Strange Tango

by Michelle Dayton

  “Still can’t get over how weird you look.” Geoff shook his head at her. “You’re all...tan.” The word was spit out with distaste.

  Jess rolled her eyes. “I was in Florida for four months with my brother. It’s sunny there.” Andrew, the youngest sibling, hadn’t shared the view held by her three other brothers and her father, that the firing and scandal were definitely her fault. She still couldn’t believe how much it stung when they hadn’t listened to her version of events. She hadn’t even seen them since she returned. She was pretty sure they wished she’d stayed in Sarasota.

  Geoff wasn’t impressed with her defense. “Skinny too.” With a meaningful glance at the cash register on the corner of the bar, he slid her a menu.

  “Subtle,” Jess said. “Fine. I’ll take some crispy pickles.” Her stomach grumbled and she couldn’t blame it. She’d eaten dinner, but that had been hours ago and she’d gone for a five-mile run along the lake today. Geoff was right about her weight loss.

  It wasn’t a vanity thing. She just had a lot of time on her hands and a lot of depression and rage to burn off.

  But now she had another outlet to handle some of that rage. A frisson of excitement ran down her spine. She pulled out her own wireless hotspot and connected to it. AJ’s had free wireless, but she could never do what she was doing on someone else’s network. Time to see what my little worm dug up.

  As a sliver of guilt joined the excitement, Jess squirmed on her stool and took a deep breath. No more stalling. She’d spent all day Sunday waffling before finally deciding that it was too late to turn back now. She’d already committed the illegal act, and it wasn’t exactly the first. In her months of unemployment and desperation to understand what had happened to her, she’d helped herself electronically to some private information. But this felt different. Ignatius had been an essential part of her life for so long. Invading it now felt...dirty. She’d stolen access and uploaded a series of bugs to the University’s network, for God’s sake. But looking at the data now was just the crescendo of her crimes; the damage had already been done.

  She still couldn’t quite believe she’d actually pulled it off. With a little help. Jess frowned into her coffee. Technically she’d been caught. The frown turned into a reluctant smile. Caught, yes, but by the best-looking man she’d ever seen. And he hadn’t been appalled, or even that surprised. In fact, he seemed to think she was up to something even more nefarious.

  Thank goodness she’d noticed the staff exit from the ballroom earlier in the evening. Once she saw the keycard go back into Jerome’s pocket with her own eyes, she’d fled into the kitchen. She pretended to be lost and tipsy until a busboy took pity on her and put her on the staff elevator to the first floor, where he walked her out the back entrance.

  Sorry, Michael Collins, or whatever your name is. As much as she’d been tempted to stay right where he commanded, she needed to escape. He couldn’t know who she actually was or her entire plan would go right down the toilet. Hell, forget the plan. He could report her to the police and she’d go to jail.

  Why had she admitted her keycard theft to him anyway? Sure, he’d seen her do it. But she could have ignored his questions. She could have walked away. Why had she opened up to him? Something to do with the twinkle in his eyes and the faint lines around them, she decided. He clearly knew what he was doing and maybe that experience, combined with his utter lack of judgment was what made her let down her guard. Stupid? Maybe. But ultimately the right call since he helped her return the keycard. And ultimately harmless, since she was able to escape.

  She couldn’t help but wonder about his abrupt change in behavior in those last few seconds. Almost the entire time they’d been talking, he was light-hearted, teasing. But when he saw Jerome with Seymour and the mysterious Maurice Knoll, his entire demeanor changed. The amused, flirtatious persona vanished, replaced with a look of single-minded intensity.

  It was truly unfortunate she needed to flee. Because on his face, intensity looked even better than amusement.

  Her laptop beeped, indicating that it was finished running her custom encryption programs. She glanced around, noting the few other patrons at the far end of the bar. “Geoff, I’m moving,” she called, pointing to a booth in the corner. She needed her laptop screen facing the wall. It was just too risky.

  Geoff acknowledged her with a nod of his head, and she made the move. With a quick prayer for forgiveness, she raised her fingers over her keyboard, prepared to bring up the browser that would lead her to the Dark Web.

  She didn’t hear his footsteps. One moment it seemed that she was very alone in the dark corner of the bar. The next, he was standing next to her table, those electric-blue eyes roving over every inch of her face. Her hands froze in the air.

  “Hello, Blondie.”

  Chapter Three

  Adam wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he expected from Saturday’s blonde woman in the white dress—who was currently neither blonde nor wearing a white dress.

  If he was being perfectly honest with himself, he was hoping her reaction would be some sort of thrilled, seductive smile. But a more realistic one would have been a gasp, maybe even a small shriek. After all, she probably thought she’d made a clean escape on Saturday, leaving no trace of her true identity.

  But she didn’t smile. She didn’t gasp or shriek. She didn’t even widen her eyes.

  All she did was shut her laptop with a loud snap and say, “Not sure that’s really an appropriate nickname anymore.”

  Her dry, almost dour, comment surprised a laugh out of him. No, “Blondie” certainly did not represent her true appearance. Tonight, her hair—her real hair—was a thick chestnut brown, pulled into a long, messy braid that hung down the back of an ancient Cubs fleece.

