Fascination

Ian raised an eyebrow as Marty shook his fingers in a “too hot” gesture behind Jessup’s head as he moved past her into the hallway—something she shouldn’t have seen but did. Turning slowly, she fixed an icy-blue stare on Marty until he smiled feebly and slinked away.

Ian liked her already.

2

SAGE SAT NERVOUSLY IN the small lounge, the folder containing her résumé—her very thin résumé—clasped in her hands. The appointment for her interview had been more than thirty minutes ago, but she was willing to wait—she needed a new job, a real job, something that would allow her to move forward in life.

When she’d seen the classified ad for a security consultant, her heart had leaped—plenty of hackers, even those who had been on the wrong side of the law, became high-level security consultants. It was like hiring a reformed thief to help you make sure your house was secure. She figured she stood as much of a chance at the job as anyone.

But as time passed, her confidence was evaporating. The other applicants looked younger than she was, were male and their folders appeared to be much thicker than hers. Most had laptops with them or at least Blackberrys or PDAs. Probably none of them had felony convictions.

Was she nuts? There was no way a reputable company like this was going to hire someone like her.

Swallowing the lump of anger and despair that had suddenly formed in her throat, she left the room with as much dignity as she could manage, passing by the other applicants, who barely spared her a glance. Well, goody for them, she thought belligerently. Boring bunch of yuppie wannabes anyhow.

Except she wanted to be one, too. Wanted to be normal, to have a real life. Wanted to be respected for her talents. Wanted to be valued and accepted. She wanted to show her family that she could be a success, even though she had let them down in so many other ways.

Walking out into the stifling summer air, she yanked off the conservative gray blazer she’d spent way too much money on for the interview. Her hopes had been too high when she’d received the phone call responding to her application—an application conspicuously missing any hint of her conviction. She’d figured it would be better to try to explain that in person. Ha. What had she been thinking? She was just glad to have left before she’d gone in there and humiliated herself.

Lifting her face up, the strong rays of the midday sun felt like a kiss on her skin. The sky was clear and bright, but when she looked forward and tried to see her future, it was just a gray blur, on the personal as well as the professional front.

Regardless of the games she played with Ian, there hadn’t been many men in her life. Not many decent guys were turned on by a woman who had been convicted of a felony. Those who were weren’t the kind of men she wanted to know. How much of that would change when she was free?

Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, she let the warmth soothe her until a pointed wolf whistle had her glaring at the source and continuing on her way. She walked down the sweltering city sidewalk to the waterfront, gazing out at the Elizabeth River—Lizzie, as the residents called it. She leaned over the rail that ran the length of the park and led down to the Nautilus naval museum, the gigantic battleship, the USS Wisconsin, looming above the museum building.

It was a perfect day—the waters were smooth and green, and dolphins were frolicking out in the river as they often did, drawing amazed stares and the clicking of tourist cameras. Turning from the rail, she headed toward the hot dog stand in search of some lunch and companionship.

She’d taken the day off from the shop to go to the interview, so there was nothing else on her schedule. She’d given her two weeks notice anyway—motivation for getting a better job—but now she thought maybe she had been a little hasty in that decision. Feeling down, she knew just how to lighten her spirits. As she approached the stand, she heard the gruff laugh she loved filling the air around her.

“Hey, Ray.”

“Sage! My favorite girl. Woooo, look at you! All dressed up today!” The older black man leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “Did we have a date and I forgot?”

Sage laughed, her mood brightening at the sound of his voice. She responded, her voice playful.

“No, you never ask me out. I’m still waiting. You’re my guy, Ray, you know that.” She planted a solid kiss on his rough cheek and Ray howled again. He handed her a hot dog with everything on it—just the way she liked it—and a cola.

She sat down on the cement-block wall behind the stand, munching while Ray served some customers. He’d been around as far back as she could remember. Her parents had taken her and her sister to lunch at the park every week when she was little. That’s when she’d met Ray. He’d become a good friend and a sort of honorary uncle.

