Sweet Seduction Stripped (24 page)

I smiled and the room went silent.

"Lucky bastard," someone murmured. "What I wouldn't give for a smile like that."

Out of all the possible scenarios I could have foreseen when I walked in here to face Jaxon's death and the answers to the turmoil he'd created in me, I did not expect to be enjoying it. To be amused and entertained. To be delighted and happy. To feel so normal and in my element and surrounded by friends.

But that's what they all felt like. I barely knew them. Hell, I barely knew Ric. But like Ric, they'd slipped past my defences and wormed their way inside. I didn't want to lose this. It felt good and right and... home.

"What happens when this is all over?" I asked, my eyes soaking up Ric's happy face.

"What do you mean, Dancer?"

"When we confirm what Jaxon's been doing and," I nibbled my bottom lip, then forced myself forward, "we all move on."

"What do you want to happen?" Ric asked carefully.

I glanced around the room; some of the guys were talking; some listening in on conversations; some even doing things on tablet computers or on their phones. None of them were paying attention to me. Or, at least, I thought none were.

"I could use someone with your skill-set on my team," Nick said from my other side. My head swung 'round to look up at him where he stood. He shrugged. "Just a suggestion." And then he walked off to the other side of the room and joined in a conversation with someone there, as though he hadn't just altered the course of my life.

My eyes came back to Ric's, unsure what I'd see there.

"It's not a bad idea," he said cautiously, his features guarded. "I mean, you could be my other half." He scratched his head as though those weren't the words he'd meant to say and so was trying to wipe them away. "At least, you know, my other half in here. It's hard to get the guys to take my down hours, and sometimes they miss things, but you wouldn't. We could job share."

"But then I wouldn't see you," I whispered. "Well, only briefly, at change-over."

Ric slowly smiled. Tentative at first, but soon it encompassed his entire face.

"I thought, maybe, you wouldn't want to feel trapped," he explained. "Feel like I wanted you here just for me."

"
Do
you want me here just for you?" I asked and held my breath.

"If I tell you that, it defeats me trying to persuade you that the job is not a condition of being with me."

"Answer the question, Ric."

He stared at me, eyes searching, but I kept a neutral expression on my face. No way was I giving him a hint on this one.

"Ah, fuck it," he murmured. "Who am I kidding?" A shake of his head. "Baby, you're all I think about. The only person I want to be with. There's no way I'd let you job share, if I could help it."

I raised my eyebrows at him.

"Yes!" he snapped. "Dammit!" he added. "I want you here just for me."

"See," I said with a sweet smile. "That wasn't too hard, was it?" Ric huffed out a breath just as a  phone line rang.

I was guessing it was an internal one because he reached forward and hit a button, saying into his earpiece, "Control. Yeah, put him through, Carmel."

Then he turned back to the room and added, "Pierce is on the line, I'll put him on speaker."

The room went silent as Ric hit another button, and then his hand slipped into mine. I knew immediately why he'd chosen that moment to show physical comfort and support. Pierce was the detective, this could only mean one thing.

"You're on speaker, Pierce," Ric said, eyes on my face. I tipped my gaze down to the floor.

"They found a body," Pierce's voice said down the line. "It's Harding. Dental records match."

I blinked. There it was. Jaxon was dead. It was over. I could move on and start a new life safe from the machinations of a once thought loving man.

It felt strangely anticlimactic. Someone like him should have gone out in a flurry of bullets and a spray of blood splatter. But he'd died alone, while sleeping, and then being crushed to death by tonnes and tonnes of bricks.

"Are you OK?" Ric asked quietly to my side, as Nick took up the conversation with Pierce.

I nodded, still staring at the floor.

"It's all right if you're not," he pushed and my fists clenched. "Understandable even."

I closed my lids and fought back tears.

"Baby," he crooned, shifting in his seat, probably preparing to wrap me up in his arms.

I jumped to my feet, staring down at him, hands fisted at my sides, breathing a little too hard.

"You don't get it," I said, loud enough to halt all conversations in the room. "I feel cheated," I ground out. "And that makes me feel ashamed. Because it wasn't enough that he died in a building collapse. I want more. He threatened my dad. He laid a trap for me and when I passed his test he
threatened my dad
. I have never been so scared as I was with him. So terrified he'd snap and kick me like he did his lawyer. But that's not the half of it. You know what really makes me sick? He never treated me unkindly until this week. I didn't see this coming. He tricked me. Me!"