  Uninvited, he sat down across from her. “You must win a lot of poker games.”

  She shrugged, watching him carefully with those huge brown eyes. “I learned early in my career that you get further if you under-react to problems.”

  He’d learned the same lesson himself. “Very true,” he granted, not surprised that she considered his reappearance to be a problem. Now that he knew who she was, he’d realized she wasn’t in his line of work at all. She was just an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. But maybe that had changed after last fall. Whatever she’d been doing on Saturday night was clearly not aboveboard.

  A weathered-looking man with faded red hair plopped a plate of steaming grease on the table while giving Adam an undisguised look of hostility. Adam heard him say, “You okay?” to her under his breath.

  She answered just as quietly. “For now.”

  Adam cleared his throat. “We’ll have two bourbons on the rocks. Doubles.” Before she could protest, he said, “You’re eating fried pickles with coffee. Disgusting.”

  That tugged a little smile out of her. In an instant, he memorized the deep dimple in her right cheek. The wig had hidden that part of her face. “He’s paying, so make it Angel’s Envy,” she said to the red-haired man, who just grunted and disappeared.

  She pulled the plate of fried pickles closer and leaned over it to smell it, closing her eyes. He welcomed the quick opportunity to study her unguarded face.

  He’d never admit it, but he hadn’t actually recognized her at first when she walked in. He’d been staking out her apartment since early evening, trying to figure out the best way to remake her acquaintance. Knocking on her door offended him with its lack of creativity. Breaking into her apartment probably would have scared her. He’d been pondering it over a drink...and then she’d walked into the bar.

  He still couldn’t believe that he’d been checking out the attractive brunette—before realizing it was her. Sheesh, it was too bad that she wasn’t in his line of work. She would have been quite an asset. There weren’t many stunning chameleons out there. Usually, if a woman was beautiful, she was
too recognizable and easily remembered. If a woman was too much of a chameleon, she needed a lot of props to make her super-attractive when that kind of thing was needed.

  But this woman, Jessica, he reminded himself, was that rare unicorn. She’d looked beautiful as a blonde socialite on Saturday, and she looked beautiful tonight with no makeup on and wearing clothes that were two sizes too big. The kicker was that she didn’t look like the same woman—a huge bonus in his business. Of course, to really disguise herself properly, she’d need to work on hiding her eyes. To someone who was really looking, they were her Achilles heel.

  He’d gotten extremely lucky with her inexperience and with the photograph in the Tribune, he suddenly realized. As she looked up from her pickles, he marveled at the dark fringe around her eyes. “Those aren’t your real eyelashes, are they?”

  She snorted and picked up one of the fried spears. “You think I wear false lashes to my neighborhood pub?” She bit the end of the spear, threw it back on her plate and then tugged at her eyelashes hard enough for him to tear up in sympathy. Damn, they were real.

  The red-haired man returned and plunked down the glasses of whiskey.

  “I’ll be right at the bar,” he said to her, but glaring at Adam. Groaning inwardly, Adam wished he’d just broken into her apartment. The bartender clearly had a fatherly interest in the woman, which made him look just a little too closely at Adam. Years of training had taught Adam to fly under the radar, but no Papa Bear would ignore a 6’3” stranger buying a young woman shots of whiskey. Stupid.

  “I suppose you know my real name?” She asked.

  Back to business. “Jessica Elaine Hughes,” he said, tapping his glass of bourbon against hers, which still sat on the table. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Are you sticking with Michael Collins?”

  He should have. She shouldn’t know about any of his other identities. But he couldn’t. Prior to staking out her house earlier tonight, he’d been meeting with one of his hackers. A guy so paranoid that he had a bodyguard frisk Adam every single time they met—and then run his identity to make sure he hadn’t been arrested since their last meeting. To the hacker, Adam was “Thomas Paine” so that’s the driver’s license and credit cards he was carrying. He didn’t think she could lift his wallet, but his gut told him not to underestimate her.

  “Tonight I’m Thomas Paine.”

  She lifted one dark eyebrow. “Another revolutionary. How appropriate. Didn’t Paine write, ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’...well. You’re certainly trying my soul.”

  A sharp laugh bubbled right out of his chest. How did she keep doing that? “Clever girl.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down, abruptly showing her hand. Her bravado was hiding a fair amount of fear. “Not clever enough. How did you find me?”

  He kept his tone light, not wanting to scare her. He wouldn’t scare her until it was absolutely necessary. “Blondie, you’ve had your picture in the newspaper,” he chided. “When I did a little Google-ing, there you were.”

  It hadn’t been quite that easy. But it hadn’t been that hard either. Given her behavior at the ball, she was clearly associated in some way with Ignatius University. After she’d fled, he made some careful inquiries and learned that the gray-haired man she’d been careful to stay away from was Seymour Davies, the Chief Information Officer of the University.

  Typing a combination of the University name, Davies’ name, and descriptors like “young,” “woman,” “attractive,” into the search engine had led him to a flood of articles about an uproar at the University last fall. Jessica Hughes, a reputed computer genius and the youngest VP in the history of the University, had been suspected of masterminding an identity theft ring.

