Micah picked up the mug, a lopsided grin gracing his lips. “The boys gave that to me on Mother’s Day,” he was saying.
She did her best to suppress the laugh of relief that suddenly bubbled up within her. “They gave that to you, huh? Aren’t your boys a wee bit confused?”
“That’s what I thought at first,” he said, appearing to agree with her. But then he continued. “But I
have
been both mother and father to them for the last two years, so I guess they thought I deserved it.”
He turned the mug around in his hands. The smile on his lips was pure love. For just a second, pending charges notwithstanding, she envied him more than she thought possible.
“I just didn’t have the heart to argue with them,” he concluded.
“I understand.”
And, oddly enough, she did. He was making perfect sense to her. Little feelings were at stake. Besides, his sons had unconsciously given him a wonderful compliment. That he had filled both roles for them and they were not just aware of it, but grateful. How often did
that
kind of thing happen?
“The boys love you very much,” she told him. She took the mug from him and looked it over herself. “You’re very lucky to have them.”
“I know.” If not for them, he wasn’t sure if he could have made it through these past two years. And then he looked up at her, finding himself curious about her. Had she remained evasive so as to separate her private life from her professional one? “And you really don’t have any kids?”
There was that knife again, twisting in her stomach. Allowing the emptiness to all but consume her.
“No,” she finally said. It was more of a whisper than a normal response. “I don’t.”
I would have, had she lived. Lila would have been three by now. She could have made friends with your sons, played with them. Instead…instead Lila’s playing with angels.
She felt her throat tightening up until she had to concentrate on breathing to get through the feelings her stillborn daughter generated.
He’d struck a nerve, Micah thought. The topic was obviously a sore one for her. Was that because she’d had a child and then lost it? Or because she couldn’t have any? Or was it just that she felt her time would never come?
“Sorry,” he apologized with feeling, remembering that he’d already asked her about having children last night and she hadn’t answered him. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’ve got no business asking you questions like that.”
She was being way too sensitive. It had happened and she’d moved on. Time to act like it. “You’re entitled to know about your attorney,” she replied, pulling herself together and away from the whirlpool that threatened to suck her into its depths. “Anything else you want to know?” she asked. “Go ahead, ask me anything that’s on your mind. I’ll do my best to give you as honest an answer as I can.”
In his world, that was doublespeak for sharing only partial intelligence while keeping the rest a secret, usually for security reasons.
But she wasn’t part of that world, he reminded himself.
Or was she?
She wasn’t quite prepared for the bluntness of his first question. “Are you married?”
It took her a moment before she replied. “No.”
“Good.” She looked at him sharply. What had he meant by that? The next beat, he explained, “I wouldn’t want to be dragging you away from your husband and dinner.”
That made her laugh. “If I had a husband, I’d be bringing him here—on second thought, no, I wouldn’t. He’d want to know why I couldn’t cook as well as you. You know, I was only half kidding last night about you opening up your own restaurant. But tonight convinced me that last night wasn’t just a fluke. I really think you could do very well opening up your own place.”
The smile she saw on his face in response to her heartfelt compliment had the middle of her stomach tightening again while the rest of her grew very, very warm.
She wasn’t sure just how much of that she could attribute to the hot meal, but she did her very best to pin the blame there—and not on the man who had prepared it.
Chapter Nine
I
t was almost a week later. Although there had been several phone calls between them, Tracy had deliberately not allowed herself to come over to his house on some pretext as she made her way home. She knew better than to think “out of sight, out of mind” actually worked, but something was going on with her. Something she didn’t quite understand and it made her very nervous. Especially whenever she was around Micah.
In short, she was reacting to Micah. To his home life, to his family.
To him.
And that was decidedly bad, not just because of the conflict of interest it could possibly represent but it was bad for her, personally.
In the courtroom, there was no question about it, she was a dynamo. But when it came to her own home court, well, that was an entirely different story. Her emotions had a habit of tripping her up, so she had learned, long ago, to just block them out. She’d gotten rather good at that, or so she’d believed up until now. She was not a person who made the same mistake twice and she’d discovered that leading with your heart, or any part other than your head, was asking for trouble with a capital T.
Been there, done that.
And once was more than enough for her.
But Jewel had stopped by her office today with an update on what her I.T. guy, Neal, had uncovered on Micah’s supposedly “scrubbed” laptop. The news was very hopeful—but only up to a point. Jewel had carefully explained all that to her and now she was standing before Micah, trying to find a way to couch her words so that he was apprised of the situation, but didn’t instantly take it to mean he was now in the clear.
Because he wasn’t. Not yet.
She began again, following him to the kitchen, which apparently seemed to be his favorite room in the house when he was trying to destress.
“My investigator’s I.T. guy managed to dig up what was going on with your laptop that made your bosses so suspicious.”
Taking a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, he turned to look at her just before he set the bottles on the counter. “Donovan gave him access?” he asked, more than a little surprised.
