Countermeasure (14 page)

“Please come with us, Mr. Bauer. We need to have a little conversation.” Her words, although polite, left no room for refusal.

By her intonation, he would be joining her whether he liked it or not. He was curious and more than a little pissed at the disgust he saw in her eyes. He wanted to know what the hell was going on. He stood abruptly and a little jolt of electricity shot through him when his body brushed up against the front of hers. Startled, the woman jumped back as if she’d touched a live wire, giving him an odd satisfaction at knowing that he wasn’t the only one affected by the contact.

Filing his reaction for later examination, he glanced at George to gauge his take on the scene playing out before him. George looked back at him and shrugged his shoulders as if to say,
No clue, buddy,
followed by a questioning look Trevor interpreted as,
Do you know her?

With no option but to join them, Trevor turned and led the woman and her shadow through a series of corridors until they reached an empty conference room. Once inside, the woman walked to the head of the table and sat, gesturing him to take the seat to her right. Her partner closed the conference room door and stood beside, his message clear:
You can leave when we let you.

Total poser,
Trevor thought, dismissing the man with a chuckle. Ignoring her unspoken order, he took a seat at the other end of the table, putting as much distance between them as possible. He wanted to be able to think with a clear head. Her fresh scent had invaded his nostrils and had already jumbled his senses during the walk to the conference room. If he sat too close to her he would be distracted with thoughts that included exploring every inch of her body to learn where the scent originated. Was it her hair? Neck? The spot between her breasts? The back of a knee? Shaking his head at the direction his thoughts had taken—the gutter, most definitely—he tried to return his focus to the strange situation in which he found himself.

The woman’s eyes narrowed and she took her time studying him. The silence became uncomfortable as she continued to dissect him alive. Her look was cold and full of anger. Her eyes skimmed his face, touched on his lips, and then clashed with his. Trevor, against his better judgment, became aroused by her perusal. Her whiskey eyes studied him for a long while, but he could have sworn that just for a nanosecond, they’d softened with something more—a tiny hint of interest?

Shifting slightly in his seat, he thought he heard a low growl coming from the man at the door and glanced at him. He figured he must have imagined it, since the man displayed the best imitation of a marble statue he’d ever seen.
Why the hell did men like him think that was a special talent?
Trevor wondered. When he shifted in his chair, searching for a more comfortable position, he caught the faint frown on the woman’s face and the warning look she speared at the man at the door. For the second time, Trevor wondered about their relationship.

Trevor was tired of being jerked around and chafed at the additional time this little tête-à-tête was adding to his day. “What the hell is this about and who the fuck are you?”

His question grated on Cassandra’s nerves. Her anger was bitter on her tongue and rushed in her blood. Her pulse beat a mile a minute and sounded so loud to her ears that she was positive both Nathan and Bauer could see it jumping at the base of her throat. The bastard had infiltrated her project, taking advantage of his position at the NSA and of his unlimited access to tools most hackers could only dream of.

Cassandra looked at her nails and, to calm herself, counted to ten. She was so close to getting the information she wanted she could almost taste it. She controlled her expression, falling back on old tricks learned as a child, looked up, and pinned Bauer with her eyes.

“This is my partner, Nathan Nelson,” she gestured to the man at the door. “My name is Cassandra James. I’d like to know what the hell you were doing in EXClinic’s system, and why you were snooping around the Morrígan files.”

“Shite!” Trevor exclaimed harshly, straightening in his chair to stare at her with wide eyes. Cassandra James. The same Cassandra some ass had pinned as “bombing” the security on the formula case that had fallen in George’s lap. The same formula’s hosting servers he had hacked into only to reach a dead end.
Double shite!

Cassandra kept her eyes locked
with his wide ones when his curse burst loose with a delicious lilt she hadn’t noticed before. His eyes had darkened from indigo to the dark blue of a raging sea in a matter of seconds.

“What were you doing on the server Mr. Bauer?” she calmly asked him. When he simply stared at her, she added, “It’s a simple question, Mr. Bauer. It shouldn’t be that hard for you to answer.”

Her sarcastic tone rubbed him the wrong way again.
Who was
she to talk down to him like that?
He refused to follow her lead. “What gives you clearance to ask such ‘simple’ questions regarding NSA operations, Ms. James?”

Cassandra raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to imply your prowling around the server was official NSA business, Mr. Bauer?”

His eyes were drawn to her lips. “What I am saying, Ms. James, is that I am not answering any questions until we establish why you are here and what you want from me.” He smirked when her eye twitched slightly under the heat of his gaze.

“The only thing I want from you is the truth regarding why you were worming your way around the server.”

Trevor’s anger swelled and his eyes narrowed. “I was…”

Before he could finish, she spoke over him, “I know that you were careful enough to leave almost no trace behind. You deleted most of your presence on the server, so technically I can’t press any charges against you, since I have no actual proof of what you did. But…we both know that you wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t thought there might be something of value to retrieve from it.”

Trevor chuckled at her condescending tone and her eyes widened in surprise.

“You laugh. Why?”

“You just confirmed what I was thinking, Ms. James.”

 “And that would be…?”

“You have no fucking idea what, if anything, I was….” he flashed a smile, lifting his hands and using his fingers to gesture quotation marks in the air, “‘…doing in your servers.’”

His laughter, while totally unexpected, ground on her nerves but was simultaneously surprisingly appealing to her ears. She schooled her features and held her emotions in check, but she couldn’t hold back the anger from sparkling in her eyes.

