Chapter Fourteen

Sami

I was so beyond pissed off at myself. I shouldn’t have cracked under the blackmail, but I hadn’t expected a cyberattack to send Harvard reeling. I hadn’t realized he was so desperate to prove himself to his teammates or that the fear of failure loomed so large over his shoulders.

I had already closed the backdoor while he was sleeping, but there was still a lot of damage control left to do. We worked for hours. I exploited several vulnerabilities, but he caught me as soon as I was in each time.

On another computer, I ran checks to make sure none of our information had been compromised. So far, so good. Looked like we were in the clear. My indiscretion hadn’t hurt anything. Except maybe my pride, but I deserved that.

I should’ve been stronger. I owed my benefactor for giving me that money, but I wasn’t willing to pay that debt at the expense of other people. Especially not Harvard.

But now that I had closed the backdoor, it was only a matter of time until my benefactor came for them, wasn’t it?

I’d just have to be doubly vigilant.

My back started cramping up from hunching over a keyboard for so long. I took off my headphones and stood to stretch out the kinks. I really had to pee, too. Definitely time for a break.

I sneaked a glance at him over the top of my screens. Some color had returned to his cheeks, and he looked less hungover now. His hair stuck up at odd angles from his hard night of drinking and multiple passes of his hand. At one point, he absently swiped at the strands hanging in his eyes, giving himself a temporary mohawk, and it was just about the most adorable thing I’d ever seen.

He still hadn’t touched his candy bar, and it was closing in on dinnertime. How was the guy still going without any calories in his system?

“Harvard?”

He was completely absorbed in what he was doing, 100 percent focused on his screen. In the zone. I could parade by his desk naked and he wouldn’t look up.

I walked over and waved a hand in front of his face. He just shifted to see around me. I rolled my eyes and put my entire body between him and his computer. He blinked owlishly a couple times, then focused right in on my boobs.

Okay, judging by the hot flare of lust in his eyes, he would have noticed if I’d stripped naked.

“Hey, look up. A little more.” I curled a finger under his chin and lifted his gaze to mine. “There you go.”

He blinked again, and red splashed across his cheeks. “Uh, sorry. I was still… I wasn’t…” He waved a hand vaguely at the computer. “I wasn’t back yet.”

I grinned. I knew what it was like to get so caught up that you lost track of the world around you, but his mind definitely wasn’t on binary when he’d zeroed in on my girls. “It’s been hours, and you haven’t eaten. Take a break.”

“I can’t.” He took off his glasses and scrubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “I still have to write a patch and—”

I shushed him with a finger against his lips. He was beyond exhausted, and—probably my guilt speaking up here—the need to take care of him was overwhelming. I grasped his hand and gave it a little pull. “The network’s solid now. The patch can wait for another hour. You need food or you’re going to end up on the floor.”

He spared a glance at the computer and opened his mouth like he wanted to protest but closed it again without making a sound. His gaze dropped to my grip on his hand, and his fingers slowly enveloped mine. “Lead the way.”

There was a cafeteria on campus, but it was only open for dinner. Everyone had two kitchen duty nights—mine were Tuesdays and Thursdays—when we had to cook dinner and serve it to our fellow trainees. I doubted Harvard wanted to go anywhere near there after the words he had earlier this afternoon with Wolfe and Blaze.

Yes, I knew all about that. Wolfe was horrible at keeping secrets.

The other option was the dorm, where each floor had a kitchenette, but again, taking Harvard there probably wasn’t the best game plan. After a heavy night of drinking, the guys would be swarming the kitchenette like locusts, devouring every crumb of food we bought during our last grocery run. Which left…Harvard’s cabin.

I didn’t give myself time to second-guess. I just went with my gut and turned down the dirt drive that wound toward the main road, away from campus. Harvard didn’t protest. He took the lead when we reached the first of the cabins and I hesitated. They all looked the same, and I didn’t know which one belonged to him. Turned out, it was the first in the line of six, the one I had stopped next to.

