Chapter Two

Harvard

She wasn’t what I expected.

I had compiled the dossiers for all of our trainees and already knew a lot about Samira Blackwood. She was a hacker who went by the name Fragment. She’d appeared on the hacking scene three years ago and had done some freelance penetration testing and security work for several well-known companies in the San Francisco Bay area. Although at first glance she looked like a squeaky-clean white hat, I’d found her on several dark web message boards. Never doing anything illegal that I could see, but definitely toeing the line between legal and illegal. That hat of hers was more gray than white. Maybe even edging toward black. Had to admit, I liked that about her. I’d been known to dip my toe over that line of legality myself.

Harvard, the man I was now, wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t.

Fragment was a genius, and she proved it when she hacked Quentin Enterprises to get the big boss’s attention. She got through my firewalls. Through my layers of encryption. I was both impressed and annoyed that she’d managed it.

This girl sitting silently next to me, though? Sami? She was a mystery. A fascinating bit of code I wanted to crack.

Up until I walked into the airport, she was a name on a screen. Based on the photo I had, I’d assumed she’d come with serious baggage—and not in the form of R2-D2. The asymmetrical, blond-tipped hairstyle and lip ring screamed BAD ATTITUDE in all caps. While nothing hinky jumped out at me as I compiled her dossier—except that maybe her background was a little too tidy for my liking—I still thought for sure she’d be a problem, but she didn’t seem like a troublemaker at all.

Actually, if pressed to come up with one word to describe her, I’d go with lost.

She looked completely out of place and uncomfortable in the airport. And even more so bouncing in the passenger seat of the old ranch truck.

The truck had been a mistake. I didn’t realize how much of a mistake until I saw her near-panic reaction to it. When I discovered she’d been left behind, I jumped into the thing by habit. It was what I’d been driving for the last few months since my old car died. I was in the market for a new set of wheels but hadn’t had the time to do the relevant research. The truck was a rust bucket that smelled of hay and horse, used mainly for errands by the family ranch of HORNET’s medic. Guess I should have asked one of my teammates to borrow their vehicle.

I realized suddenly the silence between us had stretched too long and was starting to get awkward. I’d wanted to give her time to relax, but there was a thin line between space and awkwardness, and I’d crossed it. I’d gotten wrapped up inside my own head. Again. A bad habit of mine.

I glanced over at her. She huddled as close to the door as she could without tumbling out onto the highway and hugged her laptop case to her chest like it was a shield. In that way, we were a lot alike. I had wielded my computer as both a weapon and a shield for most of my life.

Lost? Oh, yeah. I’d been there and done that and knew the look. And she was more than a little scared, though she was doing her best to put on a brave face.

What kind of shit had life dealt this girl to make her so nervous?

Damn. I wish I knew how to make her feel more comfortable.

And then—Jesus, I’m a myopic idiot—it hit me. I did know exactly how to relax her. As Fragment, she was bold and sassy, smart and calculating. I just had to talk computers, which happened to be my favorite subject.

“How’d you do it?” I asked.

She jolted and glanced over at me with stark fear, like I’d asked her to confess to murder or something. “Uh,” she said faintly. “Do what?”

Shit. This wasn’t going well. I’d never been good at talking to girls. Jean-Luc Cavalier, HORNET’s linguist and arguably my best friend, had tried giving me lessons on how to charm the ladies. Obviously, none of his teachings had stuck, because I was fucking this up. If something wasn’t computer code, it didn’t stay in my head.

Just once, I’d like to be like the rest of the guys on the team. Masculine and badass, not the geek behind the computer.

“Sorry. I was trying to make conversation. If you don’t want to talk, we can—” I reached to switch on the radio. It didn’t always work in this rattling pile of rust, but maybe I’d get lucky tonight.

To my surprise, she reached out and stopped me with a touch to the back of my hand. She seemed calmer now. “You’re asking how I hacked Quentin Enterprises?”

“Yeah.” I withdrew my hand, even though I didn’t want to break the contact, and curled my fingers around the steering wheel. “You know, because it was my security you got through.”

“It’s a good network. Solid. But even the most solid network isn’t safe if the company’s employees aren’t taking the proper precautions.”

I nodded. “You got in through an employee.”

“Yep. A phishing email in a low-level employee’s inbox. Once I was in, I worked my way through the layers of encryption until I had the whole network.”

“For a minute I thought it was Nomad.” The black-hat hacker had been making all kinds of waves in the cyber underworld recently and had already taken several large companies hostage with ransomware attacks. Nomad was now on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. “You’re good.”

“So are you. It took me nearly two weeks to break in.”

“But you still got in.”

She flashed a smile. “Like you said, I’m good.”

“You are. You didn’t do any damage. You just broke in and let us know you were there. Why take that risk?”

She pushed her tongue against her lip ring, and a bolt of lust shot straight to my cock.

Wow. Okay. That was unexpected.

And wrong. She would soon essentially be my student, and that was a massive mountain of an obstacle I had no intention of scaling. I couldn’t help the instant flare of attraction, but I could damn well make sure things stayed professional between us.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said when her silence stretched into awkwardness. “It’s none of my business.”

“Okay. Thanks.” After another uncomfortable beat, she asked, “So what exactly is HORNET?”

I took my eyes off the road long enough to glance in her direction. “You seriously don’t know?”

