This time, Hope smiled. He could be charming when he wanted to be, when he was not being annoying.
“Soo…tell me about this obsession of yours,” she said, looking at him from the side of her eye.
He turned to face her then. “You just want to hear me say how amazing you are,” he accused.
Hope shrugged, she didn’t hear it very often so…yeah. “Go ahead, I’m listening.” She waved a hand at him.
Rusty chuckled in amusement. “You are so without shame, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Hmm…I have been in a few forums and chat rooms with you, CodeNymph.”
She glanced at him in surprise. That was the nickname she used in internet chat rooms and forums. Not many people connected her to that persona.
“What is your nickname?”
“CookieBaron.”
Hope gasped as the car swayed slightly. She quickly brought it under control, thankful that it was a Sunday and the freeway was free.
“You are…He is…” She was speechless.
CookieBaron was one of the greatest hackers out there, only he worked on the other side. There were rumors that he was a government agent or something of the sort, but he was such a well-respected member of their community, willing to lend a hand where needed. Hope was not the type of person to have a crush on an online personality, but there had always been something about CookieBaron and his witty sense of humor.
“I can’t believe that you’ve known who I am all this while and I had no idea you were him.”
He shrugged. “I knew you were Hope Conran, but I could not get any information on you besides the fact that you owned a dating site. You are so damn elusive.”
It was her turn to shrug. “I don’t bother to grant interviews because well, there are things in my past I’m not particularly proud of. I’m not sure I want them splashed all over the tabloids. Then there’s my mother…”
“So I kind of got a little obsessed about finding out more about you.”
“Yeah? Hope you weren’t too disappointed?”
“Nah, you’re pretty much the smartass I expected to find.”
She glared at him then laughed. “You are less arrogant online.”
“It’s part of my charm,” he said, sending her a wink when she turned to look at him. “Seriously, though, the way you handled that Project Dark Discovery was epic.”
At his words, she shrank. “How did you know about my involvement in that?”
Project Dark Discovery was a massive hack carried out by Anonymous, the online hacktivists, as they liked to call themselves. They had taken down over fifty illicit child porn websites. Her main area of concentration had been Lolita City, a file uploading website that was used by pedophiles. It had been very personal to most of them that had worked on that hack. She’d had her own experiences with pedophiles, and for one brief moment in time, had felt like an avenging angel. Even though she was very proud of her part in taking down the sites, it was not something she liked talking about.
“When you guys had done your bit, we moved in,” he said quietly.
“So the rumors are right, you work with government…maybe law enforcement?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly, but we do collaborate from time to time. And besides, I was in military intelligence at that time.”
Hope nodded. She knew about his stint with the military, she’d done her research and he’d told her as much. Except, he had not told her why he left the military in the first place. She bet he had been a damn fine soldier.
They were both silent for a while, Hope lost in her thoughts. It was not an uncomfortable silence, but more of a companionable one. She did not feel any need to fill the silence with pointless chatter and she was glad he didn’t feel that need either. It felt so nice to be with someone and not feel any pressure to say anything. She really could get used to this.
“Tell me about your mother?” Rusty broke the silence.
They had been driving for close to an hour and they still had a couple of hours more before they got to the Springfield area, where the women’s prison was located.
Hope gave his question serious thought. No one had ever asked her to tell them about her mother and she wanted to use the right words to convey her exact thoughts.
“Her name is Sheila Conran and she was a school teacher before…well, before everything happened. She is a gentle woman, soft spoken and kind. Even as a child, I remember her baking cookies for the neighbors and volunteering at the shelter.”
Her mother had laughed a lot and played with her a lot too, but she’d known that there was something dark about her father. She remembered him hitting her mom. As a little girl, she would crawl under her bed and hide till the scary noise ended.
“Even now, after spending over two decades incarcerated, she’s still kind and sweet. You know the correctional center where she’s being held has gotten a bad rap lately and there’s a lot of abuses going on inside, but somehow, Sheila has a way of making everyone who comes close to her feel better.”
“She sounds like a wonderful person,” Rusty said when she’d been silent for a while.
Hope smiled sadly. “She is…I just…I wish she’d been there, you know?” She blinked away the tears that prickled the back of her eyes. “I was so angry at first and did not want anything to do with her, and I missed out on so much. I should be the strong one, but she gives me strength.”
“But you still have mixed feelings about going to visit her?”
“Yeah,” Hope said with a nod. She hated seeing her mother behind bars and still could not get used to it. What broke her heart each visit was having to leave her there. It killed her. “I can’t wait for her sentence to be over.”
“When is she getting out?”
“In two years.”
“Yeah? That’s great.”
“I know,” she said with a smile. “I just wish she would tell me why she did it. She could have just walked away.”
“Sometimes, it’s better not knowing.”