  Davies claimed that she’d been illegally collecting and planning to sell the social security numbers of the students, faculty, and staff...when he’d become suspicious, discovered her plan, and shut it down. She’d been fired immediately. “We’ll be prosecuting her to the fullest extent of the law,” Davies announced to the Trib.

  But they didn’t. She’d never even been arrested. In a follow-up article, Davies sadly explained that, “Jessica is a gifted technologist. She’s covered her tracks and erased the evidence I found. We currently have nothing tangible to offer the DA. Except, of course, a warning about her overall character. It makes me sad that such a bright young woman with a long career ahead of her turned out to be so reckless and amoral.”

  Adam had read the articles with growing incredulity. Given her hard-working history and intellect, the claims against her made no sense. If someone with her level of computer skill wanted to make money through illegal means, she would never do what Davies accused her of. It was too easily traced back to the University. If she was truly as smart and amoral as Davies described, she could have been making a hell of a lot more money doing other illegal activities. He winced, considering the wad of cash he’d just forked over to his hacker.

  One of the articles featured a photograph of her being escorted out of a University office building by campus security. A grim-faced guard in uniform gripped each of her elbows. It was this photograph that strengthened Adam’s suspicion that something else was going on here, that she’d been framed.

  No organization wants a photo of a senior staff member being led out of their offices. It’s terrible publicity. Getting her out of the building would have been done quietly, with as little fanfare as possible. Even if the story had to come out, a picture is always a thousand times worse. And the one of Jessica Hughes was a doozy. It didn’t even look like a candid, which told Adam that the photographer had been tipped off with plenty of time to get in place and frame the shot. Jessica was centered in the photo, with the stern guards at each side. Wearing a simple black suit, her shoulders were back, her chin up. The expression on her face was a mixture of anger and confusion.

  In the newspaper photo, she didn’t look much like either the blonde socialite or the woman now sitting across from him. She’d been paler, her face rounder and softer. Her hair had been darker, shorter, and slightly curly.

  Oh, but those eyes. Staring straight into the camera, her dark eyes were huge and defiant. He’d recognized them in an instant.

  So here they were. She accepted his comment about the newspaper photo with a sad bow of her head. She pushed away the plate of pickles, pulled the glass of bourbon closer.

  What had happened to the defiance, he wondered. He guessed that it had translated into whatever shenanigans she got up to with the keycard, but he was a little surprised she hadn’t gone with a legal option first. If she was innocent she could have fought back with an employment lawyer.

  Adam enjoyed a long swallow of Angel’s Envy. She had good taste in bourbon. “Why do you think they made up the story about the identify theft? Why did they need you to be fired?”

  Jessica’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Wow. He’d actually managed to demolish her poker face. A little strange that it was his belief in her innocence that finally managed to shake her composure, but people were strange. He took a moment to relish in her shock before cocking his head and waggling his eyebrows. “Well, Blondie, any theories?”

  She blinked at him three times. It was fun watching her catch up.

  But then, she licked her lips, and sucked the full bottom one into her mouth. Which quickly erased any feelings of condescension. And concentration. Possibly because all of the blood in his head began to drain south.

  “I do have a theory,” she said. “I think it has to do with Maurice Knoll.”

  And...the blood began to flow north again. His pulse beat faster. I knew it. “Go on.”

  * * *

  Jess struggled to keep her voice even and her thoughts proceeding in a linear fashion, when all they wanted to do was circle around these two questions: What the hell was happening? Who was t
his guy?

  She didn’t let herself get stuck. She needed to stay sharp, hyper-focused. He was gorgeous and charming, but she recognized the undercurrents of his vibe tonight. Hell, she had four good-looking and charming brothers; she recognized most male vibes.

  He wanted something from her—and it wasn’t sex.

  Or at least, not only sex.

  She’d seen his brief pupil dilation when she licked her lips. Good. Knowing her identity, he had the upper hand in whatever game he was playing. Even if he hadn’t pushed it in her face yet, her instincts told her it was coming. She needed any weapon in her arsenal.

  “Normally when a new Board member is appointed, they’re given an alphanumeric ID,” she explained. “Everyone associated with the University has one. Mine was jhughes13, for example. Maurice Knoll’s was mknoll25. I’m responsible—I mean, I was—responsible for all of the security of our campus systems,” she said, flushing. “I took the responsibility very seriously. Aside from the normal protocols and systems in place, I also wrote my own security audit programs. Board members are generally given a University email address and basic network access so that they can pull their PowerPoint slides when they’re on campus for quarterly meetings and stuff. But that’s it. They don’t get access to anything else.”

  She paused, remembering the first time her audit logs had alerted her to Knoll’s unusual system access. “My security programs detected that Knoll’s ID had been granted admin-level access to every single system the University has. It was absolutely bizarre. He would have been able to do everything from admitting a student, to changing grades, to stopping employee paychecks from being processed, to viewing the campus at night through security cameras. No one outside of system administrators has that much access.” She paused to make sure he was following.

  Not only was he following, he was way ahead of her. “Putting aside the question for now of why Knoll would have wanted that much access, isn’t setting it all up under his own ID kind of stupid?”