Risky Love (Dirty Hacker 2)

Rowan let that jab roll off him. He understood Ryder’s frustrations. Lewis had access to technology an everyday criminal would not. The drone couldn’t detect the bomb in the computers, and as much as the FBI took down criminals like Lewis, it also gave Lewis all the protection he needed from getting caught.

Ryder finally turned around and picked up the phone off the desk and dialed a number. “It’s Ryder Blackwood. My team hit a location. They need the bomb unit before we search the unit. I’ll send you the coordinates now.” He paused. “Yes. Yes.” Another pause. “Thank you.” Then Ryder hung up and said to Jeff, “Send the location.”

Jeff accepted the order with a nod then his fingers moved quickly across his keyboard.

Rowan had no idea who Ryder spoke to, but if he took any guesses, it was someone high up with the NYPD.

Flanagan carefully stood just outside the unit, waiting, while loud coughing echoed through the speaker on the phone.

“Get out of the smoke and hold,” Ryder ordered. “The bomb unit is on its way.”

“Roger,” Flanagan said.

Sirens off in the distance sounded as Alex rose and moved closer to the monitor. “Can you ask Flanagan to move to the right a little?” Ryder did so. “One step closer.” When the video feed moved in tighter, she straightened, “They won’t need to search the unit.” She turned back to the silence greeting her. “Flanagan wasn’t wrong—those scraps of metal there, those are the hard drives. That bastard blew up the evidence.”

Rowan ground his teeth. One step forward, a dozen steps back.

CHAPTER 9

The tension in the room hadn’t faded in the passing hour. Ryder’s team returned to their headquarters in New York City. Higgins needed stitches to his head wound from being slammed into the storage unit and the burn on the side of his neck needed treatment, but he would recover, and that was a much-welcomed relief. Ryder had been on edge, pacing around the command center until Alex told him to get lost for a while before she called his wife. She needed to think and work, and having all that testosterone hovering around her became an annoying itch she couldn’t scratch. Ryder eventually listened and left for his office in the main area of the headquarters, which housed normal offices and meeting rooms and a receptionist out front.

Alex wasn’t even sure how long had gone by since she’d first sat her butt in her chair, working on more secured files on Lewis’s hard drive, but she knew she wasn’t getting out of it until she had something. Anything that was a step forward. She cleared two files that had financial documents when she noticed Ryder next to her again. “I told you to go away,” she said without looking up.

“Do you want to explain to me what happened in Seattle?”

For a brief moment, her mind stuttered. “Seattle?” But then she looked into Ryder’s amused eyes, and her memory rebounded. “Oh.”

His mouth twitched. “You also have a visitor.”

“Damn. Heath Lennox?”

“Ah,” Ryder commented with a grin at whatever crossed her expression. “So, you do know him?”

Oh, yeah, she knew the billionaire out of Seattle. She’d once named him as a possible suspect before they closed in on Lewis.

“Who do you know?” Rowan asked, entering the command center carrying a tray full of coffees and a bag full of sugary pastries that suddenly made Alex realize how empty her stomach felt.

“Heath Lennox,” Ryder said.

Rowan froze unnaturally still. “What about Lennox?”

“He’s here to talk with Alex,” Ryder said, obviously knowing something happened when it came to Lennox.

Rowan pinched his lips shut, clearly fighting his smile.

That jerk. Alex narrowed her eyes and pointed at him. “I told you this would happen. This is your mess. You go clean it up.”

Ryder glanced between them. “How about one of you fill me in on what Lennox wants from you?”

“Oh, he wants me to be his submissive,” Alex said breezily.

Ryder’s eyebrows shot up. Yeah, it was pretty laughable. She didn’t have a submissive bone in her body. “Go on,” Ryder said.

Rowan set down the coffee and the bag of pastries behind Alex’s desk, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter, as Alex explained, “I originally thought Lennox was a suspect. One of two actually. The other guy was a pilot, who flew Rowan and I to Seattle to attend a masquerade ball that Lennox was putting on. Well, there, I pretended to be a submissive to lure Lennox in.”

“You. Pretended. To. Be. A. Submissive?” Ryder asked, his eyes wide with surprise.

“She was very believable,” Rowan replied with a grin.