Once Upon a Matchmaker

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Obviously you can’t take the same precautions with your laptop, since if it’s locked up at Donovan’s, you defeat the initial reason for having the laptop in the first place,” she reasoned. “Which computer is the reason for this investigation?”

  He liked the way she shifted the blame onto the inanimate object and steered it away from him. But the laptop was his, had been his for the past eighteen months. As far as he knew, no one so much as touched the computer in all that time.

  “The laptop,” he told her.

  She asked him the first thing that occurred to her. “Any chance that one of your boys—”

  He cut her off before she could finish her question. “No. I treat it as if it were a firearm.” Then he explained what he meant by that. “I lock it up when I come home unless I’m using it. And even then, when I’m finished I put it under lock and key in the back of my closet. Neither of the boys can reach it,” he assured her.

  Little boys could be very resourceful, but for now, she let what he believed to be true stand. “All right, go on.”

  “The company does random surprise tests on computers. They send in their man—nobody ever knows when they’ll happen or who they’ll target—and when he asks to see either your desktop computer or your laptop, you’ve got to immediately stand back and give him total access to your hardware.”

  Tracy could tell that he took this to be the ultimate show of distrust, even if he could probably see the reason for the random tests.

  “No last-minute keying in of any codes or saving any material you might have been working on,” Micah continued. “You have to instantly raise your hands away from the keyboard and give the guy room to run his test.”

  Tracy saw the need for this, but at the same time, it was incredibly invasive. It showed that there was no trust, no bond between management and the people who worked for them.

  “Have you ever had one of these tests run on your hardware before?” she asked.

  “No, but I’ve only been working on black programs for the last two years—I’ve had the laptop for eighteen months,” he added, trying to give her as much information as he could.

  “Black programs,” she repeated.

  “That’s what they’re called,” he explained, answering her unspoken question. “Most likely because whenever there’s any paperwork involved, whole sections are indelibly and permanently blacked out with a black marker.”

  Interesting though it was, she was getting sidetracked and got back to the pertinent questions. “All right, so this is the first time that this has happened?” she asked again.

  His smile was just the slightest bit lopsided as he told her, “There is no second time if they find something to arouse their suspicions. This kind of thing is grounds for instant dismissal, not to mention being brought up on charges.”

  “But you haven’t been dismissed yet, have you?” she asked. He’d told her that he was working today. If what he’d just told her was true, then he’d lied about working. Something wasn’t adding up here.

  “Due to all the layoffs that have been taking place in the last couple of years, the company’s really shorthanded. I’ve been with Donovan Defense for more than ten years—I interned with them while I was still in college,” he explained, in case the numbers didn’t work for her. “Because of that, and the fact that I’ve worked for several different areas within the company, I’ve got a broad spectrum of knowledge that they need so they don’t want to get rid of me altogether. But I have been placed on restricted duty,” he assured her, none too happily. As far as he was concerned, he was now doing grunt work and he hated it. “They have me doing end-of-day reports and quantifying—well, never mind. It’s actually even more dull than it sounds,” he told her.

  And he didn’t do “dull” well, she thought. Who did? Tracy mused, knowing how she’d feel in his place. A person liked to be challenged, to strive to do their very best. Rote work didn’t allow for that factor. It tended to put the person who was doing it to sleep.

  “So exactly what was found when they did their impromptu raid on your laptop?” she asked.

  He’d gone over this a hundred times in his mind, trying to figure out how it had happened—and when. He still had no answers.

  “That the firewall had been breached and it looked as if someone outside the company got into my hard drive. These laptops are programmed so that only certain internal computers can communicate with them.”

  A closed circuit, she thought. “In other words—ideally—if I sent you an email from my office to your laptop, it would just bounce back,” she asked, wanting to make sure they were on the same page with this.

  Micah nodded. “Exactly.”

  She was fishing now, but she had to start somewhere. “Could you have done something to, say, tweak your laptop so that you could receive messages from me if you wanted to?”

  She was asking him if he was a hacker, Micah thought. “That is entirely above my pay level,” he told her whimsically. And then he became serious as he gave her a little more background about himself. He had a love/hate relationship with computers. “Computers for me are an acquired taste. When they’re working properly, they can be extremely efficient, but when they’re not…” He allowed his voice to trail off.

  She picked up his meaning immediately. “It’s like that old nursery rhyme about the little girl, that goes, ‘When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid.’”

  Micah brightened. “Exactly. There’re people who can make their computers tap-dance and sing. I feel victorious if I can just get mine to work properly.” He realized that she was looking at him intently as he talked. So much so that he felt the attorney was practically looking right into him. “What?”

  She was just trying to get a feel for him, for what he was thinking. She wanted to be able to read him easily. For that she would need his cooperation—and to build up some trust. The latter was a two-way street.

  “You realize that anything you say to me is going to be kept strictly confidential.” It was a given, but it didn’t hurt to make sure that it was understood.

  “I’m aware of that feature, yes.”