She’d continued to come by at least once a week until her arrest. The eighteen months at the beginning of her sentence, when she had been confined to home arrest, had been the hardest of her life for many reasons, but one of those was because she never got to visit Ray.

Helping himself to a hot dog, he sat next to her, took a bite, then spoke. “So what has you down here all dressed up, li’l girl? You should be working, huh?”

She nodded, swiping some mustard from her chin with her pinkie and sucking it from the end of her finger. “Yeah. I took the day off. Had a job interview.”

“Hey! Good news! You’re almost done. You have to come down here and celebrate on the day.”

Sage smiled, but then it faded. “You bet. But free is a relative term, isn’t it, Ray? I’ve reached the end of my sentence, but I feel like it will never really be over. I can’t escape the past.” She knew she sounded sorry for herself in spades, but she couldn’t help it.

Surprisingly Ray laughed again, and she looked up, popping the last big of dog into her mouth. He shook his head.

“Well, you know, girl, I made my own mistakes an’ been where you are. Been in worse. You have a college degree. I never had none of that, but it’s no matter. We can do whatever we want. We make our own luck.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Depends on what you tryin’ to do, don’t it? You just gotta find the right thing, that’s all.” He cleared his throat and patted her arm. “Don’t worry too much. I had a hard time, too, when I got out. People’ll forget, it just takes a while. I kept at it, got enough odd jobs to get myself a cart and found myself a spot to sell lunch. Before you know it I had this stand, right here in this pretty park. No one else is allowed to have their stands here, the city said, just me. The mayor himself. Imagine that.”

Sage smiled and nodded quietly, having heard the story a thousand times. She always enjoyed how Ray’s face lit up with pride when he told it. But he’d only told her about his time in jail after she’d been arrested and become too ashamed to come around to see him. So he’d come to see her and told her he understood.

He’d never told her why he’d been sent up, but she just knew there was no way this gentle man had ever hurt anyone or anything. She never asked. He never judged, so she didn’t either.

“I just want a normal life, Ray. A good job. You know, the regular stuff.”

“Mebbe you aren’t cut out for regular, missy. You’re special. You just have to find your place. Just don’t plan on coming down here and tryin’ to edge old Ray out with your own stand.” He laughed again, and she couldn’t help but join in.

“No worries there, Ray. I wouldn’t even try to compete with you. Everyone knows you’re the best.”

She threw her arms around him in a tight hug. Looking past his shoulder, she stiffened suddenly, her eyes widening as she saw a familiar figure coming into view.

Locke stood at the edge of the park, watching her. She hadn’t seen him since before her arrest. She thought she might be seeing things and blinked, but he was still there. A cold feeling spread up from the base of her spine. Slipping out of Ray’s hug, she studied Locke, her heart in her throat. What was he doing here? Why now?

IAN LIFTED A STEAMING cup of coffee to his lips as he reviewed Sarah Jessup’s résumé and his interview notes from the previous day. He believed he might be looking at the first new member of his team.

True, her formal qualifications were a little light, but she could talk the talk and she was more than a little interested. There were lots of people out there with the right education, the right experience, but she had passion. There was a sharpness, an electricity about her that he liked. She knew computers inside and out and she was a born cop whether she knew it or not. He’d wondered why she never pursued a career in law enforcement and had to suppress a grin when she’d told him she’d thought about it but didn’t like the uniforms. She’d been relieved to know the HotWires weren’t required to wear them.

The lady had talent, but she also had secrets. He had seen the slightest flicker in her eyes when he’d mentioned doing a background check. When he’d asked her if there was anything she needed to tell him about, she’d closed up like a clam. He would have to see what that was about before hiring her, but he trusted his gut that she was one of the people he was looking for.

There was also no denying that she was, as Marty had made a fool out of himself noticing, pretty damned hot—a fact that left Ian cold. He couldn’t drum up an even mildly sexual thought about Sarah Jessup, whose ample curves and chocolate-brown hair should have at least inspired one. This was doubly annoying because his mind kept wandering back to Sage’s silky copper curls.

