Maybe she wanted to talk about it now.
“What was your mother like?”
The question surprised her, but in a good way, if the widening of her eyes and her lack of hesitation were any indication. “She was wonderful.” She said it matter-of-factly, with no hesitation.
Max envied her certainty. It was not something he’d shared in recent memory. Of course, there must have been a time he would have answered similarly, but when he thought of his mother now, she inspired none of the warmth he heard in Emma’s voice.
“You must have loved her a lot.”
There was a tragic beauty to her smile. “I did. I do. My mother was an amazing baker. She used to let me help make medenjaci cookies. They’re like Croatian gingerbread, but you make them with honey. And that smell, spicy and warm, that’s what love smelled like, you know? They were my dad’s favorite. He used to ask her to make them for him instead of a birthday cake, he loved them so much. And after he died, whenever I really missed him, we’d make them together.”
Her smile wobbled a little, and Max’s chest constricted. He very deliberately grabbed a second slice of pizza, if not quashing the temptation to comfort her, at least making it more difficult for himself.
“They met when my mother and her family came to Los Angeles on holiday, but their rental car broke down. My dad was an apprentice mechanic at the shop they got towed to. They made eyes at each other while the mechanic and her dad fiddled around with the car. They fell madly in love, and before she left a week later, he asked her to marry him.”
Max paused with the pizza halfway to his mouth. “And she said yes?” He didn’t mean to sound quite so incredulous.
Emma nodded. “She said yes. She was twenty, and he was twenty-two and she gave up everything she knew to stay in America. To be with him.”
She stared at the ring on her finger, like she was trying to see her mother in it.
“My mom got a job as a janitor and improved her English by taking night classes. They never had very much, but they were mostly happy. As happy as people can be, I think. But even so, she always seemed a little wistful when she spoke of Croatia, about her childhood in Dubrovnik. Like she had a little bit of homesickness that never went away. I always planned to take her back there one day.”
Max swallowed the pizza he’d been chewing. It was difficult to imagine a childhood more different from his own. “It’s nice that you want to see where she grew up.”
“What’s your family like?”
He stiffened at the innocuous question. One that any person in possession of the most rudimentary social skills might ask. And the last one he wanted to answer. “Nothing like yours, I can tell you that.”
The half-eaten slice in his hand was suddenly unappetizing. He set it back in the box.
“My mother is a failed politician whose career went down in a flaming scandal of newspaper headlines when she got caught fucking her handsome young intern, and my father retaliated by fucking a pretty, even-younger stripper.”
A strangled-sounding “Oh” was all Emma managed at his blunt summation of the sordid story.
“Obviously, her senatorial bid came to a crashing halt before it even got off the ground. Now the only thing she cares about is propriety, and what other people think of her, and by extension, us.”
Max shook his head at the ridiculousness of that particular obsession.
The damage was done. His mother of all people should realize that you couldn’t rewrite the past.
If someone betrayed you, if you betrayed someone else, then the only option left was to accept the consequences and move forward as best you could.
Try as she might, and she did try, his mother would never escape the scandal.
Just as he would never forgive his father for what he’d done to John Beckett.
And Aidan would never forgive him.
That was how life worked.
“How old were you when it happened?”
“Ten.”
He didn’t deserve the heart-melting expression she was giving him, or rather, the boy he’d been. As the eldest, he’d had a lot more autonomy than Kaylee. Mostly because he thrived under rules and had always worked hard for the day when he’d be the one setting them for other people.
His sister, on the other hand, was strangled by them. And when her political career gasped out its last breath, Sylvia Whitfield had turned her considerable will to ensuring Kaylee’s rebellious streak was extinguished. But try as she might to smother it, it always seemed to flare up again.
It was one of the things about his sister that Max respected the hell out of, even when it was annoying as fuck.
He used to try to help Kaylee. To intervene. Run some interference. Until his father had made it clear he would destroy anything, and anyone, Max cared about. After that, he’d learned to keep his distance.
“Kaylee was only six. And my mother’s been ruining my little sister’s life ever since.”
And judging by the crestfallen look on Emma’s face, Sylvia Whitfield had just ruined their night as well.
He took a sip of wine, but it tasted sour in his mouth. This was why he didn’t talk about his family. With anyone. It was a guaranteed mood killer, especially for him.
Sex was one thing, but this... Max was a firm believer of keeping his business life and personal life separate. But whatever strange intimacy that had sprung up during their shower conversation seemed not to have dissipated completely, and just like that, he’d crossed yet another line with Emma Mathison.
A line he should have had the brains to stay far away from.
Something shifted in the room, as though he’d abolished the moment of emotional honesty with the sheer force of his will. Emma lowered her feet to the floor. The smile she shot him was reserved.
It was as though they’d both realized they’d stepped into a minefield of feelings, and retreat was their only option.
Which was probably for the best.
“It’s getting late,” she said.
He nodded at the lie.
