by Remy Richard
He turned and strolled away while she tried to get her gumption back. “Of course, if you really wanted to keep an eye on me, you’d let me take a shower with you.”
Holden tossed a grin over his shoulder as he pulled jeans and a dark blue pullover out of his dresser. “You’re that hard up to see the equipment huh?”
Sabrina was so startled by the off-color comment that she couldn’t help the laugh that busted out of her.
He pointed at her sternly. “Stay still.”
She gave him a mock salute and pouted a little after he closed the door behind him. She was forever on the wrong side of a door from that man.
As the shower started, she leaned her head back on the chair and tried to figure out where she had lost control of the conversation. Probably somewhere around when he had accused her of not being a good con. The shame of it was he was partly right. Mike had taught her everything that he deemed it important for a woman to know. Self-defense, breaking and entering, a little bit of old school safe cracking, and of course, the cons that had been passed onto him by his mentor. A sincere smile and a pretty face could be more forceful weapons than a gun or a knife any day.
Although Mike had put the time and effort into training her, he had always been reluctant to let her go out on her own. Frankly she had been surprised that he’d even referred her for this job. He generally kept her away from the rougher characters.
The door to the bathroom opened and released a cloud of steamy air. Sabrina drew in a deep breath and recognized the musky scent that was all Holden. He ambled out with his clothes on, unfortunately, and a towel draped around his neck. He hadn’t taken the time to shave and he looked really good with a day’s stubble. More dangerous, dare she even say sexier, than with a smooth face. If he traded in the pullover for a tight black t-shirt she might even fantasize about the two of them together.
The thought made her unexpectedly sad so she brushed it off quickly and stood up. “See, right where you left me,” she said with arms spread wide.
He grinned at her in the way that apparently now sent her insides fluttering. “Well, I’ve taken all of the time I had locked in my cell to make a decision,” she said to cover her reaction.
He raised his eyebrows in question.
“I’m going to do the best I can to help you find these guys.” When he started in surprise, she shrugged a shoulder, not wanting to look like too much of a goody-goody. “After all, my best chance of surviving and thriving is for them to be jammed up with the police. So I’ll help and then you’ll let me walk away…right?”
Holden nodded jerkily and after a few seconds he put his hand out. She stared at it before sliding her hand into his grasp. With purpose, they shook on the deal. “I promise,” he said in a low voice.
“Great.” Sabrina stared up into his eyes as the grip on her hand turned less business-like and became gentler. She could feel herself being towed in, both by the look in his eyes and the grasp on her hand. Her breath caught in her throat as his thumb slipped between their clasped hands and started to rub the palm of her hand. Slow, erotic circles that made her knees weak.
When she was about two seconds and one bad decision away from throwing her body against his, her stomach started to growl in hunger. She pulled her hand away and slapped it over her stomach while he chuckled.
“I did say I would feed you, didn’t I? I guess I should start with keeping promises I’ve already made.” He made to lead her from the room and then stopped suddenly to face her again. “Sabrina, if you need help…”
She felt her face heating up. Suddenly he’d become very much more dangerous to her, lack of black t-shirt notwithstanding. It had been years since someone had offered to help her. Probably since Mike had taken her under his wing. Just the offer was heady so it didn’t even bear thinking about how she would feel if he actually followed through. Which wouldn’t happen, because she didn’t need anyone’s help.
She forced a smile. “Hey, I know that I’m super adorable and that I’ve been sitting and staying for you like a brand new puppy but don’t get confused. I’m not a victim; I’m just in a tight spot.” She patted his arm reassuringly. “Soon enough I’ll be out of your hair forever. Don’t sweat it.”
He nodded slowly, but didn’t look happy about it.
“Now, what are we going to have for breakfast?”
***
“Cereal? Really?” Holden covered a smile as Sabrina watched him pour her a bowl of cereal with as much distaste as if it were a bowl of Brussels sprouts. He wasn’t sure why he thought so, but he was fairly certain she wasn’t a vegetable kind of girl.
“Hey, I offered you a lovely selection of five different kinds of cereal. It’s not my fault you refused to choose for yourself. That’s why you get shredded wheat. You could have had frosted cocoa bombs but you opted out,” he pointed out logically.
Sabrina settled herself on a stool across the bar and propped her chin up on her hand. Almost eye to eye, he could see the circles under hers. A twinge of guilt went through him at the sight, but it couldn’t be all his fault. He’d trapped her in a bedroom all day, after all. Who would have known she wouldn’t have taken advantage of the bed more?
His mind started a full Technicolor movie of Sabrina taking advantage of a bed. Sprawled out with just a sheet to cover her, moonlight blond hair spread out over a pillow, and a lock on the door keeping both of them trapped. Realizing that was a very bad direction, Holden shook his head and tried to concentrate on Sabrina’s complaints.
“I was thinking more along the lines of bacon, eggs, toast, pancakes. What time does your housekeeper get here?” she asked, pushing the bowl of cereal he handed to her back toward him.