Ian couldn’t seem to get Sage out of his head. He didn’t like being distracted, and that fact urged him to either get the hell away from her or to take her up on what she was offering, to get her out of his system. He was dangerously close to the latter. What would she do if he did? How would she react? Was it all an act on her part or did she really desire him?

He slammed on the mental brakes. No sense going there. He’d gotten out of his office thinking a change of venue would freshen his mind and help him concentrate, but thoughts of Sage followed him wherever he went. It was well and good that it was almost over. Four more days.

He’d taken his laptop and set up at a table in a local waterfront coffee shop for the afternoon. It was a perk that he could avoid the office when he wanted to. He watched groups of tourists file out of the tour boats. A large cruise ship was moored in the background. Even from a distance the ship appeared enormous. His parents took several cruises each year, but he’d never been on one, preferring to spend his weeks off fishing with his brothers at their camp in Maine.

His mom and dad had both been career Navy until they’d retired the year before last. His dad had been a commander who had worked on submarines since he was seventeen; he’d spent the last twenty years as captain of his own boat. Ian’s mom had been a nurse who’d eventually found her way onto the big ships, as well. And now they took their vacations on boats. Ian didn’t understand it, but to each their own.

He sighed, realizing he wouldn’t be taking another vacation for a while. He should contact his brothers—Jim, who was older, and Gabe, who was younger—and see if they could at least grab a weekend sometime soon before all of his time got sucked up by getting the new team up and running. Squinting out the window, his gaze gravitated toward someone too familiar.

Sage.

She was standing with the hot-dog-stand guy she visited every week. At this time of day, though, he would have expected her to be at work. He made a mental note to check out why she wasn’t.

The old guy, Ray, had been convicted on charges of bank robbery back in the sixties, but from what Ian could tell when he’d read over the case, it had been a bad bust. Ray had been hung out to dry more or less because he was convenient—caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. There wouldn’t have been much interest in finding justice for a poor black man back then. Sage seemed very fond of him.

Ian couldn’t make out the look on her face, but he saw her hug Ray and then slowly move past him to stand on the edge of the walk, her attention focused across the street. She was staring at a man, not far from where Ian himself sat in the window. The guy looked roughly her age but slick and—Ian’s gut signaled him—dangerous.

He was tall. Skinny but built—the kind of guy who always walked away because others underestimated him in a fight. His long hair was tied back and an earring shone in the sunlight. Ian couldn’t make out exact facial features, but his hackles rose in response to the way the guy’s focus was obviously pinned on Sage. They were making direct eye contact—silent communication streaming across the distance between them. They definitely knew each other.

Ian’s internal radar sharpened. Something was up and it wasn’t good. Though he’d never seen the guy before, he knew the look—he was a walking hacker cliché. Dressed in black, wearing a leather jacket on a hot summer day, he stood out like a sore thumb to anyone who knew the type. Apparently, like many criminal hackers, he had an ego bigger than his brain. Though they’d claim otherwise, they usually wanted to be noticed.

Ian waited to see what would happen, his body tense and poised in the chair. The man stepped back, taking an envelope from his jacket and sliding it into the large pot of flowers by the curb, nodding in Sage’s direction before walking away.

A drop, Ian realized. And not even a very subtle one. This guy didn’t really care if anyone saw him. Or maybe he was just arrogant enough to think no one was looking.

What was she involved in? Ian’s blood first ran cold and then started to simmer—was she an idiot, getting involved with these people when she was so close to finishing out her time? Or had she been involved with them all along, playing Ian for a fool? Sage was clever, no doubt. Maybe more so than he’d assumed. Maybe for all his supervision, she’d found a back door. Maybe her constant flirting was not so much an attempt at control as a method of distraction. Was the guy part of her old group? She’d never given up any of their identities, though Ian knew she hadn’t worked alone. Someone new? Were they lovers?

