If anyone should know how deceptive men like Cian MacFarlane could be, it was Lila.
And yet, there was still a little voice in her head that said he wouldn’t actually do it. The way he talked about his brothers, the look on his face when he watched her while she explained technical things to him, the questions he asked when they met for coffee. He’d seemed genuinely interested, not asking the standard questions, but deeper things—like what it was like to grow up biracial, if she was religious, what she liked to do in her spare time. And the way he’d texted her late at night after she’d been attacked.
How is your throat? he’d asked.
Better. But I think I might have a bruise that shows. Scarves for me for a couple of days.
Then there had been a pause, and she’d thought he might have moved on, the obligatory check-in done.
I wish more than anything I could promise you’ll never be harmed because of me again, he’d finally added.
It’s okay, she’d texted in response. I’m a grownup, I knew what I was getting into when I decided to enter the dark end of the business.
You’re not even thirty years old yet, and you’ve been a professional hacker since you were twenty, he’d responded. There’s no way you could have predicted this—my family’s business.
She hadn’t known how to answer that, so she never responded. But she’d looked at that message in the dark of her bedroom for hours afterward. Because deep down, as much as she liked to tell herself otherwise, she knew he was right. She’d been twenty, angry, and lost. She’d already broken countless laws on her father’s behalf. Erasing his debts with bookies, switching his bets in the records when his horse lost, and scamming online gambling systems on his behalf. And then one day, she’d stood in front of the entire information systems faculty and student body at the prestigious Chicago Institute of Technology and accepted the award for student of the year and her father hadn’t been there to see her get it. That was when she’d finally known—he didn’t love her. He only loved what she could do for him.
Her anger over that had been so consuming, she’d dropped out of school, started hacking for personal gain, and never looked back.
Yes, Cian MacFarlane had pegged her in a way no one before ever had. He’d seen she’d never had a choice about what she did. She’d been set on her path just as surely as he’d been set on his. Childhoods and fathers who gave them no alternatives. Men who cared more about their own obsessions than they did their own children.
It was because of the way he’d seen so deep inside her that she was having trouble believing he’d actually hurt her. But wasn’t that what manipulators did? Looked inside you, found what made you tick, used it against you. It was what her father had done. He’d known all she wanted was him—his love, his approval—and he’d used it to control her.
Was Cian different? Or more of the same? She gave herself a little shake as a timer told her she needed to get past the current barrier in the system in the next twenty seconds or she’d be booted out and need to start all over again. She focused as the timer ticked down, her heart racing in that familiar way it did whenever she faced a challenge from a system. Ten…nine…Dammit! She reversed the code she’d typed and hammered out another string instead. Five…four… Her screen went dark, then relit almost instantly with the FBI logo. She exhaled a shaky breath. She was into the basic employee system. Now she had to find the file Cian needed. No telling what security clearance level it would require, but at least the first hurdle had been cleared.
She glanced at Cian sitting on her sofa, thumbs flying over his phone screen. Then she shook it all off, focused on the blinking cursor in front of her, and got down to business. Whether he’d kill her or not, he expected her to succeed at this, and the one sure thing Lila had in her life was her hacking. She was one of the best in the world, and she wasn’t about to let the FBI or a sexy mobster change that.
For the next two hours, Cian sat in Lila’s living room as she clacked away on her keyboard, muttering to herself intermittently. He made some calls, scrolled through emails, even went in her kitchen and made them both coffee with the old French press she directed him to.
Finally, somewhere south of three thirty in the morning, she stood. “Okay, I’m in. At least I’m in to one file with the sort of information you want. I can’t promise it’s the right one, so I may need to look more.”
Cian set his nearly empty coffee cup down on the end table and made his way to the computer.
“You’ll just double-click on that folder,” she indicated, pointing to the screen. “And you should go quickly. They do a security scan at six a.m. Eastern, and it might pick me up digging around in there.”
Cian nodded and sat in her desk chair. It was still warm from her body, and something inside him couldn’t help but notice that.
She turned away and walked to the kitchen. He heard the refrigerator door open, then a pan being put on the stove. After he double-clicked on the icon, the screen brightened with a list of names, along with series of letters and numbers—some sort of codes.
He scanned the list. What an idiot he’d been. He’d had visions of the list being like a roster—name of informant, organization they were informing on, email address, phone number…something other than first names that were probably pseudonyms and damn secret codes of some sort.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Dumbass.”
“You having problems?” she asked as she walked back into the room, the scent of bacon following her.
“Uh, my own stupidity, I guess.” He looked at her over his shoulder. “I didn’t really consider this stuff might be coded.” He scanned down the list. There was no Cian there, and thank God, because he had a damned unusual name. “Can you take a look?”
She tentatively stepped closer, standing behind his chair to look at the screen. The back of his neck prickled, and he felt something he knew he couldn’t afford to right then.
“Ah,” she said quietly. “Not going to be easy to find your guy in all that, is it?”
“No.”
“So the trick to these is the patterns…” She leaned over next to him and hit a couple of keys that split the screen, then she began typing rows of letters and numbers that looked like the ones on the FBI’s page.