I was shaking and the room felt chilled, but heat flushed my cheeks and my head pounded with the volume of my voice.

"He wasn't who I thought he was," I said, trying hard to control my anger. I was almost whispering now, a complete turn around. "And now I'll never know who he really was. Just some guy I gave twenty months of my time to, never bothered to find out more, and in the end feel like I barely escaped with my life."

There, I'd said it. I was a vengeful, nasty person. I didn't deserve Ric's love.

He stood up slowly, hands out in a peace-keeping move.

"You want to find out who he was?" he asked, voice low and steady. "You want to confirm that your gut was right in the end? You want to stop anyone else in his company taking over the reins and doing this to someone else? Do you?" he prompted.

I hadn't looked at it like that. I'd thought it was all over. It didn't need to be over.

"I do," I whispered. Ric's eyes shot to someone's over my shoulder. I didn't turn to see, I was anchored to Ric. My lifeline. My light in amongst the shadows. Not running from me, running to me. Arms open, heart laid bare. Stripped.

"Then welcome to ASI, Amber," Nick said, finally breaking my connection to Ric. I turned slowly to face him. The entire room watching the exchange with various looks of intrigue, excitement and a type of hunger that wasn't for me, but I was thinking was for what they could achieve with me on their side.

Nick held out his hand for me to shake, like the first time I met him in the hallway.

But unlike last night, I didn't need to think about reaching out, gripping his palm, and returning the greeting. Sealing the deal.

I just did.

Claps and hoots and shouts of approval sounded out, startling me enough to make me jump.

"All right, you lot," Nick yelled. "Let's give our IT gurus some space and take a break for now. Lockdown's lifted, so tell your loved ones. But we've still got work to do. Hop to it!"

The room thinned out until it was just Ric, Nick and me left.

Nick paused at the door, turned back and looked me in the eye and said, "Every single one of the people on my team have a history. A background that has made them into who they are today. Some work for me because the alternative is too bleak to contemplate. Some work for me because they believe in a better world and think they can help make it that way. But what we do is not for the faint of heart. I thank God every day that my team has been through hell to get here. Because, Amber, hell doesn't stop when you reach civilisation. Sometimes that's where it began. Not one of my team doesn't understand that. And you are no different from them."

He nodded once he'd delivered that speech and then pushed through the door, Ric releasing the lock with well timed precision.

Silence met the click of it closing, then Ric said, "Bastard still didn't confirm if we'd job share."

I smiled. "I haven't signed anything yet. We can still negotiate."

Ric's face softened and he whispered, "Can I hug you now?"

The answer was easy. "You never need to ask."

I shouldn't have been surprised. ASI control was a fantasy come true. My deepest, electronic desires brought to life. All wrapped up and accompanied by Ric. A girl couldn't have landed on her own two feet any better than I had. For a moment it felt truly surreal.

This is my life now? This is where I'd always thought I would be. And yet somehow I couldn't help checking over my shoulder, holding my breath, pinching the skin on the side of my arm, just to be sure it wasn't a dream.

I was gainfully employed by a security and investigations company on the right side of the law.

Take that, Harding! That wonderful degree you moulded to suit your nefarious purposes was now going to be used to bring down the rest of your colleagues.

At least, that was the plan. But by five that night we hadn't cracked C&C, and the more we tried, the more slippery the slope became. Ric and I had been working practically without interruption. Abi had brought us lunch in control, Nick had checked on us twice, and Katie, Kelly and Gen had swung by to say farewell, introducing me to Eva, Lucas, Drew and Finn on their way out as well. All of them talking a mile a minute and eager to be free of ASI's walls.

The quiet of control was blissful after that.

"What are we going to do about this seven-point-two million US dollars?" I said, looking at the only other avenue we hadn't tried until then. The electronic trail I so meticulously covered from PaP Holdings to ASI via C&C.

"Who are they, anyway?" Ric asked, taking a break from his own attempts to climb the insurmountable walls C&C's IT system had.

I ran a check and came up with a few shadow companies, a couple of fronts and finally a trust in Haiti.

Ah, PaP, or Port au Prince.

"Does Haiti mean anything to you?" I asked.

Ric sucked in a breath of air. "Say again, Dancer?"

"Port au Prince, Haiti."

"Fucking hell," Ric breathed.

"What?"

"Declan King was born there."

My eyes flicked back to the screen in front of me. The trust didn't name recipients, but I should be able to track it down.