His jaw tightened as ugly thoughts raced through his mind. He held himself in check, resisted the urge to run out and confront her, to find out what was in the package. He intended to find out soon enough.

SAGE’S FINGERS WERE NUMB as she looked through the tangle of blood-red azaleas, her heart beating furiously, to see what Locke had left there. She glanced around carefully, trying not to be too obvious. She was taking a chance, but it wasn’t an option to call for help or alert anyone—if Ian knew she’d even seen Locke, he’d throw her in jail without a second thought.

She didn’t want to pick up the envelope, but neither did she want to leave it there. Biting her lip, she knew it was meant for her. If someone else found it, it could be just as damning; she had to know what was in there. She could just take it and destroy it so that nothing in it could hurt her or anyone else.

Locke had barely changed in five years, but seeing him made her realize how much she had. In an instant she knew she didn’t want him back in her life and she feared for her freedom. He was tall and gaunt-looking in a very romantic, poetic way that had once appealed to her but now left her cold.

They’d met the summer before her junior year in college; he’d been an arts major, and she’d been in computer science. He’d been her first lover, and they’d had some good times. He was passionate and his adventurous spirit in bed had encouraged her own to blossom. Locke had been adventurous in other ways, too.

Though he’d studied art history, he was a hacker of brilliant proportions. He eschewed formal education and had taught himself everything he knew. And he knew a lot. He’d studied art as a form of camouflage. Who would suspect an art history major who studied restoration of renaissance paintings of being a master computer hacker? Sage felt the material of her jacket slide against the paper of the envelope and gulped.

Walking quickly up the street to her home, where she could inspect the package privately, she kept glancing around suspiciously, making sure she was alone. It wasn’t good news that Locke had showed up now. Being seen anywhere around him could violate her sentencing agreement. It was a relief to reach her house.

Throwing her jacket on the hall table, she held the thickly padded envelope in her hands and just stood quietly for a few minutes. When she finally ripped at the paper, an old zip disk and a letter fell out. She bent to pick them up from the floor. The disk was unlabeled, and she certainly didn’t have a computer to read it with. She opened the white slip of paper, feeling her heart sink.

To my LadyBug—

She closed her eyes when confronted with her old “nym”—her hacker pseudonym or nickname. Locke had christened her with it when he had discovered her budding talent for creating “bugs,” computer viruses. It was something she had done for fun; she’d never let any of them loose on the Net. It was enough for her to try to make the code work. She’d broken into some sites—sure, most hackers did—but she’d never been destructive in any way. Everything changed when she met Locke.

Opening her eyes again, she read.

I know this must be a surprise—hopefully a happy one. I’ve never forgotten you. I can only hope you still care since you didn’t tell them about me. You proved your loyalty. I’ve thought of you every day for the last five long years. I’ve missed you, baby girl.

Her skin crawled as she remembered how he’d always called her that and how she’d loved it, practically worshipping him, how he’d made her feel as if someone finally understood her. Locke had understood her—well enough to take advantage of her.

Remember the evenings we spent in the grotto planning our attacks? Well, it’s done, baby girl. It’s a true work of art, a testament to your sacrifice. I worked every day to finish what you started, and now it’s finished and ready to go. When you’re free, we’ll celebrate this great accomplishment together.

Always yours, Locke

Sage’s hands were shaking now, and the note fell from her hands to the floor. She stared at the disk, her heart in her throat. She didn’t need a computer to know what was on it—it was the thing that would take away her freedom for good.

3

IAN WASN’T QUITE SURE what he was going to do; he decided to just play it by ear and see what developed. He’d let a couple hours pass so that she wouldn’t get suspicious. But he’d been watching. She’d brought the package home, and he’d watched her through the window as she’d read something, seen her bend to retrieve an object she’d dropped on the floor. He wanted to know what it was.

His knock on the door received no response, but he knew she was in there and rapped his knuckles on the wood door again, harder. This time the door opened, his hand held up in midknock. Sage glared at him, seeming agitated but not surprised by his appearance.

