“Two. I insist on paying you the way I would any employee. You’ll be well compensated, and I want you to do whatever you want with the money.”
“I will gladly accept it.”
Her response surprised him; he’d been prepared for her to push back. “Three. I’d like you to keep making those paninis because they’re good and I really like them.”
She bit back a smile. “I would be happy to make you a sandwich anytime you want one.”
“One last thing. You cannot ever drive that fast again.”
“What? No!” She sounded like he’d taken away her favorite toy. “That car handles like a dream. Frankly, I never expected to love it so much, but I do.”
“I’m glad you love the car, but the speeding is nonnegotiable. You mean the world to me, and I can’t have you risking your safety like that. There are other ways to get an adrenaline fix, and if you want to start social engineering, you have to agree to slow down.”
“All right. I will agree to all those conditions, but I’d like to add one of my own. I want you to rejoin the task force.”
He had not seen that coming. “Kate—”
“It’s me, Ian. I’d like to think that I know you about as well as anyone does, hopefully more. Are you really going to look me in the eye and tell me you’re not dying to go back?”
“It doesn’t matter how I feel. I told you I wouldn’t do it.”
“Of course it matters. I understood why you gave up the task force. I thought it was what I wanted too. But you’re not satisfied either.”
“I’m not unsatisfied.”
She leveled a gaze at him, the kind of look that said please do not try to bullshit your wife.
“I don’t love the thought of you working undercover. But you’ve got the same look in your eyes I probably do. You left the task force, but only to put me at ease and prove I meant more to you. I know how much you love it, and I never asked you to give it up.”
He decided he might as well come clean. “I miss it, more than I ever thought I would. I can’t stand being left out. I hate that Charlie’s working so closely with Phillip. I keep thinking of all the things they must be working on, and I wish I was working on them too.”
“Do you know what else I think? I think the reason you didn’t get in touch with Charlie to let him know we’d moved here is because you didn’t want to hear anything about the task force if you couldn’t be a part of it.”
“Can’t get anything by you, can I?”
“I certainly hope not.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure. That doesn’t mean I won’t worry, but I love you and that means accepting the things that drive you, even if they scare me. Love requires compromise. Maybe—in our case—it also requires bravery.”
“I think you’re right about that, sweetness.” No one had ever understood what made him tick like she did, and marrying her had truly been the smartest thing he’d ever done.
“So I guess things are about to change.”
“Maybe just a little. You already know what it’s like to be with someone who works on an undercover task force. As for social engineering, I’ll mostly be teaching you how to convince people to give you what you want. Something tells me that’ll be very easy for you.”
She gave him an innocent look, as if she had no idea what he could possibly mean by that, and he wanted to kiss it right off her face.
“There is one thing we might have to change though.” He grabbed a lock of her hair and slid it through his fingers, imagining what she’d look like and wondering if she’d agree.
She looked at him strangely and shook her head. “No way.”
He smiled and put his arm around her. “We’ll see about that.” He pulled her close. “Did you get my text about that nap?”
“I did.”
“What did you think about it?”
“I think you should know I’m not tired at all.”
He kissed her forehead, took her by the hand, and led her inside. “Neither am I, sweetness. Neither am I.”
CHAPTER NINE
The next morning, Ian was on his way to meet with the task force by ten o’clock. It was true that in the past, visits to FBI headquarters weren’t often at the top of his list of favorite activities. He chafed at the structure.
The hierarchy.
The rules.
After the first year or two of working with the FBI, Phillip had stopped asking him to come on board as an official agent because he knew Ian would never say yes, but today he might have considered it if Phillip were to suddenly ask, such was his excitement to be part of the task force again. He couldn’t wait to hear what Charlie and the others were working on, and he would forever be thankful for Kate’s blessing.
The task force was a subset of the FBI’s Cyber Action Team, which was housed under the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force. Under Phillip’s stellar guidance, they’d worked their way up until they were the premiere task force for domestic cybercrime. If there was a cyber equivalent of the Navy SEALS, they were it. The five-member team—six now that Ian had returned—included some of the nation’s top experts in criminal investigation and code analysis, and no other team was more proficient in identifying cybercrimes that were an emerging threat to the American people.
Before he’d started working with Phillip on the pentesting, they’d spoken at length regarding Ian’s concerns about being seen at headquarters. The FBI often attended hacker conventions such as Def Con and Black Hat and recruited hackers as special agents—hackers who might have once worn black hats or at the very least had friends who still did. The last thing Ian needed was to bump into whoever had doxed him when they passed each other in the hallway. Phillip had shared Ian’s concern, so instead of meeting in his office at headquarters, they’d met off-site in the conference room of a large, nondescript office building half a mile away, kept by the FBI for this very reason. From now on, the task force meetings would also be held there.
Everyone looked up when Ian walked through the door.
“Somebody call it,” Charlie said.
Tom, a seven-year veteran of the task force, raised his hand. “Right here.”
Charlie withdrew a stack of bills from an envelope and shoved the money across the table.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Tom said as he pocketed the cash.