"I'll get on it," I said, familiarising myself with Haiti's convoluted cyber infrastructure and their legal parameters surrounding trust privacy. Not everything has to be obtained illegally. Lesson number one Ric had told me once Nick had left control.

I was vaguely aware that Ric had connected a call through to someone, saying simply, "You might want to come in here."

I found the legalese, and then set to work on decoding the gibberish through a French translation programme. It was just beginning to make sense when Nick walked in through the door.

"What have you got?" he demanded.

"Declan King," Ric replied.

"Not yet," I offered, but I was getting close. Haiti had a national database for tax purposes, listing trusts and their trustees.

"Where?" Nick asked, moving closer to watch what I was doing.

"PaP Holdings," Ric said. "Stands for Port au Prince."

"Fucking hell," Nick whispered, a repeat of Ric's earlier reaction. "If you can prove it..."

"We've got Harding," Ric finished.

Not that Jaxon could pay for his crimes now, but this would go a long way to implicate C&C. The next step would be to flush out Jaxon's second in command. Who, as far as I knew, was Sala. I couldn't picture Sala in charge of the business. Well not the business as I had thought it to be. Legitimate, above board, nothing at all to do with drugs or the laundering of money.

Maybe Sala was a good bet after all. He certainly lacked a conscience.

Bingo! A list of trustees and beneficiaries for the ultimate owners of  PaP Holdings.

And none of them were Declan King.

I leaned back and looked up at Nick, standing over my shoulder and currently reading through the list on my screen.

"Don't recognise any of them," he muttered. "Do you?"

I thought he was talking to Ric, but his eyes flicked down to me.

"Me?"

"Yeah. Are they Harding's?"

I turned back to the screen and reread the names, but none of them registered. I closed my eyes and flicked through recalled images in my mind. But I've seen a hell of a lot of things. Narrowing it down to C&C was the first step. Singling out anything to do with cash flow and finances helped. But in the end I had nothing. I was ninety-nine percent sure that those names had never appeared on anything I'd seen to do with C&C.

I shook my head. "Never seen them before," I offered.

Nick just nodded, accepting my word for what it was.

"OK," he said. "Keep digging, see if we can find a connection between either Declan King or Harding, something Amber hasn't been privy to before. You never know, just because we don't see it now, doesn't mean PaP won't still come up smelling of King's brand of heroin."

"What do you want done with the money?" Ric asked.

Nick frowned. "Separate it into a holding account and notify Pierce. Giving it back could be funding the bad guys. Holding it is out of the question. Let's hand it over to the Police and let them decide where it should go."

"Good enough for me," Ric replied.

Nick left after that and I returned my attention to C&C, which seemed trickier than it was just twenty minutes ago.

"Do you think this is morphing?" I asked, watching an area I had tried to hack just a few hours ago and not recognising the security wall that now surrounded it.

"A chameleon programme?" Ric queried.

I shook my head. "No, more like a reactive one. It's only changing at places we've tried to hack. If you look at C&C as a whole, there are areas we haven't navigated to that appear unchanged, but those we've attempted to bypass today all look different."

Ric stopped what he was doing and looked at what I was seeing.

"That would mean they have someone actively watching us," he remarked.

"Tracking our movements, like you followed my code trails."

"They know we're here. They know what we're doing. And they're determined to keep us out."

"So soon after Jaxon's death," I commented. "You'd think they'd be in turmoil, sorting out company structure. Familiarising themselves with their new boss, whoever he is."

"Yeah," Ric said, still staring at the ever changing code on my screen. "This is too reactionary, but also too well prepared. Harding not only expected us to try to hack in, he expected us to keep trying after his death."

"Which makes you think..."

"That he knew he was going to die."

Fuck. Who the hell was this man?

Ric started tapping in further instructions on his keyboard, bringing up a screen that I didn't immediately recognise. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out though, the familiar silver ferns on either side, crown on top, and stylised NZP in the centre. Not to mention the large as fuck font saying New Zealand Police.

"You're hacking the cops?" I asked, astonished.

"It's not hacking if you have a login and password."

"Pierce," I guessed. "Does he know?"

"What he doesn't know won't hurt him," Ric replied.

"You scare me sometimes," I murmured, turning back to my screen and trying to decipher a pattern to the morphing code C&C were utilising.

"No more than you do me, Dancer," Ric whispered. "But it's a good kind of fear."

"There's a good one?" I asked, tipping my head to the side to see if I could get a better understanding of what the hell this code was doing.

Nope. No better.