“Your bacon will burn,” he said, noticing his voice sounded a little rough as he looked at the strip of skin between her cropped T-shirt and yoga pants. “I’ll deal with it. You do what you do.” He moved off the chair, striding quickly to the kitchen. Once there, he rolled up his shirtsleeves and flipped the strips of meat, pulling plates out of the cabinet and popping a few pieces of bread in the toaster as well. He’d always liked cooking, and he really needed the distraction.
“God,” he heard her call from the other room. “They’re so predictable. It’s a Caesar cipher. I just need to find the shift value. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.”
The toast popped, and he slathered on some butter, divided the bacon between the two plates, and added half a grapefruit to each as well. After searching for utensils, he found an entire drawer full of plasticware from takeout packages.
He walked out of the kitchen carrying the food and set her plate on the desk next to her. “You have no silverware,” he remarked, one eyebrow raised because he thought it was funny.
She glanced at the plate, then at him and sighed. “I don’t cook very much.”
He pulled a footstool over and sat on it, balancing his plate on his thigh as he ate.
“What the hell is a Caesar cipher?” he asked around a bite of toast.
Lila absentmindedly plucked a piece of bacon off her plate as she continued to tap out rows of numbers and letters with her other hand.
“It’s a fairly simple way of encrypting something. Just imagine if you have two rows of the alphabet and you shift the bottom one four spaces to the right, then take the four leftover letters from one end of the bottom row, move them to the other end, and then substitute letters in the bottom row
for letters in the top row.”
She grabbed a piece of paper and pen from the drawer and quickly showed him.
“So that’s what they’ve used?” he asked, fascinated at the things she knew.
“Yes, but I don’t know how many spaces they shifted, and they’ve included numbers and special characters, so it’ll just take me a sec…” She paused, hit enter, and the screen went wild for a few seconds, spitting out strings of numbers and letters in a frenzy. Then it stopped, two rows highlighted.
“Here we go,” she said.
“Did the computer just figure it out?”
“I figured it out,” she corrected. “I just set up a quick program to have it run the combinations so it would go faster.”
Cian set his plate down on the desk and leaned forward. Her hair smelled like honey, and he couldn’t stop himself from taking a deep breath before he focused on the screen where she was now typing madly again.
“Now what are you doing?” he asked.
“Decoding the list for you,” she said. “Oh. Except maybe I shouldn’t see the list. I can give you the cipher, and you can decode it. We can print it out or—”
“Just do it,” he told her. He had neither the time nor the mental energy to solve encrypted FBI informant lists right then, and he’d already admitted to her his name might be there. What difference did it really make?
She swallowed. “Okay.”
“Lila from Rogue?” he said quietly, keeping his eyes on the computer screen though he really wanted to look at her.
“Yeah?”
“I’m not actually going to kill you.” He couldn’t help the small smile that lifted one corner of his mouth as she turned, her face mere inches from his, and stared at him.
“Okay,” she said again, her voice thready.
“I have a very complicated life,” he continued. “I make hard decisions every day, and my priority is always protecting my brothers. Sometimes to do that, I make unorthodox choices. You can understand that, right?”
She nodded, still staring at his profile. She’d stopped typing, so there was nothing to see on the screen, but he continued to look at it anyway.
“I’ve trusted you with something because I had to right now. If you choose to tell someone—anyone—it will cost my life, and that in turn will probably cost my brothers their lives, or at least their freedom.”
Then he looked at her, and it took every ounce of the self-discipline he was known for to keep from leaning those last few inches and pressing his lips to hers. Her eyes were luminous—dark and shiny. Her skin was flawless, porcelain laid over steel, and her lips were two perfect pillows calling for him to come rest there, release his burdens, lay down his weary soul.
But he was Cian MacFarlane, and he hadn’t survived thirty plus years in his world by losing control.
“So, you can tell someone what you learned here today, and you can put me and my brothers at risk. Or you can keep it to yourself. Your choice. Either way, I’m not going to kill you. I don’t kill beautiful women who are doing me a favor.”
“I don’t want you to die,” she said, blinking at him for a moment before she broke the spell by turning away and resuming her typing. Something inside him sizzled and sparked at that. The idea that anyone other than his brothers didn’t want him to die was refreshing, maybe even inspiring.
“And I haven’t learned anything here today,” she continued, “except you cook damned good bacon, and the FBI is lazy with their encryption. A five-year-old could have broken that cipher.”
Then she grinned and pointed at the screen. “Voilà!”
He looked where she pointed, and there, the third name she’d decoded on the list was Juan, and following it was the name Vasquez. His gaze traveled to the other two rows she’d decoded, and he noted neither included “Cian” or “MacFarlane.” He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now,” she said, “it’s already five a.m. Eastern. I’m shutting this down before they sweep the system.”
“Great,” he answered, standing and picking up his plate. “That’s what we needed.”
He loaded her dishwasher while she backed out of the FBI system, and ten minutes later, they both stood in her foyer, Cian armed with the information he hoped would stop a war, Lila looking tired as hell.