“You placed bets?” Ian said.
“You didn’t think anyone believed you when you said you were quitting, did you?” Charlie asked. “I gave you ninety days. Clearly I underestimated how long you could hold out.”
“Do you all not remember the part where someone doxed me and hacked my girlfriend—who is now my wife—and I had to break her heart into a million pieces by pretending I was dead? Not to mention put my beloved car in the Mississippi and throw away a company I’d spent ten years building?”
“And yet here you are,” Charlie said with a giant shit-eating grin.
“That’s because Kate insisted I rejoin you.” He sat down and pointed around the table. “May you single men marry half as well as I did.”
Phillip opened the door and hurried into the room. “Welcome back, Ian,” he said as he sat down and pulled a sheaf of papers from his briefcase.
“Did you know they placed bets?”
“Oh, who won?” Phillip asked with interest, looking up from his notes.
“Tom,” Charlie said.
Ian frowned. “I’m disappointed in you, Phillip.”
“All I can say is you’d better hold on to that wife of yours. She’s one of a kind. Okay, we’ve got a lot to discuss, so let’s get to it. Charlie, bring Ian up to speed please.”
“In the past three months, there’s been a string of cyberattacks on several high-profile websites, mostly banks and credit card companies. What appeared last summer to be a series of random hacktivist activity has recently become more organized. In the past month there have been cyberattacks on both the CIA and NATO, which were thankf
ully unsuccessful. We have reason to believe the same group is responsible for all of them.”
“Sounds familiar,” Ian said. Phillip had been smart to focus on making sure the FBI’s current systems were secure, and the reason he’d asked Ian to do the pentesting was clearer than ever.
“Exactly,” Charlie said.
Several years ago a hacktivist group led by a man named Joshua Morrison had done virtually everything Charlie had just said, right down to the CIA and NATO attacks. The group was already a major thorn in Phillip’s side when they took things one step further and pulled off a successful cyberattack on one of the FBI’s own affiliates, defacing the website and stealing passwords and other sensitive information. Their retaliation had been fierce, and Ian’s infiltration of the group had garnered enough evidence to arrest Joshua and send him to a medium-security federal prison in Oklahoma where he was currently serving a ten-year sentence.
The backlash had been severe as the hacktivists felt the FBI used entrapment in order to secure the evidence needed to make the arrest. Ian hadn’t been kidding when he’d told Kate the hacktivists made the carders look like Boy Scouts. He’d been on the receiving end of death threats too numerous to count, and the only saving grace was that the court records identified him by a screen alias and not his real name. If they ever did find out who he was, their vengeance would be immediate.
Phillip had shifted the entire task force over to the carding ring to give them a chance to lie low for a while. Ian hadn’t minded the lower-profile work, but near the end, after spending so much time trying to bring down the carders, he felt a bit unchallenged. He believed wholeheartedly that they needed to be stopped, but he couldn’t help but think of them as low-life crooks that needed babysitting more than anything. Ironically it was more than likely a carder who’d proven to be the biggest threat to Ian’s anonymity, if in fact it was a carder who’d doxed him.
“Anyone paid a visit to Joshua?” Ian asked.
“Yes, and he’s not talking of course,” Charlie said. He passed a thick file to Ian. “Here are the printouts of the evidence we’ve gathered so far.”
“I’ll take a look at it and let you know what I find,” Ian said.
“Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?” Ian asked Phillip after the other members of the task force had filed out of the room to head back to their desks at headquarters.
“Because I knew it would make it hard for you to honor your promise to Kate about leaving the task force, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that,” he said. “You fought hard for her, and I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize your relationship. I feel like I’ve gained a daughter-in-law. I want her to be happy the way I want you to be happy, which is why I suggested you let her help you with your company. You two are more alike than you know. Maybe that’s why you get along so well.”
Phillip had never seemed more like a father figure than he did at that moment. “Kate’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” Ian said.
“I think she might say the same.”
It was pouring rain when he got back into his car and headed for home. Lightning streaked across the sky, and he crackled with a similar energy. He hadn’t felt this way in months, and only in its absence did he understand how much the task force made him feel alive. It had become a major part of who he was and how he identified himself.
He found Kate in their bedroom curled up on the couch that used to be in her old apartment. She was reading a book, and he stood in the open doorway watching her, thinking once again how lucky he was to have her. If she had reservations about the task force—and he was certain she did—she was willing to set them aside to make him happy.
As if sensing his presence, she looked up and smiled. “Hello, lover. I’ve been expecting you.”
Grinning, he leaned against the doorway. “Were you tracking me, Katie?”
“You bet I was. That’s quite a storm.” She put down her book. “Why are you not over here showering me in kisses?”
“Unbutton that a little for me.” She was wearing leggings and one of his button-down shirts.
Holding his gaze for a second, she brought her fingers to the buttons and undid two of them. “Like that?”
He could see the lace of her pink bra. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, zoomed in and clicked. “Maybe a couple more.”
