And there was no question but that this was an honest-to-goodness date.
Of course, this was the guy who’d cut his teeth on breaking into the Department of Defense’s network. Who was he, this man who ran in such high-profile circles but appreciated simple things? A man who worried so deeply about his brother, even as he pretended to cut himself off from deeper feelings with a carefree attitude?
Troy was getting to her, in spite of all her wary instincts shouting out for self-preservation. She wanted for once to find out the yearnings of her heart could be trusted.
She leaned in to smell a camellia. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” His thumb caressed the inside of her wrist.
“Really?” She glanced sideways at him through her lashes. “Doesn’t everyone ask you about it?”
He brushed an intimate kiss along her ear. “Why did I break into the Department of Defense’s computer system?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you already.” His mouth flirted closer to the corner of her lips. “I was bored.”
“I’m not buying it.” She spoke against his mouth.
“Then you tell me. Why do you think I did it?” Pulling back, he held her eyes as firmly as he held her hand.
She studied him for a second before answering honestly. “I think you want me to say something awful so you can get pissed off.”
“Why the hell would I do that?” He scowled.
“And yet, you’re getting pissed anyway, which gives you a convenient wall between us.” She tapped the furrows in his forehead.
He backed her against a roped-off area. “You want more? Walls down, total openness and everything that comes with that?”
“You’ll only find out if you answer.” She smoothed aside the long hair on his forehead, his normally cool-guy ’do pushed down by his ball cap. “If you don’t want to tell me the real reason, just say so, but it’s unrealistic to think people—especially people close to you—wouldn’t want to know.”
“You’re close to me?” He linked both arms around her, bringing her closer.
“Aren’t I?” Butterflies filled her stomach as she thought about how close she wanted to get, how deeply she wanted to trust Troy.
His arms fell away and he backed away a step. “Okay, fine…” He whipped off the cap and thrust his hands through his hair before jamming the hat on his head again. “Everyone says I had this altruistic reason for what I did, but honest to God, I was unsupervised, spoiled and pissed off at my parents for not—hell, I don’t know.”
“You did it to get their attention.” An image of him as a boy started to take shape, one that tugged at her heart. She suspected there was more to the story but that he was only going to tell her at his own pace.
“I wasn’t five.” He steered her out of the way of an older couple snapping photos of flowers, touching her with such ease, as if they were lovers. “I was fifteen.”
“But you weren’t an adult.”
“Lucky for me or I’d have been in prison.” He stuffed his hands in his suit pockets. “Hell, if I’d done the same thing today, even as a teen, I wouldn’t have gotten off so easy.”
“So the brotherhood, the guys like you at the military high school, they were really more of the family you never had.”
Defensiveness eased from his shoulders. “They were.”
“The casino owner? He’s a brother?”
“What do you think?”
Her mind skipped to the obvious question. “What did he do?”
He hesitated for an instant before shrugging those broad shoulders that endlessly drew her eyes. “It’s public knowledge anyway. Remember the big fluctuation in the stock market a little over seventeen years ago?”
“No kidding?” She gasped. She’d only been about ten at the time, but her teachers had used it in a lesson plan on government and economics. Newscasters and economists still referred to it on occasion. “That was him?”
She sank down on a park bench as other tourists milled past.
“He accessed his father’s account, invested money, made a crapton. So his dad let him keep right on investing.” He sat beside her, his warm thigh pressing against hers. “But when he caught a couple of his dad’s friends assaulting his sister…”
“He crashed the friend’s business?”
Troy stretched his arm along the bench, touching her, taking part in more universal dating rituals. “He did. And once he was in the system, he uncovered a cesspool of companies using child laborers overseas. The press lauded him as a hero, but he never considered himself one since his initial intent was revenge.”
“So even though what he did was wrong, he had an emotionally intense reason for it, as did you.”
“Don’t try to glorify what we did. Any of us. We all broke the law. We were all criminals heading down a dark path that would have only gotten darker if we hadn’t gotten caught.” He tugged a lock of her hair, bringing it close to his face and inhaling. “There was this one guy—a musical prodigy—whose parents sent him to reform school instead of to drug rehab.”
She turned on the bench, sliding her hand under his suit jacket to press against his heart. “That had to be painful for you to see, because of your brother.”
He didn’t answer, just stared back at her with those jewel-tone green eyes, and she wondered if he would kiss her just to end the conversation. She wouldn’t stop him.
Then something niggled in the back of her brain. “I think what you did had something to do with your brother.”
He looked down and away.
“Troy?” She cupped his face and urged him to look at her again. “Troy?”
“My brother failed out of college, enlisted in the army, then got busted and sent to jail.” He held up a hand. “I’m not defending Devon. What he did was wrong. But there were others in his unit dealing, and two of them got off because their dads were generals.”
Her heart broke over the image of a younger brother dispensing justice for his older brother.
“Once I got into the system, I stumbled on other…problems…and I decided I might as well do a thorough job while I was in there.”
“Wow…” She sagged back. “You sure set the world on its ear.”