“What do you want? It’s late.”

“Well, isn’t that a charming way to answer the door.”

“I don’t need to be charming with you.”

“True, and I don’t need to explain a random visit. Open up.”

Ian watched her move to the side and noted the tension in her stance and her expression. Something was definitely up. It wasn’t completely unprecedented for her to display bad temper when he showed up unexpectedly, but this was different.

She was guarded, protective. He could see it in the way she wrapped her slim arms around her midsection and how her eyes met his with their usual belligerence but none of the sexy challenge he usually encountered.

She was scared. He wanted to know why and of what. Of him? Of being caught? Or of something else?

“Everything go well today?”

“Jesus, Ian, I just reported in yesterday. Is it the usual practice to harass your people when they get close to the end of their sentences?”

“You’re making a pretty big deal over a random visit. And here I thought you were always glad to see me.”

The uncharacteristic flirtation, laconic as it was, triggered confusion in those green eyes, and he watched her lower her head before perusing the room.

“You mind if I look around?”

“You mean I have a choice?”

“No.”

Then something of the old Sage snapped into place, and she dropped her arms, placing one hand on her hip. “Yeah, I figured. Just try not to get too turned on by my bras hanging in the shower.”

Sliding her a look, he moved forward, going through the motions as he picked up a pile of mail and glanced through it, then at her calendar. No appointments slotted in for today, nothing she should have missed work for.

“You didn’t go into work today.” Looking up, he saw her slight surprise. Good.

“I wanted a day off.”

“Doctor’s appointment?”

“What, you want to know the results of my Pap smear?”

“I just wondered why you took the day off. They said you’d given final notice, as well.”

She leaned against the doorway, the white cotton T-shirt she was wearing pulling across her breasts as she stuck one hand in the pocket of her shorts. The little colorful clips that held some of her wild curls in place made her look impossibly young.

“Yeah. I did.” Her chin tipped up in challenge. “I hate it there. I’m leaving after my sentence is over, so you have no say in the matter. I want out of that place and away from you as soon as possible. I’m looking for a new job.”

“So that’s what you were out doing? Job hunting?” Made sense, he thought, remembering her outfit. Though it could also just be a cover for whatever else she was up to.

He’d checked out all the visible surfaces—no envelope. She’d hidden it or destroyed it, which made him even more suspicious. He’d have to do an extensive search to find it, but he couldn’t look around more than normal without raising her suspicions. He wanted to keep her off guard for the time being.

He continued his inspection, not really looking around so much as mentally scrambling to come up with a plan. He frowned. He had one idea, though it wasn’t a good one. He crossed back to where she stood, waiting for an answer to his question.

“Yeah, actually I had an interview, if you must know.”

“With whom?”

“Meyers and Dunn.”

Ian furrowed his brow. He’d met Jim Meyers once or twice at social affairs. He didn’t like him. The guy was a sleaze who didn’t even bother to hide it, married but never showing up to occasions with his wife. And the flavor of the month was usually someone just barely legal.

“For what position?”

“Whatever they have available.”

Ian didn’t even want to think about what positions Jim Meyers might have available for a woman like Sage. He made a mental note to check up on her application and drop a warning Jim’s way. Then he reconsidered—her job hunt was not important and was probably just a cover story anyway.

“Don’t you think it’s putting the cart ahead of the horse to quit before you have a job?”

“Please, Ian, I’m too old and you’re too young to be acting like my father.”

Sage pushed away from the wall, and awareness dawned on him immediately. She’d been guarding that entryway—that’s where she didn’t want him to go. He looked down at her, gauging his next move. She appeared more slight than she usually did, the way the worn cotton just hinted at the even softer shapes underneath distracting him for a moment.

He didn’t particularly like what he was about to do, but it was the only thing he could think of. He modulated his voice a bit, stepping slightly closer. She smelled like heaven. It made his job easier—and much more difficult.

“Believe me, darlin’, I don’t feel any paternal inclinations toward you at all.”