  “And that you have to be completely honest with me,” she emphasized. As she spoke, her voice gained in passion. “If I find out that you’re not, that you’ve been lying to me—for whatever reason,” she stipulated, “I will drop you like a hot coal and remove myself as your attorney from your case so fast that your head will spin, possibly for days.”

  “That creates quite an image,” he told her.

  Micah understood why the woman had to say that, although he didn’t particularly like the fact that she seemed to believe him capable of lying to her.

  Still, she didn’t really know him, right? Didn’t know that he prided himself on being a man of integrity. Plenty of liars out there, both men and women. There was no stamp on his forehead, informing her that he was exempt from that.

  He cut her some slack.

  “I don’t lie,” he told her matter-of-factly.

  She nodded. She intended to believe him—until given proof otherwise.

  “Good to know.” Tracy got back to asking her questions. “Did the person who discovered the breach tell you anything else? Like who he thought you were selling those secrets to?” It would be nice to have a name or a face to put on the nebulous “enemy.” It made her fact checking easier.

  “No, all I was told was that the contents of my laptop had been breached and that I was on restricted duty pending an investigation into the matter—starting immediately. That was on Friday,” he told her. “In their world, I’m guilty until proven innocent.”

  And she could see how much that was really bothering him. His reputation meant something to him. So did being brought up on charges of treason. Not exactly a walk in the park, was it?

  “I know that,” she said.

  This next part would sound hokey to her, but he didn’t care. It was how he felt and she needed
to know that, too.

  “Okay, well, I also want you to know that I love my country and that I would never do anything to compromise it in any way or to make my sons ashamed to call me their father.”

  He said it with such feeling that she was moved just listening to him. He meant every word, she could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. He was a man of integrity.

  She believed him.

  That made things easier for her. She could passionately defend someone she believed in. That he sounded sincere was a huge plus, as well. If this wound up going to trial, his appearance—as long as the jury was made up of more women than men—could only help them. It was easier to convict an unattractive person than an attractive one—as long as the latter didn’t smirk, and she doubted that Micah could, even on a dare.

  Nodding absently at his remark, she looked down at the napkin she’d unfolded and had been making notes on. “Well, I seem to have run out of napkin space, so why don’t we stop here for tonight.” It wasn’t really a question, more like a rhetorical suggestion.

  Tracy rose to her feet and picked up the two plates that were on the counter in front of her. She turned toward the sink. “Tomorrow, I’ll see what I can find out from Donovan for you,” she told him.

  “You don’t have to do that.” He went to take the plates from her and their fingers brushed against each other. “I mean bus your dishes,” he explained, in case she thought he was referring to talking to someone at his company.

  She picked up on the words he’d used. People were like jigsaw puzzles to her. She liked filling in the missing pieces. Most likely, he’d done some waiting on tables himself. Probably when he was in college, she guessed. To earn some extra money.

  “I always clean up after myself,” she protested.

  Micah continued to hold on to the dishes from his end. “You looked after Gary for me. The way I see it, I’m the one who still owes you.”

  “You fed me dinner,” she reminded him. “I consider myself paid in full—and then some.” But because she had no intentions of playing tug-of-war with the plates, Tracy did retract her fingers, allowing her host/client to take possession of the dishes.

  He brought them over to the sink, then put his own on top of them. For now, he ran some water over them to keep the food from sticking.

  Shutting off the water, he turned toward her. “How about some tiramisu to go?” he suggested.

  Normally she turned down offers of doggie bags at restaurants whenever the food server asked if she wanted to take any of her food home with her. But there was absolutely no way she would turn down this offer.

  So, instead, she smiled at him and said, “You certainly do know how to tempt a girl.”

  The phrase—along with her smile—seemed to nudge loose something distant in the back of his brain, a half memory he couldn’t quite get hold of and bring forward. But it did manage to rouse a tiny inkling of nostalgia, as if what Tracy had just said was something that Ella might have said to him once a long time ago.

  It also, for just an instant, made him acutely aware that his attorney was an extremely attractive young woman, the kind that brought conversations to a screeching halt whenever she entered a room.

  Added to that package—and a pair of possibly the longest, sexiest legs he’d seen in a long, long time—was her utterly unassuming air. If anything, it made her doubly attractive.

  He had a strong feeling that Tracy Ryan had no idea just how sensual, how beautiful, she actually was. The more genuinely beautiful women usually didn’t.

  The next moment, Micah realized that he seemed to have completely frozen in place and that she was waiting for him to make good on his offer.

  Embarrassed, but able to hide the fact well—a trick he’d learned as a freshman in college—Micah reached into one of the overhead cabinets, took out a role of aluminum foil and then pulled out a length of foil slightly larger than he needed.

  He used it to wrap up a generous slice of tiramisu for her to take, then held out the wrapped piece to Tracy.

  She smiled as she took the cake from him. Holding it up, she told him, “Consider this a down payment on my services.”