He took the steps of the front porch in two long strides and opened the faded blue door, holding it for me to go through first. “Make yourself at home. I need to change.”

“You do smell like a bar floor after closing,” I said as I stepped inside.

“Hey, I thought the same thing when I woke up this morning. Be back in a sec.”

Oh my God, I was in Harvard’s home. His personal, private space. Someone pinch me. Then again, I couldn’t be dreaming. Even in my naughtiest dreams about him, we were never in his home.

I wandered his living room. It was surprisingly spacious for such a small cabin, the vaulted ceiling giving it an openness it wouldn’t otherwise have. I liked the exposed beams along the ceiling. It reminded me of the airport, which will forever be one of my top five favorite places because it was where I first met him.

Maybe living in the dorm with a bunch of guys had lowered my expectations, but I was impressed by Harvard’s decorating choices. This place looked like an actual adult occupied it. His furniture was clean and good-quality stuff—not the thrift-store finds and beanbags the guys decorated their dorms with. The couch, a lovely rust color, was wide and deep, and I tried not to think about what it’d be like to stretch out on it with Harvard beside me, his arms around me, the two of us cuddling while we binged Netflix on that giant TV he had hanging over the fireplace.

While the living room was adult, his geek kid-self showed back by the kitchen. Where most people would put a dining set, he had a bank of computers on a huge U-shaped desk and tables covered with all kinds of electronic components. This was probably where he’d created that kickass drone of his that had gotten him into so much trouble.

On the wall across from the Starship Enterprise setup were bookshelves filled with more geekery. Books, collector-edition action figures, and even some Funko Pop and Lego figurines. I spotted an unopened box set of Star Wars figurines: Darth Vader, Hoth Battle Gear Stormtrooper, AT-AT Pilot, Hoth Battle Gear Rebel Soldier, IG-88, and Yoda.

“Holy shit.” My fingers itched to touch, so I tucked them behind my back. “Is this what I think it is?”

He paused in the hallway I assumed led to his bedroom. His eyes raked over me in a very non-mentor-like way before he shifted his attention to the shelf behind me. “Yup.”

I gaped as he dragged off his shirt. If he noticed, I hoped like hell he thought it was because of the rare collector set rather than the glimpse I’d gotten of his abs before he disappeared into his room. The abs were a work of art, no doubt, but it was the reddish-brown trail of hair arrowing downward from his belly button that made my mouth water.

I realized I was standing there staring toward his bedroom, mouth catching flies. I closed it so hard my teeth clicked together and turned to feign interest in the action figures again. “You know this thing’s worth like two or three thousand dollars?”

“Yeah, and believe it or not, I bought it for two dollars at a garage sale a few years ago. The very nice couple who sold it to me had no idea what they had. They were just cleaning out their attic before they moved to Arizona. They said they’d bought the set for their son back in the eighties, but he had no interest in Star Wars, so he never even opened it. Win for me.” He came back to the living room already re-dressed in fresh clothes, thankfully. Or was that unfortunately?

His new shirt had a stick figure staring down at a phone with a confused question mark over its head. The text underneath read, A man using Apple Maps walks into a bar. Or maybe a hospital. Possibly a church.

God, I adored this man’s techie sense of humor.

He walked over to the narrow kitchen and started opening cupboards. “I have…mac and cheese?”

“The fake orange stuff?”

He pulled out the blue box and shook it. “You know it.”

“The only thing that could make it better is—”

He popped open the fridge, withdrew a package of hot dogs, and held them up.

I slapped a hand over my heart. “And who says romance is dead?”

His easy grin faded. “Is that what you think this is, Sami?”

Shit. I’d said too much. I opened my mouth but couldn’t find the words. Closed it again and shrugged. Wolfe had said I should go for it and tell Harvard how I felt, but it was such a huge, terrifying leap. Like I was looking over the edge of the Grand Canyon, readying to step off into thin air with no safety net underneath to catch me.

