Korbin shrugged. A few minutes later, as Rhys made the final turn toward the campus, Korbin said, “Doesn’t it bother you? You don’t think he might come back one day?”
Rhys let out a snort. “Not bloody likely, mate,” he muttered.
* * * *
Korbin let it drop. Every time he’d passed those pictures all weekend, it was all he saw.
The smile she reserved only for some nameless soldier.
Not for them.
Once at his desk, he forced his focus onto Artemis and the next round of test runs they were going to make that afternoon. When Manny finally arrived a few minutes after ten, the suppressed sea of emotional sewage he’d held back all morning exploded free of its holding pool.
“Hey,” he curtly said.
She paused as she set her purse down. “Are you all right?”
“Yep. I’m fine.”
He ignored the way Rhys’ head popped into view over the divider between their desks.
She walked over to him. “You don’t sound fine.”
“I’m peachy.”
Rhys stood and stared at him.
He ignored him.
“Korbin?”
He finally leaned back in his chair and stared up at her, crossing his arms over his chest. “I said I’m fine.”
She stared down at him, waiting him out.
“You know, you don’t have to babysit us, either. Maybe we’re not fucking macho grunts, but we’re not helpless idiots, either.”
Her brow furrowed and she planted her hands on her hips. “Ooookay, what the hell’s going on?”
Rhys rounded the desks and came up behind her.
“Nothing’s going on, Manny. But fair warning, we’re not going to measure up to your soldier, I’m sure.”
He thought Rhys muttered, “Bloody hell,” under his breath, but it was overshadowed by Manny’s voice.
“What the hell?”
“I saw the pictures, okay? Kind of hard to miss them all over the place. Like you’re rubbing our noses in it that we’re geeks, okay? The way you smile at him in the pictures and never smile like that for us. You going to smile like that for him when he finally comes back to you and you leave us in the dirt?”
Rhys stood there, his head in his hands. A horrible, dark feeling rolled through Korbin at the blank look that suddenly washed over Manny’s face.
She stared at him for a long, silent minute. When she spoke, he could barely hear her. “Considering we scattered his ashes in the Gulf of Mexico over ten years ago, I don’t think that’s possible.”
Rhys stood there, now shaking his head, eyes still hidden behind his hands.
Manny spun on her heel, obviously heading toward her desk to grab her purse. Korbin didn’t know he could move that fast, but he managed to catch her arm and stop her. “I…shit. I’m sorry, Manny. I didn’t know.”
She looked up at him. The flash of tears in her eyes ripped at his soul. “You didn’t ask, did you?” she asked in that same quiet, pained voice.
“Please, don’t leave. I’m sorry. I’m a fucking moron and I’m sorry. Please?”
“Why would you even think something like that about me?”
Her words shredded him as much as her heartbroken tone. “Because I’m an insecure idiot who’s been fucked over one too many times. Please, Manny. I’m sorry.”
“You can say you’re sorry all you want, but how do you unsay what you said?” Her volume raised a little, but pain still radiated from the core of her being. “How can you spend the weekend making love to me and then accuse me of that? I thought we really had something.”
She still hadn’t pulled away from him. He put his hands on her shoulders. “It’s not you. You didn’t do anything. I made a really bad assumption and I should have just come out and asked. I do love you.”
“People who love each other don’t say stuff like that.”
“I know.” If he’d fucked this up forever, he’d never forgive himself. “Please, please forgive me. I’m so sorry. There’s no excuse except I’m really new at having someone love me back and I’m fucking terrified I’m going to screw this up.”
“Too late for that,” Rhys muttered from behind his hands.
She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yeah, I loved him. We didn’t know where our relationship was going once we got out. But he was my best friend, and he saved my life. He threw himself between me and an IED and he died and I lived. I got to come home alive, and he came home in a flag-draped box.”
She jabbed him in the chest with her finger. “If what I tell you isn’t good enough for you, if what I feel isn’t enough, then I’m sorry. It’s all I’ve got to give. I love you, both of you, and you need to decide if you’re going to drop all that insecure bullshit and go with it or not. Because if I can be this terrified of a relationship and still be willing to see where it’s going, you can sack up and deal with it, too.”
He stared down into her green eyes. “You’re scared?”
“Duh.”
“Why?”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Look at you two. Guys like you are going to rule the world. I can barely operate my damn cell phone. Why the fuck would you want a troll like me?”
His jaw gaped. Before he realized what he was doing, he grabbed her, hard, and pulled her to him. He crushed her lips with his, kissing her until all resistance finally melted from her body and she responded.
Then, and only then, did he lift his lips from hers. “You are not a troll. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world, and I can’t believe how lucky we are that you actually want us. Please forgive me. I’ll do whatever you want, but please, I love you. We both love you, and I don’t want to fuck this up because I’m definitely not as smart as you seem to think I am.”
“That’s for bloody certain,” Rhys muttered.