“Got the gist of it.” She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Private military contractor owned by Quentin Enterprises. I couldn’t find much else about it.”

Was it ballsy or stupid to take a job you knew little to nothing about? Maybe a bit of both. Also desperate, but nothing in her tidy background reeked of that kind of desperation. Had she hidden something from me? If she had, she was even better than I suspected. No secret stayed secret around me for long. That was part of the reason I had been relatively friendless until joining the team.

“HORNET stands for Hostage Rescue and Negotiation Team,” I explained. “It’s a branch of the private military contractor HumInt, Inc., which—you’re right—is owned by Quentin Enterprises.”

Her brows pinched together in the cutest way. “Wait. You’re talking hostage situations?”

“That’s exactly it. HORNET’s function is to retrieve people the government either can’t or won’t go after.”

“Is it dangerous?”

The question was innocent enough. Expected, even. But it threw me back in time a year and a half to a snowy January night in Eastern Europe. While trying to rescue a teammate’s woman and break up a sex-trafficking ring, the team had been ambushed and captured by an old rival. Our commander, Gabe Bristow, had been shot and was in serious need of a trauma surgeon while our medic, Jesse Warrick, desperately tried to keep him alive. I could almost feel the bite of the cold again, the weight of hopelessness as we watched Gabe bleed out.

We all got out of that scrape—barely—but I didn’t think telling her about it was the best place to start. With how freaked she’d been back at the airport, I wasn’t going to acknowledge that getting shot was a real danger with this job.

“Yeah, it can be dangerous,” I admitted. I couldn’t lie to her but didn’t want to scare her off, either, and quickly added, “You’ll be tech support. You won’t be out in the field very often, and when you are, you’ll be far away from the action.” Which was a constant annoyance for me. My teammates trusted me to digitally have their sixes, but when the bullets started flying, they tucked me away like a precious fucking china doll in danger of breaking.

Sami pushed at her lip ring again. I kept my gaze firmly on the road ahead, but Jesus help me I could still see her playing with it out of the corner of my eye. There was no AC in the old truck, and I swear the temperature kept climbing inside the cab despite the cool June night. I grabbed the crank window control and rolled that sucker down. A cold shower was out, so this was the next best thing.

As cool air swirled into the cab, Sami wrapped her arms around her middle like she was cold. I swore a mental blue streak at myself as I hurried to roll the window back up.

“Sorry.” I switched on the heat, then one-handedly searched around for my hoodie to offer her. If my brain kept going to my dick, I’d be sweating bullets by the time we reached the training compound.

“It’s okay.” Sami let go of her middle and sat up straighter. “I’m not cold. I guess I’m nervous. I never considered doing anything like this before.”

“Don’t think many kids grow up wanting to be a mercenary.” I found the hoodie and, despite her protests, draped it over her lap like a blanket. She was in shorts and a T-shirt, dressed for a California summer night, not a Wyoming one. It got chilly here, even in the hottest grip of summer.

She smoothed her hand over the HORNET logo on my hoodie. “How did you end up here?”

That was a story unfit for a first meeting. Or second. Or, hell, ever. “I was recruited.”

“By Tucker Quentin?”

“Uh, no, actually. It was Jean-Luc, the team’s linguist. He convinced me to join up.”

“Are you a linguist, too?” she asked with what sounded strangely like a note of hope in her voice. As if she wanted me to be a linguist.

I laughed at the thought. The only language I was fluent in other than English was computer code. “Spanish was the only class I ever failed.” I was ten at the time, taking high school classes, and already a Microsoft Certified Professional, but I left that part out. My status as a child prodigy had singled me out my whole life, made me a freak. She’d find out eventually—my teammates gossiped more than old ladies in a knitting circle—but at least for a little while, I wanted her to think I was a normal guy and not the Boy Genius.

She cracked a smile. “Not a linguist, then.”

“Definitely not.”

“So what do you do?”

I opened my mouth to tell her I was a hacker, like her. I controlled all of HORNET’s technology during missions, and I’d be teaching her how to do the same over the next two years of her training. But I hesitated. Right now, she saw me as an equal. Would that change when she found out I was her mentor and immediate superior? Would she treat me differently? Because I was enjoying our conversation a hell of a lot and hated to have it end.

Of course I had to tell her. It was illogical to withhold that info when her training started first thing tomorrow.

Her phone rang, saving me from making the decision, and she actually jumped in her seat at the sound. I snapped my mouth shut and watched her from the corner of my eye. She checked the screen, and her hand trembled as she accepted the call.

“Mom?” She sounded small and vulnerable but also hopeful, like a lost child finally finding her parents.

Several seconds ticked by in silence. She released a breath and hung up, clutching the phone tightly in both hands.

I let her have a moment. “Everything okay?”

She gave a curt nod, though she didn’t seem at all okay. “Wrong number.”

She shifted in her seat to stare out the window. We were climbing up the mountainside, and the valley of Jackson Hole glittered far down below.

I didn’t expect her to explain why that empty phone call had bothered her so much or why she hadn’t attempted to call back. We just met, after all. But I didn’t like this return to awkward silence. I wanted her smile back.

I caught sight of R2-D2 jammed in the back between our seats and tilted my head toward him. “So R2’s your favorite character?”

“What?” She looked at me, then shifted to look at her suitcase. “Oh. Of course.” And there it was, the quick flash of her smile. “He’s the greatest hacker in the galaxy.”