She wanted to throttle the son of a bitch for destroying her carefully planned interview. Cassandra had expected to come in and pound him with her questions. Instead, he was messing with her. Trying to trip her up each chance he got. The tension in her neck grew as she stood and placed her hands on the table, leaning over him in an attempt to intimidate him, but even that didn’t seem to faze him.

“You can wipe that smirk off your face, Mr. Bauer. I’m not through with you just yet.”

Trevor stood and faced her with a thoughtful expression that in a matter of a few seconds transformed into a big, knowing smile. “Nah. That’s where you’re wrong, Ms. James. We’re through,” he said, and walked toward the door.

Cassandra, realizing he was serious about leaving, intercepted him and firmly grabbed his arm.

Trevor stopped and looked down at her hand. His thoughts blurred for a split second. Her hand was as soft as it looked and the zing of electricity from her contact was even more potent than he would’ve imagined. His body grew taut in reaction to the images her touch set off in his mind—images of her touching him in more intimate places, leaving him needy in their wake. He scrambled for control and blurted out the first smart-mouth comment he could think of: “Here? Now? On the table?”

Nathan’s reaction was instantaneous. In two large steps, he barreled into Trevor, grabbed him by the neck with one hand, and shoved him to his back on the table.

Trevor gripped Captain America’s wrist with his hands. He calmly locked eyes with his furious ones and tried to pry his fingers from around his neck while rasping, “Dude, I think you have serious anger management issues.”

At the same time, Trevor heard Cassandra James yelling, “Nate! What the fuck!? Cut it out! Let him go, Goddamn it!”

Her bulldog’s eyes narrowed and he shook his head at her. “He had it coming, Cass. He’s been an ass since we entered the room.”

Cassandra gripped Nathan’s arm, digging her fingers in deep until his fingers finally loosened their hold. Trevor forcefully flung Nathan’s arm away from him and shoved himself from the table to stand. “
A amadáin
, you need therapy.”

Nathan growled and lunged at him again, but Cassandra quickly moved between them and shoved Nathan back with all her strength, “Shit, Nate! Just get the hell out!”

“Cass…”

“I don’t want to hear it, just get out. Now!”

Nathan snapped his mouth shut. With one last glare at both Trevor and Cassandra, he adjusted his well-cut suit and walked out, slamming the door behind him.

Cassandra bowed her head and inhaled deeply to gather her composure. After a few seconds, she stood straight, squared her shoulders, and faced him again. Nathan freaking blew it. At this point she would be lucky if she got anything useful out of Bauer. From the belligerent look on his face she knew he was about to follow Nathan out the door and she couldn’t do much to stop him if he did. She quickly decided a change in tactics was in order and softened her approach. It was time to play good cop on her own.

Trevor caught a hint of something in her eyes, but it disappeared almost immediately as the confident and calm Cassandra James stood once again before him.

“Listen. Let’s try this again, Okay?”

Nodding without a word, Trevor sat back against the edge of the table, studying her where she stood with her arms crossed, seemingly gathering her thoughts.

He considered what little he knew about her. Based on the conversation flagged by Echelon, she had disappointed her boss. From what he observed during his intrusion into the system, he had been impressed by how carefully she had patched and fortified it against a hack. Her work would have stopped a better-than-average industrial hack if Trevor hadn’t been factored into the equation. The commands he had used to get into the system were almost unheard of, part of his own personal arsenal, and as a result she had no chance against someone of his skill or knowledge.

Since the theft had been deemed an insider job, the fact that someone with access to the data had turned coat was almost unforeseeable and not a direct result of a failure on her part. Yet Cassandra James’s behavior conveyed she was taking the incident a little too personally. Interestingly enough, the more he learned about her, the more he was drawn to her. He knew damn well what it was like to take things personally. They had a few traits in common.

Cassandra cleared her throat and rubbed at her left hip as if it itched. “Look…I’m sorry about that. Nate…he was a little over the top.”

“I would’ve been too, if you were mine,” Trevor interrupted.

She leaned slightly forward and spit out, “
I
don’t belong to
him
or
anybody
else
for that matter, Mr. Bauer.”

Trevor realized by the steel in her eyes that she hadn’t taken his comment in the charming manner he had intended. He was relieved to know she wasn’t involved with Mr. Muscles, but it didn’t change the fact the guy was definitely marking his territory.

“Tell that to Hulk out there,” he joked with a nod of his head at the door.

A hint of a smile crept into her eyes. “Hulk?”

“Yes, Hulk. He looked fucking normal until he exploded in rage and came at me like a linebacker. The only thing missing was the sickly green skin tone. Oh, wait…he did turn green. Right when you ordered him out!” he chuckled.

A genuine smile curved her lips and took his breath away. It would have knocked him to his knees if he had been standing; as it was, he felt like he had been punched in the gut. It was far worse than Hulk’s tight grip on his neck had been. At that moment she could have asked him anything and he would have gladly given it.

Cassandra appreciated the fact that Trevor had not been intimidated by Nathan. He had held his own, demonstrating the same calm, cool, cocky attitude she had observed earlier when he was joking with his friend. It definitely supported her assessment that he was comfortable in his skin.

His transition to friendly conversation gave her the opening she needed and she jumped on it. She sat next to him on the table and turned slightly to face him. “Tell me one thing. Why were you on the server over a week ago?” She looked him in the eye. “You don’t seem the criminal-hack type—even with your crass mouth and smartass attitude.”

A smile lit his face and he laughed. “Sorry. Old habits from home.” When she frowned he added, “Ireland. Irish. Born and raised.”