She took a deep breath before nodding. Then she placed a hand on his chest. “Okay. I forgive you.” She poked him again. “You ever pull a stunt like that again, I’ll hand you your nuts. Got it?”
He smiled. “Got it.” He kissed her again. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay. Let’s…let’s just move on. But I need to go do some stuff.” She kissed him, then kissed and hugged Rhys. “I’ll be back later.”
He watched her leave and prayed she really had forgiven him.
* * * *
“What in the bloody hell is wrong with you?” Rhys practically screamed at Korbin once she was out the door and out of earshot. “I have never in my fecking life ever wanted to punch someone as much as I want to punch you right now!”
Korbin frowned as he studied the floor. “I said I’m sorry.”
He smacked him on the shoulder, hard. “That’s not good enough, is it, you pillock! Are you trying to drive her away? Because it certainly seems like you are.”
“Well why the hell didn’t you tell me the guy was dead this morning when I was talking about it?”
“Because it’s not my place to tell those things, now, is it? She’s obviously grieved for him. When she feels ready to talk about him, she will. Or, you know, there is the bloody obvious answer of you simply asking her about him. Or is that too much trouble?”
Korbin felt horrible. That he’d let his fears cause Manny more pain. Worse, what if she didn’t really forgive him? He wouldn’t blame her. He’d hate him, too.
What if he’d fucked up a genuine chance for happiness simply because he was an idiot?
She hadn’t returned by the time they were ready to leave work. Then Rhys told him the plan. “You are going to go there tonight, alone, take her dinner, and make up with her.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine. You focus on repairing this with her.” He stepped in close and got into his face. “Because if you don’t, you won’t just be losing her, you’ll be losing me as well. Got it?”
Korbin nodded. “Got it.”
Chapter Sixteen
She needed to get out of the office and away
from Korbin before she beat the stuffing out of him. Without a look back, she headed for her car, needing to do something, anything, to try to make progress.
Maybe Ormond didn’t mind shelling out money for her to sit on her ass and pretend to work in the name of keeping Rhys and Korbin safe, but she sure as hell did.
As she sat in the parking lot and let the AC cool her Jeep, she called Tom at the office. “What was the name of that buddy of yours down in Bradenton who runs a data center? That insurance company.”
“Tony. Tony Daniels. Why?”
“Can you call him for me and see if he’s available to talk with me today?”
“Sure. Let me call you right back.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she waited for his call. Part of her wanted to go back in there and have another go-round with Korbin.
Part of her wanted to curl up and cry.
Maybe this was for the best. Put some emotional distance between Korbin and Rhys both, and then she could say good-bye to them once the assignment was over.
Unfortunately, her heart knew that was the last thing she wanted to do. At some point, when they’d both cooled down, she’d have to talk with Korbin and clear the air. If nothing else, so they could work together without bristling like a couple of porcupines trying to rub each other the wrong damn way.
She flinched when the phone rang. It was Tom. “He said if you hurry, you’ve got time to make it down there and have lunch with him and pick his brain. He’ll give you a tour of the facility, too. He said the guard at the gate will have your name and a visitor’s pass waiting and will tell you where to go.”
She wrote down the address. “Great, thanks. I appreciate it.”
Grateful for the working air as she headed toward the Interstate, she tried to find her center and calm herself.
I need a run.
Unfortunately, she had real work to do and no time to blow off steam. She was still clueless about what was going on or who was behind it, and now with the additional head-butting between her and Korbin, she suspected she needed a neutral third-party to help her understand the bigger picture and sharpen her focus.
After crossing the Skyway Bridge, it didn’t take her long to get into Bradenton and locate the campus of Asher Insurance. As expected, a meticulous guard made a copy of her driver’s license and license plate number before snapping a quick picture of her that was imposed on a temporary visitor’s badge.
I should send Ormond’s guys down here for a lesson on how to do things right.
He gave her a parking pass and campus map so she could find her way. In ten minutes, she was standing in the outer lobby of Tony Daniels’ data center building. He walked out to greet her with a warm smile and a handshake.
“Ms. Croyle?”
“Manny’s fine,” she said.
“Tom didn’t tell me exactly what you were looking for, just that you had questions.”
She nodded. “Maybe this part of the story would be better over lunch.”
She rode with him to a Mexican restaurant a few miles from campus and went over, with as few details as possible and without giving away any secrets about the Artemis project, what was going on from a technological end.
As she talked, she didn’t miss how his brow furrowed. “What?” she asked.
“Honestly? What you’re describing sounds like someone who’s not familiar with the system is trying to get in. It’s smart that they have a totally isolated, sandboxed dev environment for their software. Especially if it’s as sensitive as you say it is. What have their guys found out so far about the origins of the attacks?”
“They haven’t. Some sort of anonymizer. They said they haven’t been able to isolate it yet, that it keeps appearing to come from a bunch of different places.”
He smirked. “So how’d you get so lucky to land this assignment?”
She took a sip of her iced tea. “I keep asking that myself and no one will give me an answer. It’s like they picked the blind chick to judge the Miss America pageant.”