Holden left her bowl where it was and started to pour himself a bowl of frosted cocoa bombs. The cereal had originally been purchased for Lila but he’d quickly gained an affinity for the sugary snack. Probably not the most nutritionally responsible breakfast, but he had a sense that he would need the sugar rush to deal with Sabrina today.
“I imagine she’s up already. A very regimented woman, my housekeeper,” he said, answering her original question.
“Great, then she can whip us up something better than this.”
“She could, if she were coming in today.”
“What?”
“I gave her the day off,” he admitted. “Actually, Sam and I sent everyone home. Housekeepers, the two other security guards, I even cancelled the second day of the lawn service.”
“Why’s that? Afraid they might find out you’re holding a hostage?” She looked entirely too smug for his piece of mind.
“No, one second with you and they would have agreed that keeping you away from the rest of humanity was for the greater good.” He smiled while she huffed and crossed her arms petulantly. “Truthfully, I was worried you’d con one of them into doing something they shouldn’t. So I’m really protecting them from you.”
Rather than getting mad like he intended, Sabrina uncrossed her arms and sat up straighter, her eyes glowing. “Really? Then you don’t think I’m so bad at what I do, after all!”
“Well…I’m not sure I’d really phrase it like—” She cut off his surprised stutters.
“That’s really the nicest thing you’ve said to me.” She batted her eyes at him a couple of times.
He tipped his head to the side, trying to figure out if she was being serious or not.
She merely grinned at him and reached across the counter to pull his bowl of cereal to her. “If I’m going to cooperate, and I can’t have a proper breakfast, I’m at least going to get the good cereal.”
Obligingly, he allowed her to take his bowl and dug into her now soggy but much healthier shredded wheat. And tried not to think jealous thoughts about how good his cocoa bombs would taste. “So, you’ve got the good cereal. Give me the breakdown.”
“On what?” she asked. He had a mouth full of cereal so he just pinned her with a glare and made a motion with his spoon.
&
nbsp; “Oh, my accomplices as you call them,” she said before taking a moment to gather her thoughts. “Well, you have to understand that I only met with them three times, and one of those times was when I overheard their Plan B and booked it out of there, so I’m a bit fuzzy on the details. There were three men, Harry, George and Stiles.”
“Probably not their real names,” Holden observed.
“As their good friend Sabrina can attest, probably not.” She flashed him a quick grin. “Anyway, the first time we met they were just feeling me out. The second time they explained that they were bringing me in because they had tried to break into your server, but it could only be done from your one laptop computer. They had also tried to break in to the actual house, also with negative results. So my job was to pull a version of the sweetheart scam and get in here.”
Sabrina paused and took a big bite of cocoa bombs. Holden waited patiently for her to continue. “Nice job on keeping your server locked down by the way. I know it’s your specialty and all, but it’s still effective. It must make it difficult to access your porn though,” she said with a smirk.
He grinned back. “Nah, I use Sam’s computer for that.”
She shook her head before giving into a deep laugh. He watched with pleasure as she let loose.
After a few moments, she pulled herself together and picked up her spoon and her story. “I know I made it seem like I was going to steal the actual program but all I needed to do was put a flash drive with a virus into your computer. Getting in here and then waiting for you to go to the bathroom and leave me alone for five minutes is all it would have taken.”
Holden picked up the thread of her explanation. “With the virus in my computer they could have installed a key stroke monitoring software or set up a program to open a backdoor to all sorts of hacking. I would have found it eventually, but not before they would have gotten a fair amount, if not all of my work on the program.” He thought about it as he pushed the last few shredded wheat clusters around inside of his bowl. “Dare I ask what the sweetheart scam is?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. Make the mark fall in love, or if not love then at least lust, with you. Keys to the castle, baby.”
He regarded her seriously and asked the question he was most dreading the answer to, “Are you already running it on me?”
Her big hazel eyes widened, more green now for some reason, maybe because of the purple bags under her eyes. “Why? Do you feel like you’re falling for me?”
“That’d be a pretty dumb thing to do, wouldn’t it?” he retorted, avoiding the question, unable to answer it for her or himself.
“It would,” she said, and he thought she seemed a little sad. “It really would.” She shook her head and turned the conversation back to business. “From what I could tell, Harry is the muscle, George is the hacker and Stiles is the brains. If I could get in here and install the virus I would get ten percent of the take.”
“Ten percent seems low.”
Sabrina shrugged. “It was low risk work. Plus, I didn’t put in nearly the planning time they did.”
“It doesn’t sound like they did much planning at all, honestly,” Holden scoffed.
“Don’t kid yourself. The fact that they know you’re working on the program at all is the result of months of putting ears to the ground and finding the right sources of information.”
Holden acknowledged her point with a nod of his head as he put both of their cereal bowls in the dishwasher. “Here’s what I don’t understand, why do they even want the program in the first place? It’s not like these bioprinting machines grow on trees.”
“They never said, but I would guess that they either already have a machine or they’ve gotten their hands on the patent schematics.” She paused as another possibility came to her. “Or they’ve been hired by a competing company. Industrial espionage is really a growth market these days.” She shrugged as if she didn’t care which scenario was true.