Those words stayed with Hope for quite a while. It had never occurred to her that knowing why her mother had killed her father might hurt her. She had only wanted to understand. But what if it had something to do with her? It was a thought she had never considered before and it unsettled her. She had made up her mind to get to the bottom of the mystery, but all of a sudden, she was beginning to feel like maybe it was best to respect her mother’s wishes after all.
Chapter Sixteen
Hope had her head buried in a pile of files. Usually, she left this part of the job for Jared, but he still wasn’t back from New York. There were so many items that needed her signature and she had to go through every line to be sure she was not signing away her firstborn. Most of them were pretty standard documents, and at the beginning, Jared had made sure she handled the administrative part of running the company, just in case he was not around. But it had been several years since she’d had to do that. And even now, she could not understand why she had to, when the papers could have been sent to him via overnight.
“We don’t need to be spending that kind of money when you are right there in the office. Suck it up, Hope,” Jared had said over the phone.
So here she was, sucking it up. Hope sighed as she scribbled her signature to a boring legal document. Something about intellectual property…ugh.
There was a brief knock on the door and Nora Mason, the head of their IT team peeked inside. She looked anxious and worried.
“Hi, Hope, may I have a few minutes of your time?”
Hope looked up and nodded. “Sure, come on inside. What’s the matter?” she asked, waving her into one of the empty seats across her table.
Nora began to wring her hands as her eyes filled with tears. Hope stared at the other woman in shock. Nora Mason was one of those women who was always self-possessed and seemed to have everything in control. She was thoroughly efficient, organized and ran the IT department like a benev
olent dictator. She and Hope did not exactly get along, but she kept the programmers functioning like a well-oiled machine and so Hope had always kept their relationship cordial.
“Nora? What’s the matter?” she asked gently.
“I’m turning in my resignation,” Nora said.
Hope was confused. She had expected a lot of things, but not that. She got up from her seat and came round to where Nora was seated. She pulled out the other seat and sat beside the woman.
“Okay, but you don’t seem very happy about it. Is there something I should know?”
Nora shook her head and a few tears spilled down her face. “Two of our servers got hacked over the weekend. The Find Your Desire app is down and we can’t get it back up. I have tried everything but nothing is working. I don’t think I’m the right person for this job.”
Hope felt her heart sink. “Have you been at the office since yesterday?”
“Yeah. I called in the entire team, we managed to stop any more servers from going down, but we couldn’t rescue the other two.” She wrung her hands in despair, “I tried to get hold of you over the phone, but your cell was off and you were not picking up your house phone.”
She usually kept her phone off whenever she went to visit her mother and yesterday had been so good, she had not remembered to turn it back on.
She took the other woman’s hands in hers, stilling their nervous movement.
“Look at me, Nora.” She waited till Nora raised her distressed gaze to hers. “You got this job because you were one of the best out there, not, and I repeat, not because you were a miracle worker.”
“I don’t understand.”
Hope sighed and sat back, letting go of the other woman’s hands. “Look, we are under attack. I have no idea why or who is behind it, but we have been targeted by someone who is not just really good, but who has spent a lot of time studying my code.”
Nora stared at her wide-eyed, not saying a word as she took in what Hope had just said.
Hope stood up and walked back to her seat. “I don’t want you to get worked up about this. I’m calling in a team of experts who will handle this. This is not your fault, do you get me?”
Nora nodded, using the pad of her thumb to wipe her eyes. “I just feel so bad about everything,” she said.
“Yeah, well…we all do. But if we all go resigning now who will be left to tackle this? So no more talk about your resignation, okay?”
Nora tilted her head to the side in a half nod. “If you are sure.”
“I’m very sure.”
She nodded again, then stood up and straightened her skirt. She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh as she collected herself.
“Thank you so much, Hope. And I’m sorry for falling to pieces like that.”
Hope gave her a wicked smile. “I can’t say it wasn’t refreshing to know that the Sarge is human,” she said, referring to the nickname the office staff called Nora when they thought she wasn’t listening.
“Oh, you know about that name, huh?” she asked with a wry smile.
Hope shrugged. “Very little gets by me.”
Nora gave her a pointed look. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Hope waited till she was gone before burying her head in her arms with a groan. This was bad. This was really bad. The app was where they converted users into paying customers, so it was one of their largest income earners. Whoever was doing this was not acting randomly. The person knew exactly what he or she was doing.
She heard the door to her office open, but didn’t bother to look up. She needed some time to die in peace or at least a few minutes to wallow in private. Whoever it was could just turn back around.
“Hope? Are you okay?”
It was Rusty. The last person she needed to see on a personal level, but the right person on a professional level. And yeah, she knew she was not making sense, but she was going through an episode, so it was allowed.
She turned her head so that she could see him. “Rusty?”
“Yeah?”
“You have a gun, right?”
“Ah…before I answer that, why are you asking?”
“I need you to shoot me, now.”
“Okay…, but do you want to tell me why?”
She shut her eyes against the headache that was beginning to build, then with a sigh she sat up and faced him.