He grinned. “Maybe they want an outsider’s perspective.”
“I’d settle for any perspective that doesn’t make my brain hurt.”
“And what would you like me to do?”
“I just need an Idiots 101 crash course on this kind of stuff. Servers, whatever.”
“My systems won’t be set up like theirs, I’m afraid. We’re handling commerce as well as back-end stuff. Ormond is all dev and support.”
“I know. I’m just hoping you can help jog something loose in my brain that might allow me to see something we’re missing.”
“Involving law enforcement’s not an option?”
“Not yet. Last resort. They’re hoping they can figure out the who and have everything tied up in a bow for them when they do.”
“Ah.”
He spent the next better part of an hour giving her the basics, going through the terminology, and giving her as much general information as he could. When they returned to the campus, he gave her a brief tour of his data center facilities. He was patient and informative and, despite knowing how busy she knew he must be, he didn’t appear to rush her. When they finished, he walked her back to her car.
“I hope this was of some help.”
She slowly nodded. “It was. And I really appreciate your time. At least now I don’t feel totally lost anymore. I’m now intelligent enough to see the differences between what you do here and what they do up there.”
He shook hands with her. “Hope you catch your hackers.”
“So do I.”
On the way back she decided to make one more stop. It would kill time and put her back at Ormond Technologies just before Korbin and Rhys were due to leave. Just enough time to see if things had blown over or were going to get worse between her and Korbin, and yet not enough time for them to engage in another verbal battle royale.
She pulled her notebook out of her purse and looked up where she’d written the information for Don Aster, Rhys and Korbin’s former coworker.
Who needs a freaking smartphone? I have a pencil.
She smirked. And it doesn’t need batteries or a charger.
* * * *
Manny headed over to Don Aster’s address. He lived in a dingy second-floor apartment in an old complex that lay two blocks from a bad neighborhood.
She glanced around before getting out of her car and made sure her doors were locked. Heading upstairs, she stepped around what looked like a balled up dirty diaper in the middle of the landing.
His apartment was down at the end, closest to the street. She knocked, still glancing around, uneasy.
“Just a minute,” a man grouchily responded.
He opened the door a minute later, the same man from the ID card picture on file at Ormond Technologies. Only he had a face full of stubble and was shirtless and wearing raggedly cut-off denim shorts.
“Don Aster?”
“Yeah?”
“My name’s Amanda Croyle. May I talk with you a minute?”
“Why?”
“I’m an investigator working with Ormond Technologies. I just need a couple of minutes of your time.”
An expression somewhere between disgusted and resigned crossed his face, but he turned and headed back inside, leaving the door standing wide open behind him.
She took that as assent.
She stepped inside and when her eyes adjusted, she looked around. The dingy apartment wasn’t filthy, but it would probably make Martha Stewart break out in hives. He had two laptops set up on a cheap-ass card table that apparently functioned as his dining room table. One corner of the tiny living room was filled with baby accoutrements, a dirty pink cloth-covered stroller that looked like it’d seen better days, a playpen filled with toys, and a ripped-open and half-gone package of diapers.
“How old is your baby?”
He sat down in a plastic chair and started working on one of the laptops. “I don’t have any kids.”
One eyebrow arch
ed despite her best effort. She pointed over her shoulder at the corner.
He glanced where she pointed. “It’s not my baby. It’s my girlfriend’s son. Cullen. He’s like thirteen months or something.”
“Cullen?”
He rolled his eyes. “You know, the Twilight movies? She was crazy about them.”
“How long have you two been together?”
“Five…six months now, I guess. Baby Daddy was in jail until a couple of months ago.” He let out a disgusted snort and rubbed at his face. “Asshole comes back into her life, and I get fired. Now you show up wanting to ask me questions. Is this like my trifecta from hell? Should I just hand you my balls right now and be done with it?”
She felt a little sorry for the guy.
But only a little. “Do you want to know why I’m here?”
“I’m sure Ormond wants you to ask me questions about something to do with Artemis, probably. That’s what I was working on when I left.”
“More or less.”
He leaned back in the flimsy chair as far as it would allow without breaking. “So, shoot.”
“According to the records, you started coming in late a lot, started getting written up. Staying late.”
“Like I said, Baby Daddy came back into Kim’s life. Supposedly she’s giving him time to get to know the spawn and trying to wrangle child support money out of him.”
“You sound like you don’t believe it. And what did that have to do with your odd hours?”
“I might be a fucking patsy but I’m not stupid. She claims she’s not sleeping with him. I’d have to be an idiot to believe her. And that she’s having me do overnight babysitting so often kind of defeats her whole ‘the baby needs to know him’ argument.”
“And the odd hours?”
“Lots of times she’d take my car and get back late in the morning. Or I’d have to take her and drop her off places. Or go pick her up. More like her fucking errand boy than her boyfriend.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at the floor. Disgust and self-loathing washed off him like an oily, evil tsunami of emotions.
“So why do you put up with it?”