Zaida had shut him out after their encounter this afternoon. He didn’t know why, but he certainly wanted to give her a little room. He wondered if she regretted being with him. She hadn’t seemed to at the time, but add in everything else that had happened—meeting up with Jamal, seeing her terrified friends, learning the FBI was involved in all of this, then Jamal ordering her to stay with him instead of leaving with Levi, well, none had been easy on her; a little time alone to process everything couldn’t hurt.
It had been a relief to learn that Jamal had been truly acting for her benefit. Perhaps she regretted being intimate with Levi now that Jamal had been cleared. Hard to tell. Zaida was a sensitive, amazing woman. Levi just needed to give her room to deal with the maelstrom that had taken over her ordered life.
When he came back into the house, he got ready for bed, then checked on Zaida. Her room was dark, but the door was open. In fact, lights had been dimmed in the kitchen and living room, too. He walked past her room, peeking in to see if she was sleeping.
She wasn’t. She was sitting up in the middle of her bed, leaning against the wall, her knees bent to her chest. He leaned against her doorjamb. “Can’t sleep?”
“I’m a night person.”
He leaned his head against the doorjamb too and looked at her. “And I’ve been rushing you along each morning. Tomorrow’s not going to be any different. You know, it’s usually easier to sleep when you’re stretched out and relaxed.”
She reached next to her and dug her fingers into Beau’s soft fur. “Your dog’s trying to help me relax.”
“What’s keeping you up, Zaida?”
“What isn’t?”
Levi chuckled. He walked into her room, then climbed on her bed, sitting next to her. “Talk to me.” He leaned back against the wall. Their shoulders touched, but he kept his hands folded in his lap. “Do you want me to take you back to Jamal?”
“Jamal?” Zaida rumpled her face as she looked up at Levi.
“He wanted you to stay with him.”
“I slept with him, you know…before.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. That’s why I don’t like him in that way.”
“Oh.” He couldn’t help his grin. “That good, huh?”
“Sex is like a metaphor for what married life would be like. His marriage would be all about him. It’s one of the reasons I’m a big advocate of pre-marital sex.”
“How’d I do?”
She looked up at him and blinked. “You gutted me.”
“What?” Levi was shocked. “How?”
“You were wonderful. Everything I ever wanted. Everything. And I’m scared to death I’m falling in love with you. I have this awful feeling about us.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“Like I want to vomit.”
“So I make you sick.” Levi knew he was arching a brow at her.
“No. I do.”
He took her hand in his. “Baby, I’m having a real hard time following you.”
“What if…what if I fall in love with you—and I mean real love, not just lust—and then we just separate when this is done?”
Levi sighed, rocked by the fact that she’d been feeling the same terror he’d been fighting. He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her up against his chest. “What if we fall in love during this horrible event and stay together afterwards? It could go either way.”
“Are you feeling what I’m feeling?”
“I’m scared of losing you…now that I’ve found you,” he said.
“Yes. That’s it. Just exactly.”
Levi kissed her forehead. “What if we don’t label this—whatever it is—just yet? What if we just let it be what it will be while we discover each other?”
“Because I’m clingy and needy and extremely possessive.”
“That’s hot as fuck, you know. I would love to matter to someone.”
“You matter to me, Levi.”
He grinned. “You matter to me, Zaida.”
“I think Jamal thought, up until now, that I would change my mind and go back to him.”
“So did you date for a while?”
“No. Not really. There was just always that assumption that we’d be together. And then I saw him from adult eyes and knew he wasn’t for me.”
“And he’s a sucky fucker.”
Zaida chuckled at that, then broke into big laughs that made him laugh. He hadn’t meant to say it like that, but he was tired and his words had just tangled.
“Yes. He’s a sucky fucker. I love that. Next time I see him, I’ll think of that and laugh.”
“It’s a relief knowing why he was trying to grab you.”
“You believe him?” she asked.
Levi shrugged. “I do.”
“So, we’re just going to matter to each other for a while?” she asked.
“Why not? At least until one of us is ready to call it.”
“Call it what?”
“Call it what it is. Love.”
She gasped and turned so she was lying across his chest. “You said it first.”
He grinned. “That’s ‘cause I’m braver than you.”
Her face got serious. She touched his cheek with her fingertips. “I’m really scared about this.”
“Don’t be. Love is easy. You should know. You’re an expert in it.”
“In fiction. Not real life. I’m such a poser. I’ve never been in love before. Have you?”
He put his knees up so she could lean against them. “Yes. Twice. Both times I thought something was real, but it was just a passing thing.”
“What happened to the latest one?”
“She was in the intelligence business. Got in too deep on a case. She was murdered when she tried to get out.”
“Was she the real deal?”
“I think so. She could have been.”
“I’m sorry, Levi. That’s a hard loss to take.”
He nodded. “She’s why I got out of the service, why I switched to farming.”
“And yet here you are, back in the thick of things.”
“Kinda hard not to roll toward it, when so much is at stake.”
“Are you going to keep doing these cases?”