“The irony of it all? My dad used his influence to keep me from serving time.” He bolted to his feet. “Time’s up. We need to head back to the airport.”
He didn’t take her hand this time. Just clasped her elbow and guided her back out of the gardens. His expression said it all.
Date over. There would be no kiss at the door. And honestly, as vulnerable as she felt right now, she could use a little emotional distance herself.
* * *
On a plane leaving Lyon, France, Troy knew he should be pleased with how his meeting had gone today with Salvatore at Interpol Headquarters. His plans were falling into place. Hillary was safe. The world believed they were sharing a romantic week in Monte Carlo. No one except the colonel and Conrad knew about their true destination as they flew through the night sky.
Costa Rica.
They would be there by sunrise. He should be pleased, but still he felt restless. Unsettled.
Hillary was snoozing in the sleeping compartment. The transferable pod made his location less traceable as he came and left in different crafts, while still having all of his personal comforts available.
He preferred his life simple, although he couldn’t miss the excitement in Hillary’s eyes over dining in France. She’d told him from the start that she’d chosen her job to get away from her rural roots, that she was looking for glamour and big-city excitement. He could give her that, and he wanted to. Although he could do without more soul-searching, like what they’d done in the gardens. But he also wondered how she would feel about his more scaled back lifestyle in Costa Rica. He knew his life was not what anyone would call simple, but amidst the travel and business, he preferred things to be…less pretentious, less complicated.
Maybe those da
ys in the military school had left an imprint on him in ways he hadn’t thought about before. At the academy, all he’d had was a bunk, a locker trunk and his friends. He’d lived that way even after leaving school and growing his hair again, even with clothes as far from a military school uniform as he could make them. He’d kept his world Spartan, when it came to letting new people into his life. Until now.
Right now, he felt like that fifteen-year-old kid whose life had been turned upside down, leaving him on shaky ground as he figured out who to trust.
* * *
Troy tossed his uniform hat on the bottom bunk along with his day planner, pissed off, as usual, and he was only six months into his sentence. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked Conrad, who was pretending to be asleep.
Conrad called from the top bed. “You’re blowing my cover.”
“What cover?”
“That I missed formation because I fell asleep,” he said, his voice echoing in the barracks, which were empty other than one other guy who actually was snoozing. “What’s your excuse for blowing off a mandatory formation?”
“I got my ass handed to me in trig class today. Just didn’t have the stomach to get ripped again by Salvatore because of imaginary spots on my brass buckle.”
Conrad extended an arm with his spiral notebook, marked Trigonometry. “Be my guest. Can’t help you with the buckle, though.”
“Thanks.”
Conrad dropped the book and Troy caught it in midair, accepting it without hesitation. He’d helped Conrad out last week with hacking into a news site for stock returns. The limited computer access hadn’t been quite as tight as they’d claimed. Except in one realm. “How is it that I can get into any system except where they keep their tests?”
“Uh, hello, they know you’re here.” His arm arced down and he swatted Troy with a pillow. “They must be paying Bill Gates a fortune to keep that out of reach.”
“Funny.” Not. It was frustrating being confined to this place. He flopped back and started thumbing through Conrad’s notes. Notes that were damn near Greek. “Must be nice being a friggin’ math genius.”
“If I was a genius I wouldn’t have gotten caught. I would be at some after-homecoming dance getting blown by a debutante who gets off on the fact that my old man is rich enough to buy me a Porsche for my sixteenth birthday.”
“I think you wanted to get found out.”
Conrad ducked his head to the side, looking down. “You think I wanted this? You’re nuts. Why did you do it?”
“I’m not sure. ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’s’ attention instead of a new toy? Fame and recognition? Who knows? The court-appointed shrink just says I’m antisocial.” And how damn weird was it that now, here, he finally had a real friend. “How did you get caught?”
“I let a female knock me off my game. I got sloppy. It’s my own fault. Women have always been my weakness. Take it from me, man. Never let a woman be your Achilles’s heel.” He ducked back to rest on his own bed again. “But you, you never do anything you don’t mean to.”
In his six months here, he’d never seen Conrad’s confidence shaken.
“Sure, I do, Hughes. I blurt out crap all the time that I don’t mean to say. Teachers really hate that, by the way.”
His buddy laughed, shaking off some of the darkness. “So I see every day. You do take the attention off the rest of us, and for that, we thank you, man.”
From the far corner, the guy he’d thought was asleep jackknifed up and threw two fistfuls of brass buckles across the room. “Do you think you two could hold it down? Take the belt buckles, just go and let me sleep in peace. I’ve got some sort of stomach bug. Leave or you might catch it.”
Stomach bug? The loser was probably coming down off something. He was some piano prodigy who’d been busted for drugs and shipped here.
Troy tossed a belt buckle. “No, thanks, Mozart. I’ll pass on Marching 101.”
“Really, dude—” Mozart swung his legs over the side of his bed, holding his stomach and wincing “—if you would stop worrying about being a moody whiner all the time, you could learn something. To infiltrate the system, learn to work it from the inside. Use those brains of yours to play the game. Polish your damn brass.”