“Thank you,” he said as he stood gazing at her, knowing he needed to leave, but not wanting to give up the sanctuary of her quiet home just yet. “I’ll have something sent over for your time,” he added. “A bonus if you will.”
“It’s really not—”
“Yeah,” he corrected, “it is.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
They stared at one another awkwardly for a moment, then he took charge, because that’s what Cian did.
“If the circumstances were different,” he told her, reaching out and cupping her soft cheek in his big palm, “you’d be my reward for a life done well, Lila from Rogue.” Then he leaned down and kissed her chastely on the lips before he turned and left.
The sun was rising as Lila fell into bed. She lay in her underwear and nothing else, the sheets cool against her heated skin. She gently ran her fingertips across her lips, the feel of his breath still warm on her skin.
He’d kissed her, admittedly only a whisper, a flutter of feathered wings that was gone before she’d hardly had time to register it. But her heart had raced, her pulse had jumped, and an hour later, her breath still came faster than normal.
“You’d be my reward.” Lila had never been special to anyone for anything except her hacking skills. But somehow, she knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. No, he’d been talking about her as a woman.
She sighed, unable to stop the small smile that slid across her lips. God, a man like Cian viewing her as a woman—a woman he wanted, no less. It was so far out of her normal worldview, she wasn’t sure what to think of it.
Or at least her head didn’t know what to think of it. The rest of her seemed perfectly able to think about it—fantasize about it, sigh over it like a schoolgirl with a crush on the sexy older guy in Algebra.
She knew it wouldn’t ever happen again, and even if it did, it wouldn’t result in anything. But for that one brief moment, as the sun lit up the cold Chicago sky, Lila allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to have Cian’s hands on her, his lips skating across her skin, his fingers touching her most achy and tender places, his breath coming heavy as he thrust into her. For just a few brief moments, Lila allowed herself to dream about what it would feel like to be wanted by a man like Cian MacFarlane.
And it was spectacular.
Chapter 13
“You sure you’re ready?” Liam asked as he shifted Cian’s Kevlar vest, settling it more firmly on his shoulders.
“Yeah, I’m good. Really.”
Liam leaned down and picked up Cian’s dress shirt off the chair in the tiny office at the back of Banshee.
“I don’t like this,” he said as he handed it to Cian. “I should be going.”
Cian shrugged on the shirt and began buttoning it. “You know it has to be me. Mario Consuelos is never going to agree to a meet with a surrogate. He wants me to recognize him as the new head of the Vasquez organization. That’s a huge part of our negotiating leverage.”
Liam leaned on the edge of the desk and crossed his arms, causing his biceps to bulge more than usual, the banded Celtic tattoos that decorated them standing out in stark relief.
“Then let me stand with you. Tell him you want seconds there. Pop would never have gone to a meet like this without a second.”
Cian snorted in disgust. “Pop would have slit the hostage’s throat and tossed him on Mario’s front lawn before he blew up a Vasquez warehouse or two last night. Then he’d have eaten six eggs and a rasher of bacon before calling it a day.”
“What the hell is a rasher, anyway?” Liam asked shaking his head. “But, yeah, I know he’s not really a negotiator.”
“You think?” Cian deadpanned.
Liam’s brow creased in concern.
“And what if you’re too much of a negotiator?” He put a big paw on Cian’s shoulder, the weight of his hand comforting in a way Cian couldn’t put into words. “You’re the smartest guy I know, bro. And the best damn leader this family could ever have. That’s why Pop gives you so much shit. He realized it when you were sixteen and all the guys were coming to you with questions about business instead of him. He’s always known you were the better leader, and he can’t stand it.”
Cian smiled wryly at his best friend in the world, the man who always had his back no matter what, the brother who’d given up his entire future to protect and follow Cian. Some days when he looked at Liam, it nearly broke his damn heart.
“But…” Cian said as he pushed his arms through the sleeves of a dress jacket.
“But, I worry you don’t see how many people in this business don’t earn respect the way you do. How many of them lead by fear instead.”
Cian’s gut turned cold. “You know damn well I lead by fear too, whether I ever wanted to or not.”
Liam shook his head sharply. “No. They fear losing your approval. They don’t fear you’ll be vicious. But guys like Vasquez and Consuelos are. They’re vicious, and they won’t hesitate. They won’t bother to weigh the pros and cons and how it’ll affect their families. They’ll just blow your damn head off.”
“You mean the way Connor did to Alejandro earlier?” Cian raised an eyebrow.
Liam shook his head. “Connor’s not vicious either. Not like that. He’s hotheaded and righteous, but not vicious.”
Cian chuckled. “Righteous. That’s a big word for you.”
Liam flipped him off before pushing away from the desk. Cian gave one last tug to his tie and held his arms out. The double-breasted suit jacket hid the Kevlar well. While there was no reason he shouldn’t wear a vest to the meeting, it spoke of mistrust, and he didn’t want to set that tone before he’d been able to reel Consuelos in with the bait of a rat’s name.
“All I’m saying is…” Liam looked away, taking a breath. “Don’t fucking get yourself shot, all right?”
Breath of Deceit Page 12
