Risky Love (Dirty Hacker 2)

“What I almost did was barf all over his fancy shoes,” Alex said, feeling the heat rising to her face. “But I got the job done.”

Ryder stared at her. Hard. Then said, “Were you so believable that he’s come to claim you?”

Alex tipped her head back and laughed so hard, her belly hurt. “That’s highly unlikely. Rowan punched him in the face and then I drugged him. I can only imagine he’s here to get answers.”

Ryder arched a slow questioning eyebrow at Rowan.

“He kissed her,” was Rowan’s hard reply.

Ryder’s mouth twitched. “Explains the black eye.” He gestured toward the hall. “He’s waiting in our meeting room. I don’t care who deals with him, but I want him gone from my office in the next ten minutes.”

Alex turned back to her monitor. “Rowan’s mess,” she said firmly. “He’s the one who punched him.”

“I thought we were in this together,” Rowan said from behind her.

“Nope, not for this,” Alex said. “You broke the rules, and I will legit vomit on him if I have to play that act again.”

Ryder chuckled.

Rowan cursed then grumbled, “Where is he?”

“I’ll show you the way,” Ryder said.

Alex kept her attention on her monitor, even though she could feel Rowan’s irritation behind her. Heath Lennox was devastatingly h

andsome. Tall, dark, and handsome, with a body made of hard muscle. She wasn’t a CIA agent, and if she had to admit she totally manipulated him, she’d feel like shit. Besides, had Rowan not been jealous and punched Heath when he kissed her, they wouldn’t be in this predicament. She had planned to get him drunk and then be there the next morning, pretending they’d both fallen asleep, drunk out of their minds.

Rowan broke the rules. His problem to clean up.

She had one last file to look into on Lewis’s hard drive. The one file that had been the hardest for her to crack. Lewis had quite a few of those, but so did everyone in high-level positions in the FBI. And she was nearly there.

Long minutes went by.

She dug deeper, pushed harder. But Lewis was good, and she couldn’t even break the firewall. She smiled at her monitor. Too bad for Lewis, she was better than him. Every time his system blocked her, she reworked her code, until her program finally broke through his security, and then she deciphered the password into the file.

With one click of her mouse, she opened the file, and her heart leapt up into her throat. Only disappointment sank in deep when she found a single photograph of a little boy with brown hair standing in a forest next to a large rock formation that looked oddly familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it.

“Is that Lewis?”

Alex gasped and pressed her hands against her chest, snapping at Ryder behind her, “You know better than to sneak up on me like that!”

Ryder laughed, as did Jeff.

She didn’t. She swirled around back to her monitor. “I don’t know who it is.”

“It’s Lewis,” Ryder said, leaning in and studying the boy’s face. “It’s in the eyes.”

Alex never had the same perceptiveness that Rowan and Ryder had. The kid looked like a kid she’d never seen before. “If you say so.” She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, glad she hadn’t thought of putting mascara on this morning. “Regardless of who it is, it’s the last thing I’ve found on the hard drive.” She dropped her hands and spoke her frustrations. “I don’t know where to go from here, and you know how much I fucking hate that!”

Ryder inclined his head, frustration etched deep into his frown.

“What’s with the picture of Lewis as a kid?”

She spun around, finding Rowan standing next to her with his arms crossed, looking unscathed. “I see Lennox didn’t kill you,” she said with a smirk.

Rowan snorted a laugh. “He got the explanation he needed and the promise of a decent-sized donation to his charity.”

Alex couldn’t fight her smile. “Did you tell him the truth?”