“I don’t know. The money’s good. I’m still something of an adrenaline junky. I want the world to be a better place. It’s nice to be needed by my country. And I don’t like innocents like you, your family, and your community getting dragged into danger.”
Zaida sighed. For a long moment, they just sat there in the dark and silence.
“We better get some sleep. Will you stay with me?” she asked.
“You know it. Let me just go shut things off.” They both got out of bed. He held up the covers for her then called Beau out of the room and ordered him to sleep on the sofa. He locked the front and back doors and shut off the lights, then joined her under the covers.
The twin bed, though extra long, was way too narrow for them to sleep in any position other than their sides. Or her on top of him, which worked too. She settled her head on his chest. She was quiet a long moment, but then he heard her whisper, “I love your flowers, Levi.”
“I love them, too.” Only it wasn’t his flowers he was responding to. He’d fallen off the deep end for Zaida. If she wasn’t who he thought she was, it was going to fucking kill him.
It was early the next morning, not yet eight a.m., when the rumble of a Harley cut into the quiet summer morning. Levi had already made a partial tour of his lot, checking the irrigation flowing to his sunflowers. They were drought and heat tolerant, but they needed a good supply of water for another month or so before he let them start to cure.
He’d made a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and fruit. Zaida was already up and moving around, which was good because he had a lot of ground to cover that day.
The Harley triggered Levi’s motion sensors. He went outside with Beau to see who’d arrived. His dog barked and ran down the stairs as Max shut off his eng
ine. He wore a loose beige T-shirt and a leather vest that was inside out. He reached down and rubbed Beau’s head, then grinned up at Levi. Geez, the guy looked crazier every time Levi saw him.
“Thought they kept you chained to your desk,” Levi said.
“Usually, but we need to talk.”
Levi went down the front stairs and shook hands with the hacker. “Want something to eat? Just made breakfast.”
“Sure.”
The screen door slammed. Levi turned to see Zaida standing there, wearing a silky floral robe that was only partially on one shoulder. Her hair was a sexy mess. She looked like she’d just come from a tumble in bed.
Levi wished that had been the case.
“Hi, Max,” she said, frowning into the morning sun.
Max arched a brow at Levi, then gave her a quick nod. “Zaida.”
Beau ran up the stairs to greet her. She bent over and scratched his ears, entirely unaware of the luscious view she gave the two of them. “I’m just going to take a quick shower, Levi. Don’t wait breakfast for me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Levi said, wishing like hell that Max had picked another time to show up. “C’mon in,” he said to Max. They got their food and coffee, then brought it back outside to the picnic table.
“This is quite the place you have here,” Max said. “You got a thing for flowers, huh?”
“Yeah. And I grow herbs for local restaurants. It’s a fairly steady living.”
“Moonlighting helps.”
“Sure does. Speaking of which, what brings you here?” Levi asked.
“Zaida’s out of that database.”
“Good.”
“When I went back through it, I found a group of students at the university who are skinheads.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about last night. Abdul said he was being harassed by some of those kids,” Levi said. “They knew about his worm because he had a few of them in his class. When they weren’t able to hack its repository, they roughed him up a few times—bad enough he went to the hospital. When he didn’t cave, they hacked his Facebook feed to plant some jihadist shit. What if that damned worm stirred things up among the skinheads?” Levi speculated. “We know it froze the computers of everyone who met its profiling requirements and alerted them that they’d been identified as potential terrorists. Maybe that triggered them, kicked these kids into gear to fight back.”
“That’s my theory. I was going to check them out. Wanna come?”
“You bet…but first I want to have a look at the fairgrounds and Abdul’s robotics lab. I hear something may be going down at the county fair. Abdul—the kid who wrote the worm—is manning a robotics booth at the fair. And Zaida’s got a booth, too. I have a feeling we’re headed toward something bad.” He frowned as he looked at Max. “You know, when I asked for some of your time, I didn’t mean for you to be hands-on.”
“Well, too late. We’ve been investigating a cult. They’re not like a regular cult. These guys are organized and they’re big. They’ve infiltrated international governments, compromised CEOs, own half the world’s glitterati. And they’re a white supremacist group. They’re sophisticated, rich, and dangerous. Long before I joined the Army’s Red Team, this cult tricked me into hacking some high profile Wall Street accounts. I was caught, went to jail. I was just a kid, barely eighteen. For my own self-preservation, I hooked up with a prison gang the cult owns called the White Kingdom Brotherhood. The connections I made in jail were what drove the Red Team to recruit me. The WKB population not incarcerated runs drugs and weapons and acts as the enforcers for the cult. I’m a member of their club.” Max hooked his thumbs in the arms of his cuts. “I’ve maintained my membership for my team’s investigation. I came down to check out this group and see if they are affiliated with the cult we’re tracking.”
“What’s your cult called?”
“The Omni World Order. Nasty SOBs.”
Levi leaned back and gave Max a long look. “I never knew that about you, that you went to jail. We met when you were on the Red Team. Never gave a thought about your background or what brought you to the service.” He frowned. “I made all the choices that led me to this spot; I chose to join the Navy, chose to try out for the SEAL teams, chose to stay in as long as I did, chose to get out when I did, chose this as my second career. You…were created. You didn’t freely choose anything.”