Conrad did that uppity sneer thing he had down to an art form. “You’re actually telling us to kiss ass, Beethoven? Because you sure as hell don’t.”
“Exactly.” Mozart/Beethoven grabbed the Pepto-Bismol from his bedside table. “There are other ways….”
Troy scooped up a remaining buckle and tossed it from hand to hand. “You make people laugh. Good for you. That’s your gig. You’re a people person.”
After guzzling a quarter of the bottle of stomach meds, he swiped his wrist over his mouth, smearing away the pink stain. “Studies say that a sense of humor is the true measure of intelligence.”
“Just because you took that psychology class, Bach, don’t think you can trick me into doing things your way by playing mind games.”
“Whatever. I’m offering you a new tool for your arsenal.” Mozart/Beethoven/Bach—aka Malcolm Douglas— shrugged, stretching back out again. “It’s up to you if you want to take it.”
“Knock-knock jokes, Douglas?” Troy tossed the final buckle back. “Are you for real?”
Douglas applauded. “See, that was well-played sarcasm. You’ve got potential.”
The door exploded open across the room.
Colonel John Salvatore stood framed in the opening. “Gentlemen, you’d damn well better be hurling right this second or you will be by the time I’m done running you.”
* * *
Troy shoved up from his computer workstation and pushed open the door to where Hillary slept. Curled up on her side, she hugged the wool blanket he’d picked up on an African safari. Her red hair splashed an auburn swath over the white Egyptian cotton. His hand itched to cup the curve of her hip. He ached to slip into bed and lie behind her, tucking her body into his. He would wrap his arm around her waist, the undersides of her breasts resting against his skin. He would breathe in the scent of her shampoo, stay right there until she woke up and rolled into his embrace, inviting him to indulge in more.
Indulge in everything.
He wanted Hillary in his bed for real, not just to sleep, and he had wanted that since he’d first seen her. But he needed to have his thoughts in order, be in control of himself. He wasn’t the impulsive teen anymore who blasted through security firewalls without thinking of the consequences.
And as he thought this through, he was beginning to realize his preference for keeping things simple wasn’t going to work with her. She was the type of woman that asked for, demanded, more from a man. She had a way of getting him to talk that no one had managed before. Maybe because she wasn’t some groupie who glamorized what he’d done. Even when she didn’t agree with his choices, she listened. She wanted the real story.
That was mighty damn rare and enticing.
As he watched the even rise and fall of her chest as they powered across the ocean toward the Costa Rica coastline, he couldn’t deny it any longer. He would do anything to sleep with her. Anything.
And he would need everything he’d learned from Salvatore, from Hughes and from Douglas to win her over.
Eight
His Costa Rican getaway wasn’t at all what she’d expected.
She slid out of the Land Rover, sounds of the tropical wilds wrapping around her. The chorus of isolation, of escape, echoed. Birds and monkeys called from the dense walls of trees. His home rested on a bluff, with a waterfall off to the side that fed into a lagoon. Wherever he looked out from his home, he would have an incredible view.
Sure, it was a pricey pad, without question. But not in a flashy way. She’d expected a sleek beach place with gothic columns and swaths of gauzy cabanas on a crystal-white beach.
Instead, she found more of a tree house. The rustic wooden structure was built on stilts—which made sense for surviving fierce storms.
Built in an octagonal shape, its windows provided a panoramic view of not only the water but also the lush jungle. Splashes of blooming colors and ripening fruits dotted the landscape like tropical Christmas lights.
This wasn’t a beach vacation place for parties. This was a retreat, a haven for solitude. There wasn’t even a crew of servants waiting. She carried a travel bag while Troy unloaded their luggage. He’d been strangely pensive since their flight, studying her like a puzzle to figure out.
Although she was probably looking at him in exactly the same way.
He glanced over. “Elevator or stairs?”
“Stairs,” she said without pause, “I wouldn’t miss a second of seeing this from all angles.”
Climbing the winding wooden stairs, she drew in the exotic perfume of lush fertility seasoned with salty sea air. The spray of the waterfall misted the already-humid morning air. She cleared the final step to the wraparound balcony.
The man who would choose this type of home intrigued her, and she suspected the house would only get better. She wanted to believe that, as if the house was an indicator of the real Troy. It was ironic that after she’d fought so hard to leave the isolation of the farm, that somehow this secluded place felt amazingly right.
He ran his fingers along a wood shingle, and it opened to reveal an elaborate panel of buttons and lights. He’d keyed codes into elaborate security gates along the drive to the house. Apparently there was a final barrier to breach. He pressed his palm to a panel and the front door opened.
She stepped into a wide space full of rattan sofas and chaise lounges with upholstered cushions of deep rusts and greens. With the windows, it seemed as if the inside and outside melded seamlessly. No period pieces or antiques.
Just well-constructed comfort.
Troy tapped another small panel on the inside wall and the lights came on. “There are multiple bedrooms. You can choose which suits you best. We’re on our own here, so no worries about where the staff might sleep.”
An Inconvenient Affair Page 10
