nodded again as things started to fall into place.

  “It was you, then. That’s why they let him go without charging him. They must’ve been pretty sure that they had him to hold him like they did. Boy, they must have been pretty angry.”

  Darius shrugged.

  “I could hack them and tell you just how angry they were, if you want me to.”

  Leigh shook her head quickly.

  “No. Absolutely not. The fact is, Darius, I shouldn’t be asking you to do anything at all. I’m grateful for what you already did, but I shouldn’t ask you to do more. So feel free to say no. There’s no obligation here. I’m not calling in any favors.”

  “Name it, Ms. Wells.”

  Leigh hesitated, still. She had come there to enlist this young man’s help. But…

  It could get him into so much trouble, all for what? To save Harrison’s pride? Harrison hadn’t even asked for help!

  “Darius…”

  “Tell me. I promise, if I can’t do it, I’ll say so.”

  Leigh nodded, slowly.

  “It looks like Harrison’s network and his servers were hacked. I need you to see if you can figure out what was done, and how – and if you can maybe replicate it.”

  Darius pursed his lips.

  “This is Harrison Bloom we’re talking about. He knows his security.”

  Leigh nodded.

  “Yes, so I hear. And yet somebody broke into his servers and sabotaged him. Worse, they suckered him into following the bait they set out for him. Maybe if we can replicate how it was done, we’ll have an idea of who could’ve done it. If it’s somebody in your hackers’ collective or whatever it is…”

  Darius shook his head firmly.

  “No. We don’t all like Harrison Bloom, but we all have mad respect for him. We’d never do it. But it’s a good idea. And I like the challenge. I’m game.”

  Leigh frowned. Darius’s excitement reminded her of Harrison’s reaction whenever he had a new project on his plate.

  “This isn’t a game, Darius.”

  The young man nodded seriously, but his eyes still shone with delight.

  “I won’t let myself be suckered into any classified shit. Don’t you worry about that. And I’ll cover my tracks. Whatever this bastard did, I can do better,” declared Darius, and Leigh knew that she’d set the ball rolling.

  For better or for worse, she thought, she was involved now. And so was Darius.

  Chapter 7

  “How much longer is this going to take?”

  Darius barely spared her a glance.

  “It’s not like takeout, Ms. Wells. This is like a gourmet meal.”

  Leigh rolled her eyes.

  “How pompous. You might as well call me Leigh, by the way. No point calling me Ms. Wells when we’re stuck in a storage facility.”

  Now Darius did look up, offended.

  “I think it’s cozy.”

  “It is,” she assured the young man, and tried to go back to work. At least she could get some work done while Darius was preparing his gourmet meal. She could only hope that it would be palatable in the end.

  At the very least, she didn’t want food poisoning.

  Or death.

  Damn, now she was really freaking herself out.

  “Wow, he’s good, he’s so good, but I’m better, I’ll show you.”

  Leigh smiled. She couldn’t help it. Darius looked like he was having such fun – like, she had to admit, she did when she found reasons to get her clients out of jail and give them another chance at life.

  Of course, she knew that a few of the people she kept out of jail would go on to commit other crimes instead of straightening themselves out. Leigh knew it was something she couldn’t help. She understood, too, why cops didn’t like defense lawyers. They saw people whose life’s work was to tear at the good work that cops did.

  She could empathize.

  But then, if they didn’t want defense lawyers to get alleged criminals out, they should pay better attention to the law.

  Leigh frowned. She knew why she was following this particular train of thought. It was because of Portia O’Donnell. Why had she even called her? She owed Leigh nothing at all. She definitely owed Harrison nothing.

  “Shit,” said Darius, breaking into her reverie.

  “What? What happened? Are we in trouble? What?”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” muttered Darius as he tapped away furiously at the keyboard. Leigh was left in an agony of impatience, for a whole two minutes as Darius stuck his tongue out to focus better and his fingers flew over the keyboard.

  Leigh tried to take a look at what was going on, but she could make nothing of it. It just made her head hurt.
<
br />   Finally, Darius’s fingers stilled and he looked up.

  “Ms. Wells – I mean, Leigh – your man sure is good at this. Really, it’s too bad he went straight and decided to go legit. I see why he’s a legend. Really, he’s…”

  Leigh huffed an impatient snort.

  “What the hell, you mean we’re not going to have suits screaming down at us?”

  “What? Oh, no. No, of course not. I wouldn’t do anything that stupid. I mean, no disrespect to your man, he wasn’t looking for it. I was. There was something, but it was gone before I could see it. Anyway, it isn’t any suit that caught me. It was your man. He sure is good.”

  Leigh frowned.

  “Harrison caught you? So you’re telling me that that hacker was better than you.”

  Darius shook his head, obviously affronted.

  “He didn’t have this level of security to sneak through. Harrison has upped the game, a lot. You have to really know what’s what to get through now. I got through four levels – three were obvious, but difficult. The fourth was hidden. I thought that was it, but there was a fifth hidden firewall. That’s sneaky, so sneaky. If I’d known it was there, I might’ve been able to get past it, but I tripped it. The entire thing locked down. Now I’d need about two days of work to get through, and even then, I have to say, I can’t be perfectly confident that I could do it. I probably could, but… Shit, shit, shit!”

  Darius’s face was the perfect picture of horror before crystallizing into determination.

  “Oh yeah? I’ll show you. I’ll show you who’s the boss. Bring it on.”

  Leigh watched, a little bewildered and a lot fascinated, as a battle of wits that she couldn’t figure out at all was waged in front of her. She could see every little hard-won victory from Darius, and the whimpers from every loss. After twenty minutes of what felt like a battle sequence from an intergalactic saga, Darius pulled the plug.

  “Wow. Wow, just wow. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that just happened.”

  “What just happened?”

  “He followed me back! Harrison followed me back and took me on. I managed to get out of it and unplug, but if I hadn’t, he would likely have gotten every tiny bit of information about me that even my mother doesn’t know. Seriously, he’s good, Leigh. He’s really, really good. If anybody has a hope of hacking him now, they’d better catch him napping. Seriously, his fail-safes are pretty good, but if he’s online, there’s just nothing anybody can do.”