Max’s hazel eyes glared into Levi’s before he slowly lowered to the mug he was holding.
Jesus. Levi knew better than to reach into a man’s soul and pull out his guts. “Forget it.”
“It’s true.” Max shrugged. “At least up until I joined the Red Team. From there out, my choices have been my own. I’m cool with where I ended up. I’m loving what I’m doing now. I guess it worked out. I lost every fucking thing I loved, but I’m alive. I got my woman, a team I care about, work that’s challenging.”
“Good.” Levi sighed. “It’s not like we get out of this alive, anyway.”
Max’s faced slowly eased. “Yeah. We should just march through it like fucking flame throwers.”
Levi grinned at him. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
Max pulled something from his pocket. “Brought this for your girl. All of us at our team headquarters wear one. The panic button alerts us to any problems. If Zaida gets taken, we’ll be able to track her. Another thing, Owen’s loaning you two of his team—Selena and Ace. They’re badass. They’ll keep Zaida safe.”
Levi took the necklace and stared at it in his hand. “When I put out a call for help, I didn’t mean to make my problems yours.”
“No big deal. We’re all in the same fight, no? If we get in a bind, I’m sure you’ll help us. Speaking of which, you should talk to Owen when this is done. He’s always looking for guys like you. Wouldn’t be bad to have a few frogmen on the team.”
Levi chuckled. “I got all I can handle here. I’m not looking for a permanent gig, but thanks. These one-off jobs I get are enough for me.” He paused. “I’m trying to make them enough, anyway.” He held up the security necklace. “Thanks for this.” He gathered their dishes. “I’m gonna round up Zaida so we can head out.”
“Leave your phone with me,” Max said.
“Why?”
“So I can install the app that goes with that necklace.”
Levi handed over his phone. “If you want more coffee, help yourself. We’ll just be a minute.”
Max grinned at him. “I got all day.”
Levi returned his grin, knowing Max probably meant the opposite. Inside the house, the scent of Zaida’s body soap teased the senses. Levi set the dishes on the counter, then went and knocked on Zaida’s door.
“You about ready?” he asked.
She opened the door. She wore a pair of tight jeans with a rose colored baggy V-neck cotton sweater over a beige tank top. Her hair and makeup were done. Her feet were bare, which made her seem super short. He’d gotten used to her in heels.
“Almost.”
Levi handed her the security necklace. “I know it’s not pretty to look at, but it will let us find you fast if you go missing. Just hit this button if you have an emergency when I’m not around. Max said he and his team all wear one.”
She draped it over her head, then adjusted her hair and slipped the flat plastic under her tank top. “Thank you.”
“I’m going to drop you at your apartment while Max and I go check some things out.”
Zaida’s eyes widened. “Maybe it would be better if I joined my parents for the day?”
“You’ll be safe. Owen Tremaine’s loaning us a couple of his operatives through the weekend. They’ll be with you today at your apartment. You can get some work done. Get ready for your presentation this weekend. Rest. Whatever.”
“Do you think I’ll be able to go forward with my presentation?”
“I hope so.”
She held his gaze a long moment, then nodded. “Okay.”
“Pack your stuff up. Y
ou may be staying at your place for a few days.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be with you at night.”
Her eyes locked on his. He knew she was waiting for a promise that everything would be fine. He couldn’t say that, not yet, anyway.
“Okay,” she finally said, with a nod.
“Okay.” Levi stared down at her, wishing they didn’t have to rush today, wondering if—when this was over—they’d get a chance to explore this thing between them. He left her doorway and went to the kitchen to quickly clean it up. He refreshed Beau’s big upside down water jug and made sure his timed feeder was full.
Levi’s go bag was already packed. He took it out to his Jeep. Beau followed him from the house to the car. “Sorry, boy. You’re staying here to guard things for me. Mrs. Nolan will be over to check on you a few extra times over the next few days.”
Max heard that and shook his head. “What is it about people and dogs? They always seem to think their dogs speak human.”
“Don’t they?”
“They speak dog,” Max said.
Levi shrugged. “Whatever. You’re clearly a non-believer, so I got nothing to say to you.”
Max laughed and put his helmet on. “I’m going ahead. I want to check a few things out.”
The roar of Max’s bike drowned out his answer, so Levi waved instead. He took Beau inside. Zaida was ready with her bags. She wore high-heel sandals that had wide brown leather straps across the top of her feet. Why that gave Levi a hard-on, he didn’t know. And really, it didn’t matter, because everything about her had that effect on him.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I am,” she said. “Will we be coming back here?”
“Maybe not for a while, but when this is done, I sure as fuck hope so.”
She smiled at him, her lips shiny and pink, her small teeth white and straight. Levi let out a quiet sigh. Maybe Lambert had been right; he had gotten his head and his dick tangled up. He grabbed her satchels and led her to the front door. She paused briefly to say goodbye to Beau.
Freedom Code Page 15