  Micah laughed shortly. As far as he was concerned, he made better desserts. Maybe if she came back to dinner sometime, he’d show her. “You get me my life back, and I’ll make you a cake every week for the rest of your life,” he promised.

  Tracy’s smile, already wide, spread even further. It seemed to light up her entire face, making her appear radiant. She shifted the wrapped dessert to her left hand. “Deal,” she declared, holding her right hand out to him.

  When he realized that she was actually being serious, he was quick to put his hand in hers. “Deal,” Micah echoed.

  She probably thought he was kidding, Micah surmised. But he was willing to do anything to ensure that she had enough incentive to prove him innocent.

  Because he really was.

  Chapter Seven

  Jewel Parnell Culhane was one of the private investigators that Tracy’s firm utilized whenever they needed to do a background check on a client or gather details necessary for a case.

  Tracy knew she would need more than a little help in cracking the technology involved in Donovan Defense’s allegations against her client so she put in a call to Jewel early the following morning. Since the nature of the charges being levied against Micah involved treason, she decided it was best not to discuss anything about the case over the phone.

  Though she hesitated for a moment, Jewel finally agreed to come to the office that morning.

  “But it’ll practically be a drive-by,” Jewel warned. “I’m up to my ears in cases, interesting ones for a change,” she told Tracy. The situation, they both knew, was in sharp contrast to the days when the bulk of her work revolved around tailing cheating spouses and capturing compromising photos for divorce proceedings.

  “Don’t worry, I promise I won’t keep you long,” Tracy told her.

  “You might not even be able to keep me short,” Jewel cracked. “I’m meeting my one and only for lunch.” Tracy could almost hear the smile in Jewel’s voice as she said, “He insisted. Between his work and mine, we’re like two ships in the night, except that we’re hardly even passing each other. We just seem to be sailing off in opposite directions.”

  “One of you needs to rework your schedule,” Tracy suggested. “From the little bit I know of your husband, he’s much too good a catch to throw back into the sea. He wouldn’t be there five minutes before some other woman would get her hooks into him.”

  “Said the woman who never dates,” Jewel commented, laughing softly. And then she immediately held up her hands, as if anticipating Tracy’s next words, even though Tracy had no way of seeing her. “I know, I know, it’s like the pot calling the kettle black—but I’m a reformed ‘pot.’ I’d give up this gig in a heartbeat if keeping it meant losing Christopher, not to mention losing Joel.”

  Joel was her husband’s orphaned nephew and the reason the two of them had met in the first place. Christopher had hired Jewel to find Joel’s absentee father when his sister had died suddenly. When Jewel finally located the man, Joel’s father wanted nothing to do with his son. By then, Christopher had formed a bond with the boy and readily adopted him. As a bonus—to himself—he added Jewel to the mix as his wife.

  Tracy had met Christopher and Joel at her firm’s last Christmas party. Seeing them, she couldn’t help thinking that they made a really nice family. That in turn had aroused such longing within her that it had taken her a while to lock down her emotions and tuck them away again. It did no good to long for something she wasn’t destined to have.

  “Understood,” Tracy replied, then requested, “Just get here whenever you can.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Jewel promised just before she terminated the connection.

  * * *

  “Treason?” Jewel repeated incredulously some ninety minutes later in Tracy’s office after the latter had given her a
thumbnail sketch of the case. “And here I thought you lawyers led a pretty boring existence,” she deadpanned.

  “Boring’s good,” Tracy told her. “Boring I can win.” She shifted in her chair, fidgeting slightly. “This case has me nervous.”

  “Well, that’s a first,” Jewel observed. And then she leveled a look at the other woman. “Wait, is it the case that has you nervous—or the guy?”

  Both.

  The response popped up, unbidden, in her head, surprising Tracy. Where had that come from? And why was Jewel asking her this?

  To forestall any more probing, personal queries, she ignored the question and said, “He has two little boys—ages four and five. I’m taking the case because I’d hate to have them grow up seeing their father only on visiting day.”

  Jewel nodded. Obviously Tracy and she responded to the same kind of stimuli. “I see your point. Anything else I should know about this case?”

  She might as well tell her everything up front, Tracy thought. Jewel would find out sooner or later and it was better that the investigator was prepared instead of broadsided.

  “Micah Muldare is up to his neck in debt. Specifically, medical bills—his late wife’s and younger son’s. He’s too proud to declare bankruptcy and is paying them off as much as he can each month.”

  “You realize you just made a good case for the prosecution, don’t you?” Jewel asked. “They’ll claim he sold highly classified information to the highest bidder because of his situation.”

  “If he was the kind of person who’d sell out his country, he wouldn’t be trying to pay off bills, he would have gone with the bankruptcy option. It’s easier,” Tracy pointed out.

  “It’s also humiliating,” Jewel countered. “But for the record, as far as I’m concerned, he’s innocent until proven guilty.”

  Tracy smiled. “Nice to know the justice system is still alive and well.”

  “So exactly what is it that you’d like me to do for this honest man?” Jewel asked.