You’re stronger than you ever realized, Sami. The program has proven that to you. You’re braver, too. You can do this.

So I took the leap. I stepped into the kitchen. There was barely room for the two of us in the narrow space, and I took advantage of it, edging into his personal bubble. “I’d like for it to be.”

Harvard set the macaroni box down on the counter with a rattle and scrubbed a hand over the day-old scruff coming in on his jaw. Like the happy trail on his stomach, it was redder than the hair on his head.

I pressed my lips together to keep from taking back the declaration. I waited for him to move, to say something. Anything. Seconds ticked by, and it felt like a lifetime.

At last, he dropped his hand and turned to face me. “I’m already in deep shit. My job’s in jeopardy. I need to prove myself to my team, so I can’t cross that line with you…” He reached out and curled his hand around the side of my neck, tracing his thumb over my lower lip. “As much as I want to.”

My heart was a frantic animal trying to break free from my chest. He must have felt my pulse rattling against his fingers. “You want to?” I’d meant for the words to come out strong and steady, but instead they were a breath of sound.

“Since I walked into the airport and saw you sitting there with R2-D2. God, Sami, hasn’t it been obvious?”

Champagne bubbles fizzed in my blood, and I laughed at the surreality of this conversation. “No, it hasn’t. I mean, sometimes, I thought you…but then I wasn’t sure—”

And like that, he kissed me. The abruptness of it shocked a gasp out of me, and he took full advantage, dragging me against his body and sweeping his tongue in to taste, to claim. It wasn’t how I thought kissing him would be. He wasn’t the shy boy with the dimples when he kissed me. He was a man finally taking what he’d wanted for so long, his kiss at once demanding and possessive. My fingers tingled as I threaded them into his hair, my head fuzzed as those champagne bubbles filled my brain.

Oh, wow. This was really happening. Harvard was kissing me.

When he finally released me, we were both panting. I was so warm I thought I might combust, and my clothes suddenly felt too heavy against my sensitized skin.

He pressed his forehead to mine. “Now are you sure?”

“Yes,” I breathed and stared up into his eyes. Shadows danced in those whiskey depths, and I wished I knew how to soothe them away. This man had more secrets, more demons than he wanted anyone to know. I touched his cheek, felt the beard stubble rasp against my palm.

He sucked in a sharp breath and abruptly let me go. “Everything’s so fucked up. We can’t do…” He waved a hand back and forth between us. “This. We can’t.”

It hurt. God, it hurt, but I smiled through the pain. “I know.” I backed out of the narrow kitchen, away from his gravity, which drew me into his orbit again and again. “I should go.”

He opened his mouth as if to protest but closed it again without uttering a word. He stared down at the box of macaroni and cheese for a long time, then finally nodded. “Yeah, that would be best.”

I crossed to the door, had my hand on the knob when he spoke again.

“Sami—”

I whirled around, stupidly hopeful. “Yes?”

He wasn’t looking at me. Still staring at that blue box like it held the secrets of the universe rather than dehydrated pasta and powdered cheese. “Thanks for letting me crash in your bed last night. And for not ratting me out to the bosses when you discovered my security had failed. And for helping me fix it. And…just everything.”

My throat constricted, and tears burned behind my eyes. He wouldn’t be thanking me if he knew this was all my fault to begin with. “Believe it or not, I don’t want your job.” I wanted my job at the computer next to his. A partnership, like the one we’d had before he asked me to take control of that damn drone.

“Whether you want it or not, they’re going to give it to you.”

And what would I do then? I didn’t know, because even though I didn’t want his job specifically, I wanted this job. I wanted to be part of HORNET. How stupid of me to not realize it before now. “I don’t think you need to prove yourself, Harvard. If you ask me, you already have. A thousand times over.”

I left without another word. Even if I’d wanted to say more, I wouldn’t have been able to get anything past the tightness in my throat.