“So great. What are they going to do with that? Manufacture and distribute them to hospitals and clinics? It’s a great machine, but it’s intended to create new skin to graft onto burn patients or to create clean bone marrow. Don’t tell me, your friends are planning on going into the black market for organs?”
Sabrina shook her head in despair. “You have no imagination. That black market organ thing is pretty good though. Think about it. Who, more than criminals, would want a way to change their fingerprints or even to add tissue to their face to make it appear different?”
“So they would want the bio-printer to change their help evade capture?” Holden mused.
“Sure, imagine if you could implant fully functioning blood vessels holding different DNA into your body or if you could create a contact lens that would allow you to pass a retinal scan. The possibilities are endless.” She paused to let that sink in. “And of course, just like your program would help health care practitioners to create the tissue and organs within private hospitals without major computer coding knowledge, it would also help criminals to do the same thing.”
“Running the machines would still require a measure of technological savvy. Not to mention medical know how,” he pointed out.
“Granted, but a lot less than trying to make every molecule code from scratch. That’s what your program does, right? Takes the information garnered from DNA and other cells and tells the machine what the right mix of molecules should be to create a new sample of tissue.”
Holden nodded. “The amazing thing is that the algorithm simply tells the machine what and how many cells to print, nature takes over and the different cell types migrate on their own to the position that they are supposed to hold in the tissue. It’s truly an amazing blend of science and nature.”
He stopped himself when he saw the smile on Sabrina’s face. “What I mean to say, is that it’s an amazing machine that will change the face of modern medicine. Organotech believes that it could be seeing the first human trials as soon as 2015.”
“And you’re part of that,” she said softly. He could almost imagine that she seemed a tiny bit proud of him. But that way lay danger. He couldn’t afford to think of her as anything other than what she was: a con artist. Revealing the plan had forced him to remember that he couldn’t trust her or his own feelings about her.
“And you’re part of trying to steal it.”
She at least had the grace to blush. “If it wasn’t me, it would just be someone else. There’s no such thing as an invention or a person that can’t be manipulated.”
“Why isn’t it someone else?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You claim not to know anything about these men. How did you get involved with this?”
“Mike hooked me up with them.” Realizing that he didn’t know who Mike was, she elaborated. “Mike was my…mentor for lack of a better word. He taught me everything I needed to know about conning. He kind of acts as a liaison, bringing people with specific skills together for a final cut of the take. When Stiles ran into trouble and needed a grifter, he called Mike, who in turn called me.” She looked around the kitchen alertly. “Do you have any juice or something?”
Holden walked to the other side of the kitchen to collect a glass and a jug of orange juice from the refrigerator. He poured her a glass and pushed it across the counter, watching as she took a healthy sip. Considering.
“What?” she asked, squirming uncomfortably under his stare.
“You’re very intelligent, you know,” he stated slowly.
She smiled thinly. “And you want to know why I chose to become a con artist when I could have done so much else?”
He nodded, thinking that he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“You have no concept about what choices actually are,” she said scornfully. “Conning is the family business. My family was always moving around, I missed school more often than I attended. Then, when I was old enough to realize that school might actually be important to me one day, my paren
ts skipped town and left me behind. They’d gotten caught up in a score that was too hot to handle. After that, I was a little preoccupied with clothing and feeding myself to worry about perfect attendance. I don’t have any transcripts or a credit history. There’s no one to support me while I go to college, even if I could get in. So what are my actual options, Holden? Work my way up to management at Target? Get a job in a factory and get laid off when they outsource the jobs to China?”
She shook her head and drained her glass of juice while his heart ached for her. She was right, he may not have had an ideal childhood, but they’d never had to worry about food on the table or a roof over their heads.
His mouth was moving before he had a chance to think about what to say. “Sabrina, I know you already said no, but I’m willing to help you when this is all over.”
She smiled at him sadly and got up to cross to his side of the counter. “I know you think you are.” She patted his cheek lightly. “But I also know that you don’t think I’m good enough to meet your sister. You’re worried that I’ll corrupt her and you should be. I don’t need saving, Holden. I’ve been saving myself for a long time now. Don’t let it worry you.”
She turned and started to walk away. Holden put a hand out to stop her. “Where are you going?”
She didn’t face him. “Back to my cell. I’ll try to write down as much as I remember about Stiles and the rest of them. Try not to lock me in this time please.”
He remained silent as she left the room. He knew she was right…about it all. But he couldn’t seem to stop himself from wanting to help her. From wanting to save her.
She was right about that too though. If he was her white knight, she was in bigger trouble than she knew.
Chapter Seven
Holden headed back toward Sabrina’s room with a mixture of eagerness and dread. Dylan had come over after lunch, informing him that he and Conner had decided that the situation was too volatile to be left up to Holden alone, so they had agreed to switch off days until the matter was solved. Which meant that Dylan was in the living room and had no plans to leave no matter how many times Holden assured him that everything was under control.