“Two of our servers were taken down yesterday. Our major app is now offline,” she stated bleakly.
He was silent for a few minutes, then he pulled out his phone and made a call. “Hey Vin…I’m cool, thanks…Yeah, I’m calling about that. Two other servers were taken down…uh huh…ASAP…right, thanks.” He ended the call.
“Who did you call?”
“One of my guys from back in the day. He was also military intelligence then became an anonymous hacker before he began his own consultancy. If anyone can get to the bottom of this, it’s him.”
“Do I know him?”
Rusty smiled. “Probably. I’ll let him introduce himself when he comes.”
“He’s coming here himself?”
“I’m not the only one who’s obsessed with Hope Conran,” he said with a shrug.
Hope rolled her eyes. “Not that shit again.”
“It is what it is,” Rusty said, holding up his hands.
Hope sighed. “I just don’t like what is happening. Any more of this and we’ll be forced to shut down everything.”
“You mean closing up DesireU for good?” He looked aghast.
“What can we do, Russ? If we can’t end this, then we’re just going to keep bleeding and it’s better to let people go now than keep them tied to a sinking ship.”
Even as she said the words, she felt like the life was being squeezed out of her heart. DesireU had been her life for so long. She had poured everything into it and she had no backup plan. There was no Plan B. This business was it. If she lost it, she had nothing to fall back on, and the thought of going back to having nothing terrified her. She did not want to go back to that life.
Rusty walked over to where she was seated gazed down at her.
“I came in here to invite you to lunch.”
“I’m not sure, with everything going on…”
“You have to eat and well, I also need to talk to you. Will you come with me?” He stretched out a hand to her.
Hope stared at his hand and caught one side of her lower lip between her teeth. She did not think she should be out of the office now, but if she were being honest with herself, there wasn’t much she could do. And he was right, she did need to eat. With a sigh, she took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. She was standing right in front of him and their eyes met and held. She saw in his eyes that he wanted to kiss her and she parted her lips in anticipation. Then with a wry smile, he stepped back and let go of her hands.
She swallowed the disappointed sigh and put on a halfhearted smile of her own. “I’ll just grab my purse.”
“Great. I’ll wait for you in the car,” he said and then he was gone.
Hope frowned. She had noticed a kind of restraint about him. For one, he had not repeated the kiss they’d shared the night of the cookout. Maybe it had not meant as much to him. He probably kissed a lot of women, and he did not say it was as earth-shaking for him as it was for her. She wished she could dismiss the kiss so easily, but she kept replaying it in her head. It was honestly the most spectacular kiss she’d ever received. And she needed to let it go already. The man had moved on, it was time for her to do so.
With another sigh, she picked up her purse and walked out of her office.
**
Rusty chose a small restaurant in downtown Chicago, just a few minutes away from Hope’s office. The lower floor was busy, since it was lunchtime, but he directed her to a set of stairs that led to an upper floor, which was not as busy. There were a few couples there. They were led to a table for two, placed right by the floor-to-ceiling windows, where they had a nice view of the city.<
br />
“This is nice, I’ve never been here before,” Hope said, looking around appreciatively.
“It’s one of my favorite places. I like to come here alone with a good book.”
“I can see the appeal,” she said with a smile.
The waiter came around and they placed their orders. While they waited for the food to come, Rusty reached across the table and caught Hope’s hand in his. She turned startled eyes to him.
“I haven’t thanked you for sharing the experience with me yesterday,” he said.
She frowned in confusion. “You mean the visit to my mother?”
He nodded.
“But you had to go with me, right?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t have to let me meet your mom.”
“Oh.” She smiled and then shrugged. “I knew she was going to love you and I wasn’t wrong.”
He thought back to his meeting with Sheila Conran and acknowledged that the feeling was mutual. Jail had a way of hardening people, but the woman had remained sweet and she was so positive. She’d glanced at them both with sparkling eyes and had told Hope how happy she was that she finally had someone of her own. Even though Hope had said they were just friends, Sheila had met his eyes and a sort of understanding had passed between them. She’d seen that he liked her daughter and she had told him with her gaze that she approved.
“She’s a sweetheart,” he said and felt his heart skip a beat as she beamed at him.
He turned her hand over and ran a thumb over her palm. Just holding her hand like this was really nice. He laughed inwardly at himself. He could not believe he was acting so sappily towards a woman, but he could not seem to help himself. With this woman, he felt like a sappy teenager.
“You said you wanted to talk to me about something?” Hope said as she withdrew her hand and tucked in a strand of hair behind her ear.
Rusty leaned back and kept his gaze on hers. Her grey eyes were clear and he felt like he could see right to her soul. He felt like something was pulling him in deeper and deeper into her. He blinked and moved his gaze to her full, lush lips. He could not get the taste of her out of his mind. All he needed to do to recall that kiss was close his eyes and he was back in his SUV, his mouth fused to hers.
Silver Shield Security Box Set Page 88