He crossed the room to the curtains and closed them. When he turned around, her shirt was open nearly to her waist; a few more buttons and it would hang freely at her sides. “Now the rest.”
She sat up and unbuttoned the shirt all the way.
After snapping a few more pictures, he sat down beside her and twisted his fingers in her hair, pulling her closer and kissing her hard. Then he slipped the shirt from her shoulders, pulled her arms free, and tossed it on the floor. “Lie back.”
She did as he asked. He loved the way she looked in the pink bra he’d bought her. God, she was so beautiful. Her eyes tracked his movements as he ran his hands through her hair to fan it out. He loved her like this: trusting and secure in the knowledge that he’d never do anything she didn’t want him to do. Would never do anything she didn’t like. Again, he pointed and clicked.
Reaching for her feet, he set down the phone and took off one sock at a time. He tickled the arch of her foot, and he smiled when she laughed and tried to pull her foot away. He gripped it harder but didn’t tickle her again.
He leaned over her body, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him closer and squeezing him tight. She was always so eager, so receptive to his attention and affection, and her desire for him made him feel ten feet tall. He kissed her again, even harder than before. She slid one hand into his hair, closing her fist, and then twisted the other in his shirt to hold him there.
He dragged his mouth away reluctantly because he had other things on his agenda and there would be plenty of time for kissing later. It took him no time at all to strip off the leggings, and he knew he would find pink boy shorts under them because the bra he’d bought her had been part of a matching set. He turned her slightly onto her side, with one arm under her head and the other lying on her hip, and took several more pictures.
“Kiss me again,” she said, turning onto her back.
How could he not oblige? He covered her with his body, and the sound she made when his mouth met hers was somewhere between a whimper and a groan. After a few minutes, he made his way to her neck, and the way her skin felt under his lips, delicate and smooth, her pulse beating rapidly beneath it, made him want to be rough with her. He sucked the tender skin hungrily into his mouth, stopping just short of leaving a mark.
He placed his knees on either side of her and sat up, pulling the phone from the front pocket of his jeans. “Take off your bra.” It didn’t matter that he saw Kate’s breasts every single day, often more than once. He would never tire of seeing them, and certainly not like this. She reached around to unhook it, and his breathing grew ragged when she tossed the bra on the floor. He wanted to touch her, but he wanted her to touch herself more. She complied as if she’d read his mind, and he fired off multiple shots with his phone, his jeans growing uncomfortably tighter.
When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he placed his palms on her chest, his hands gliding over her skin. Her body was firm and strong, but the softness that covered its surface captivated him, and he could spend hours happily tracing the curves and hollows with his fingertips. Kate reached for the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it off. He leaned forward until they were pressed skin-to-skin, and he raised her hands above her head as he kissed her, their fingers intertwined as she arched her back underneath him. He listened to her ragged breathing, gauging how much time he had left. Kate was not only open to him taking pictures of her, he’d discovered it turned her on like nobody’s business, and he liked to drag it out as long as he could stand, which was only marginally longer than Kate could handle. By the end, she’d be pulling at his clothes, urging him to take her. Her
skin was hot, but she shivered as he dragged his mouth from her lips to her neck and finally to her breasts. Cupping them, he knew exactly where to draw the line between pleasure and pain when he took her nipple into his mouth.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and held his head in place, her breath coming in short little gasps. When he pulled away and sat up, he took another picture, not of her body but of her face. Her flushed cheeks, swollen lips, and bright eyes took her beauty to a whole different level.
Gently he turned her onto her stomach. After brushing her hair to the side, he ran his finger down her spine and didn’t stop until he’d slipped it down the back of her boy shorts. She trembled when he pulled them off and ran his hands over her backside.
Now he stood next to the couch, looking down at her as she looked over her shoulder at him. He held the shutter down, and the camera took several pictures in rapid succession. He was so hard he couldn’t keep his clothes on for one more minute, and she watched as he set down the phone and stripped.
“Sit up,” he said.
Now she was facing him, leaning against the back of the couch.
He gently eased her legs apart. “Yes,” he said. “Jesus, yes.” He took one more picture and then set the phone aside. Softly he stroked her, teasing, working his way toward her center, replacing his fingers with his mouth. Her legs were over his shoulders, and he couldn’t get enough of the way she tasted. She twisted her fingers in his hair and told him in gasping, sputtering bursts how good it felt.
“Please, now, Ian.”
He picked her up and carried her to the bed, laying her down on it and entering her in one fluid movement. She came immediately, screaming out his name. He held back his own orgasm, prolonging his release because she felt so good and he didn’t want it to be over. But to hold off much longer would require a Herculean effort, and if past experience had shown him anything, there would be another round after this one. He let himself go, shuddering and shaking, collapsing onto her because she’d told him she loved it when he did that, assuring him she wouldn’t break. She wrapped her arms around him as he buried his face in her neck, breathing in the smell of her damp skin. In time he shifted and pulled her over so that her head was lying on his chest.