"Yeah, of course," Ric said. "It's the kind of fear that sends tingles through your body, makes your skin pull tight and a fine sheen of sweat to coat your brow."

"Sounds like normal fear to me."

"Ah, but it also makes your belly flutter, like a thousand butterflies have taken to the wing. And your mind to blank out with the most delicious images behind your lids. And your heart to stutter, because there ain't no way it could beat again without it."

"Without what?" I asked, mesmerised.

He smiled, still typing commands on his keyboards and looking at his screen. But he knew he had my full attention.

"Without feeling that type of fear for the rest of your life. It thrills you. It's addictive. It tells you you're alive."

Oh, that kind of fear.

"OK," I said sweetly and returned to my work. Ric's rumbling laughter rolled through the room and wrapped around my heart.

A few minutes later he said, "Got it."

I turned back to what he was doing, because quite frankly, I wasn't achieving much at all.

Not that my mind hadn't been on butterflies and delicious images and the beating of my heart or anything.

"What's that?"

"Dental records of one Jaxon Harding." Oh. "And they sure as hell look like they match the pathologist's x-rays taken this morning."

"So, it's him."

"Looks like it, Dancer. That's the chief pathologist's signature," he said, pointing to the name on the report on screen, "and I've only heard good things about him. Pierce sings his praises, so I can't see him doctoring an autopsy."

I blinked blindly at the letters and figures on my own screen. From one moment to the next my emotions shifted. I guess it was too much to ask myself to be recovered from Jaxon's death. I hadn't loved him in the end. But he was Jaxon. My Jaxon. And as much as that didn't mean jack shit by the time he died, it had meant something once.

Switching off emotions in such a short amount of time was impossible. So, what was I left with? Confusion.

"I don't know if we'll make much more progress here," Ric said from my side. I wasn't sure if he was aware that I had spiralled down that dark abyss again, or if he just meant what he was saying.

We had been at this for practically the entire day and made absolutely no progress. If anything, we'd created more questions. Who the hell was guarding C&C now? And why were they so prepared even in the event of Jaxon's death?

"I want to figure this out," I said softly.

"I know you do, baby. So do I. But he's won today."

Not words I wanted to hear.

"It has to be Bryan or Blair," I suggested, not willing to give up on this yet.

Ric didn't even hesitate, just followed my lead.

"How well did you know them?"

"Bryan better than Blair. He's the one who gave me my login and password, showed me around the parts of the system I had access to, and supervised some of my jobs. Blair just sat in the corner of the room and ate Cheezels until they came out his ears."

"Can you see Bryan in this code?" Meaning, could I recognise the style as being Bryan's.

Good hackers shake it up a bit. I'd only just found out I had a signature. Maybe Bryan wasn't aware he had one too.

I closed my eyes and recalled every time I'd watched Bryan work. How he looked physically sprang to mind first, so I pushed that aside, it wouldn't help me now. And concentrated instead on his actual typed words. I was several lines in, and had just started comparing two different recollections in order to find his fingerprint on each, when Nick appeared on the screen, waving at the door camera outside control.

Ric released the latch; the sound of it clicking was more like the ominous snick of a gun being cocked.

"We've got a situation," Nick said without preamble.

The code comparisons in my mind vanished at his serious tone.

"Yeah?" Ric asked carefully, giving his - no
our
- boss his full attention.

"Pierce has requested Amber down at the cop shop."

Oh, fuck no.

"Why?" Ric demanded. Almost snarled.

"I've no fucking idea why, and he refused to say, the bastard. But I told him she'd be represented by our staff union member and the firm's lawyer. In case you don't get it, the unionist is you, Shaw, and the lawyer is Dom. He'll meet you there."

Then Nick turned to me, his features softening slightly. Maybe I was getting the "nice" boss treatment, but I was sure that would change in due course. Abi seemed to get the same curt commands as the men. I obviously had to earn it.

"Now, it could be regarding the US dollars and he just wants to question you on that. Or it could be to identify something of Harding's; you are listed as next of kin."

Oh hell, I hadn't known that.

"Or it could be something else which we have no way of knowing, but I wouldn't put it past any of the arseholes that worked with Harding not to plant something implicating you. So, for now, you go in, you cooperate, but only with a lawyer present. Understood?"

I nodded.

"I don't like this," Nick added. "Pierce was acting strange."

"Strange how?" Ric asked, but I was unable to utter a sound. Currently I was desperately trying to control my breathing, which had suddenly become much too fast and shallow.