Sexy Liar (Dirty Hacker 1)

Rowan inclined his head. “We’re both aware, but without the CIA’s approval for me to work the case, I have no access.” He hesitated, and then continued with a trembling voice. “It’s my sister. Those close to me are doing what they can to help.” Were there risks? Certainly, but Rowan would risk it all for his military brothers too.

Alex let out another long, deep breath, her eyes searching his while her fingers tapped against the armrest. “I take it the CIA wants you to stay out of this because of your personal relationship?”

He nodded, still frustrated over that call. “That was their decision, yes.”

“A decision you obviously don’t agree with, since here we are.”

Rowan had always followed rules, protocol, authority. The military had raised him into a man. He knew when to talk and when to shut up. But not when it came to his family, blood or otherwise. Everything he honored, believed in, all fell apart when Mia went missing. “There is no rule I won’t break to get my sister back. Mia is a sweet girl with her whole life ahead of her. I am her brother, and there is not a damn person who can stop me from trying to find her.”

“Even if it costs you your job?”

He gave a firm nod. “Even so.”

She tapped her finger against the chair again and exhaled another long, deep breath, both actions of which were tells of hers when she was deep in thought. He’d remembered that from their week together. “I saw in the case files that their suspect list has fizzled out,” she finally said. “What do you think I could do to find this person that the FBI hasn’t done yet?” Her clever eyes lit up with speculation.

Rowan understood that energy and rush. Hunting killers, running top-secret missions, he got a high from it too. “Every damn thing they haven’t tried,” he told her simply. “They’re not digging deep enough, if you ask me. The killer knows police procedure. The crime scenes are clean. There’s no DNA evidence. There’s no trail. There’s nothing. The only link they’ve found is that all the victims, including my sister, have used the dating app, SiR, but all the men who had been chatting with the women have been ruled out.”

She reached for her laptop again. “But you’re suspicious about that?”

Rowan liked that she could read him so well. That was one of the reasons things with Alex were different. No one read him. They couldn’t see past his shield. She was the only one, and that had certainly been the bi

ggest reason he’d left her in Paris. She was too close, too dangerous. “The killer is there somewhere on the app,” he explained, stretching out his toes that had begun to tingle. “It’s the only link between the women. The FBI has missed something, whether they want to admit that or not.”

Her fingers began flying across the keyboard, her gaze firmly set on the monitor. “Are you and your sister close?”

“Why is that important to this case?”

Alex’s gaze flicked up, and she gave a small smile. “Protective. Okay, so you’re close.” She glanced back at the monitor and continued typing. “The reason I asked was to find out if she told you anything about the men she dated on the app?”

“Just one.”

Alex’s fingers froze atop her keyboard. Her eyes searched his, and his expression must have revealed a lot, since she said, “And then she went missing?”

“That’s right,” he said, having come to the same conclusion she had that the last guy was their suspect. “Mia didn’t tell me much about him, except for a few details in passing. They’d been texting back and forth for about a month. She’d never met him in person, and she’d never say much because she signed a nondisclosure agreement that all participants of the app must sign.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “An NDA for a dating app?”

“The app connects rich, successful Dominants with submissives,” he explained.

“Ah, gotcha,” she said, continuing to type on her keyboard. “The men using this app are in powerful positions, I take it?”

Rowan inclined his head. “Men who can’t risk their kinky fetishes being revealed to the public, but I suspect this might be the very reason this case is not getting solved. Money and power can make truth disappear.”

Alex nodded in agreement, keeping her gaze on the screen, and moved along. “What else did Mia say about him?”

“She let it slip once that he’d told her he had a military tattoo on his back of a solider with a gas mask and a helicopter beneath it.” He remembered that talk so vividly. Could picture his sweet sister with her long blond hair and warm blue eyes smiling at him. “She wondered if I knew him.”

“I take it you didn’t.”

He shook his head.

Alex glanced back to her monitor, her fingers continuing to fly across the keyboard. “All right. Is that it?”

“She told me he says, balls to the wall.”

Alex stopped typing again to stare incredulously at him. “Balls to the wall?”

Rowan nodded, stretching out his fingers that were going numb now. “Apparently that’s his go-getter saying.”