“I should probably go. I’ve got an early morning, and thanks to my boss, I need to make sure I’ve got a bra to wear. He’s a real stickler about the dress code.”
Max forced a smile at the joke.
She got up. He did, too, though more out of a sense of propriety than a desire to hasten her departure.
“Mind if I wear this back to my room?”
His brain snapped to attention at that. “You’re staying?”
“Temporarily. If the offer stands.”
He nodded. Followed her to the door of his suite.
“Stay as long as you like.”
She turned to face him as she stepped into the hall. “Thanks for the pizza. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he repeated.
When he shut the door behind her, Max walked back to the living room to grab his wine as he contemplated the relief that washed through him when she’d said she was staying. He had a bad feeling he was in the kind of trouble you didn’t know you were in until it was already too late.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS TROUBLE all right. The full extent of which finally registered the next morning, when he found himself watching for Emma’s arrival.
She’d accepted the hotel room. Temporarily. But according to his driver, who’d been sent back to the hotel after dropping Max at work, she hadn’t accepted a ride.
Max had spent the last hour surreptitiously surveilling the elevator in between emails and phone calls. Which was how he knew it had slid open at nine sharp, to reveal Emma, looking professional as ever in her white shirt, blue pencil skirt and nude heels. She didn’t glance at him as she passed, but it was done deliberately enough that he could tell she’d had to concentrate to pull it off.
The fact that it ple
ased him let him know he had to euthanize this ridiculous fixation immediately.
With the single-minded focus that he prided himself on, Max immersed himself in his work day. And he succeeded at keeping his mind clear of her, too. Until his four-thirty meeting with Soteria.
He set the report Brennan had just handed him on the corner of his desk as he sat.
“Give it to me straight. What are we dealing with?”
“In my professional opinion, Emma Mathison is not the originator of the hack.”
Relief poured through him at the assessment.
“Not only has she got no tech or coding background that would lead me to believe she could write something this sophisticated, she also shut her computer down at eight o’clock that night. Whoever loaded the malware turned her computer back on and overrode her login. It took some time to load and her cell phone was pinging from a tower near her apartment before it should have been, considering she didn’t just leave the memory stick in the computer.”
No. Max could vouch for the fact that she hadn’t returned to her workstation that night.
“So you don’t think it’s Emma, but you don’t know who it is?”
“I’ve got Jesse digging.”
“That’s what you’ve been saying since Saturday. I don’t need to tell you that it’s not what I wanted to hear.”
The tick in Brennan’s jaw said he was well aware. “It’s not what I wanted to tell you, either. Whoever did this knew what they were up against. It’s sophisticated code, sure, but it was deployed in an old-fashioned way. Whoever it was had strong intel about how Whitfield Industries is set up. Us finding the leak so quickly means they lost a lot of time they would have had to siphon info. Jesse’s still working on the encryption, so we should have a better idea of what they got in a day or so.”
“What does this mean for the launch?”
“That’s up to you. The stuff we’ve found so far is in the report.” Brennan gestured at Max’s desk. “Honestly, none of it’s too damaging, information-wise, but...”
“But it’s a PR nightmare if the breach hits the press,” Max finished. Just what he didn’t need.
Brennan shrugged. “You’re going to have to decide if that’s a risk you’re willing to take, because from what we’ve uncovered so far, wrecking your brand seems to be more of the focus than stealing your tech.”
Max’s shoulders were rigid beneath his suit jacket. “Find out who did this. Now.”
Brennan gave a curt nod and got to his feet.
Max faked a casualness he didn’t feel. Soteira might not have answers yet, but perhaps a certain someone else he had working the case might be having better luck.
The second Brennan had cleared the door to his office, he pulled his secondary phone—the one that was strictly for contacting AJ—out of the hidden safe in the bottom drawer and set it on his desk.
It was a pain in the ass, but when you were working with geniuses, you put up with the quirks. And AJ definitely had her quirks. Four years ago, Soteria had caught her trying to hack into Whitfield Industries, and according to Brennan, she’d almost done it—but had gotten caught in some trap door hidden deep in the code.
He might not be Max’s favorite guy on the planet, but Brennan was great at what he did, and not easily impressed. He’d helped Max track her down, and Max had set AJ up as an off-the-books consultant to help test his cyber defenses when the occasion called for it. Or, in moments like this one, to double the mind power trying to help him figure out who the hell was trying to ruin him. And he was eager to hear what his independent consultant had managed to unearth. He touched the screen to start a video chat.
Then, against his better judgment, he unfrosted the glass wall. Emma would be leaving soon.
It was, he realized, the first time he’d ever called AJ without having his office in privacy mode. She picked up on the first ring. AJ was always hungry for an assignment, and the more it tested her considerable skills, the better.
It was one of the reasons he let her get away with many of her other transgressions. The screen was filled mostly with her face, dark curly hair around a café-au-lait complexion, but there was enough of her T-shirt visible to prove that she was dressed in her signature all-black.
“What have you got for me?”
“I’m great, Max, thank you for asking. And you?”
He frowned at the implied condemnation and AJ got down to business.
“I don’t know how she could possibly have pulled off the hack. There’s nothing in her background to hint at the kind of tech genius it would take to get around anything Soteria dreamed up. I mean, not to cast aspersions, but the woman only owns a smartphone and a tablet. You know how I feel about that.”
“So she didn’t code the program, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t install it.” Max pointed out. “Any luck with the surveillance footage?”
AJ shook her head, then leaned forward so that her face took up more of the screen, obliterating any glimpse of the brick wall behind her. “I ran into the same issue Jesse had. Got nada from the security feed. Lucky for you, this is one of those times when nothing is actually something.”
AJ did love a little drama. It was in such direct contrast to her life, holed up in a shitty loft that she didn’t know he knew about, that it never ceased to annoy Max. He lifted an unimpressed brow. “Don’t stop now. I’m on the edge of my seat.”
“Oh sure, play it all casual and urbane, like you don’t care. Just makes it all the sweeter when I blow your mind.” AJ gave him a smug smile. “I don’t think it was wiped, I think the camera was turned off. Trouble is, I can’t tell if the shutdown was remote or not. But either way, we’re still dealing with a manual load, which means someone was inside your building.”
Max swore under his breath. Thanks to the other security precautions, Soteria didn’t have anyone watching the camera feeds live. And that meant Emma was still in play as someone who had the means to have installed that spyware.
“Told you so,” his hacker gloated, but her face turned suddenly serious. “What’s that look, boss? Because if your gut has info that can help me out, you’d better spill.”
Considering AJ had already picked up on his preoccupation, Max led her slightly astray and gave her the other most likely suspect in the hack. “Cybercore.”
The company name was bitter on his tongue. He tended not to lead investigators down any particular path, preferring that they find it on their own. But he wanted to be sure he’d turned over every rock. Tunnel vision on Emma would do him no good. Not professionally. Or personally, he reminded himself.
“Liam Kearney, huh?” She looked contemplative for a moment. “Yeah. That fits. The douchebag is always gunning for you, and SecurePay is way ahead of his stupid payment chip. He makes spy gear, so corporate espionage seems like a weapon he’d keep in his arsenal. I’ll look into him. See if anything pops. And I’m still running the security logs from that day to see if there was any unusual activity or visitors prior to the camera shutdown.”
“Good. Let me know if you find anything at all.”
“I will. But I still don’t know why you want me to. You’re paying me an awful lot of money to follow the same path that Soteria’s already following. And I know that Wes Brennan’s personal attention doesn’t come cheap these days.”
“I need to be thorough. This breach could sink SecurePay. We’re less than one week out from launch. I need this handled quickly and efficiently. You told me you’re the best.”
AJ lifted her chin. “Well, sure. Because I am the best. But double-or-nothing my fee says that Wes told you that he’s the best.”
Max nodded. “He would also point out that he’s the one who caught you hacking the system.”
“Hey, even a blind squirrel catches a master hacker sometimes. He got lucky. I got better.”
“I’m just
hoping one of you is right.”
AJ frowned at him, but he ignored it. He needed results, not posturing. And he didn’t want her to figure out that he’d assigned her a little side job that he hadn’t brought up with Soteria. Better to let her think it was a race to the finish. AJ thrived on competition.
“Besides the grievous sin of not owning a proper computer, did anything else ring when you looked into Ms. Mathison?”
The mention of Emma had him glancing toward the elevator.
On screen, AJ shot him a look he couldn’t quite decipher. “Oh, it’s Ms. Mathison, is it? Okay, boss. If that’s the way you wanna play it. Everything checks out in my preliminary run. Dad died years ago in a work accident, mom kicked more recently. Alzheimer’s. She was staying at a really swank home that catered to that sort of thing, top of the line medical facility. Looks like your Ms. Mathison funneled as much of every paycheck as she could spare into the digs, including her bonus checks, hence the shithole apartment she was renting.”
AJ shrugged. “After her mom died, she put together a modest funeral, and tucked half the life insurance payout away, sank the other half into a plane ticket back to her mother’s homeland. Itinerary was pretty sparse. She was definitely doing her best to pull off one of those Croatia on ten dollars a day kind of trips. But I’ll keep digging.”
The object of his...investigation, strode past on her way out. It was precisely five o’clock. This time, instead of ignoring him, she shot him a lingering glance and a flirty finger wave as she boarded the elevator.
“Hello? Earth to Max.”
His gaze snapped back to the phone.
AJ’s expression was quizzical. “What was that all about?”
“Nothing.” He hit the button that frosted his office glass. “Continue.”
“Testy today, boss. Might wanna lay off the coffee. That stuff’ll kill ya.”
“AJ...” He let her name hang there, a warning.
“Fine. But I wish you’d just read the stuff I told you about before outright dismissing the idea that the government might have doctored the caffeine supply. Anyway, like I said, this is all just surface stuff. I’ll follow the money and see where it leads.”
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