Right now, even
he
couldn’t get access. Placed on restricted duty, he was given a regular laptop that had none of the high-security-clearance software on it. And even then, he’d been subjected to a couple of unannounced spot checks where someone from the human resources department would come up to his desk and put their hands on his laptop, halting all activity. He would have to step aside and wait while the other person ran a check on it to make sure it hadn’t been accessed again.
Each time, he’d cooperated, but it set his teeth on edge. Until this was resolved, he was a pariah.
“No.” Sitting down on the stool, she picked up the bottle he offered her. “Donovan still has your original laptop locked away.”
Frowning, Micah removed both bottle caps. What was she telling him? “Then how…?”
“Don’t look at me, I haven’t a clue. But he did resurrect all the erased files as well as pin down just when they were breached. Jewel says what he does is damn close to black magic, but apparently, if this Neal person can’t access your computer, then it’s somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.” She paused to take a small sip. Beer was something she nursed rather than drank in regular, long sips. “Fortunately for you, yours isn’t. Neal pieced things together and says as far as he can tell, your laptop was picked at random by this crew of cyber hackers to be part of a botnet.”
Micah had command of a wide spectrum of information and knew his way around a great deal of physics, different disciplines of math and a wide variety of software needed to implement this knowledge. But what his attorney was talking about was a whole different, unknown world to him.
“A what?”
She found it rather comforting that someone of his caliber was as mystified as she was when Jewel had first tried to explain the existing situation to her. Tracy had absolutely no doubt that Micah was rather brilliant when it came to doing what he did for the company he worked for, which was why it was so nice to know he could be stumped, just like her.
She explained it to him the way Jewel had explained it to her. “The hackers formed a network of infected computers, which they control remotely—”
The frown on his handsome face deepened. “Doesn’t
anyone
need to be in the same room as their equipment anymore?”
To him, the first requirement was always close proximity. Had this—as well as he—gone the way of the dinosaur?
Tracy shrugged as she absently ran the tip of her finger along the lip of the beer bottle. “Apparently not. Anyway, these hackers were using your laptop among others to troll still other computers, looking for credit card numbers, bank accounts, things that can enable them to steal identities, empty out bank accounts and God only knows what else. Jewel said that as far as Neal could see, the hackers didn’t realize that there were top secret files and restricted information on your computer. Otherwise, if they had, that information would have been the first thing to go, auctioned off to the highest bidder. The hackers were just using your laptop, just like all the others, as a jumping-off point for their little million-dollar scheme.”
Maybe his brain had slipped behind a cloud, Micah thought, but he wasn’t following this. “And that means?” Micah pressed, frustrated.
Jewel and her update had in turn placed her on the receiving end of a great deal of information this afternoon. By the time Jewel left, Tracy felt as if she’d just attended a technical school and received a crash course in the dark side of having a computer.
“They were using your computer, as well as all the others they initially hacked into, to bounce around their I.P. address so that if anyone does realize what’s going on, they can’t be traced. Instead, you and the owners of those other computers bear the brunt of the blame.” She looked at him pointedly. “In short, you were set up and framed.”
“But if this Neal guy found out that this was what they were doing—that I was a victim like the others—then I’m in the clear.” He blew out a long breath. “God, that’s a relief.”
“Well, relief’s not quite here yet,” she cautioned. She hated raining on Micah’s parade, but she didn’t want him breaking out the champagne bottle just yet. Not when he was still under suspicion.
About to tip back his bottle and take a long swig, he stopped and looked at Tracy. “What are you saying?” he asked.
“That your company and the customer they’re working for—which I imagine has to be the government—” She held up her hand before he could begin to deny her assumption. “It’s okay, I know you can’t confirm that. I’m just giving you my hunch. Anyway, your company and the customer can claim that this is actually bigger than they first imagined and that you could very possibly be part of this network of hackers who had created the botnet to begin with.”
He began to protest that that was absurd. That he had no idea how to do any of this, but he knew it was all futile. She might be on his side and believe he was innocent, but he knew that in the company’s eyes, he was still guilty until proven otherwise.
The light that had completely lit up his face went out. “So, I’m back to square zero.” It wasn’t a question, but a painful assumption.
“No,” Tracy quickly corrected. “It’s not square zero.”
“And why’s that?” he challenged, wanting desperately to have
something
to hang on to.
“Because,” Tracy patiently explained, “now we know that there’s a ring out there and when there’s this substantial a ring, there’s got to be some kind of an investigation going on, either on the local police level, or the FBI level—or maybe even a joint task force, for all we know.”
He supposed it was something. “And how do you go about finding out if this task force or investigation is going on? Is that what Jewel is going to be looking into?” he asked.
She smiled. “Even as we speak. But I also have a cousin on the police force I intend to put the squeeze on,” she told him. “I’m going to have him ask around for me, see if he can pick up any useful intel about these hackers.”
What she was saying all sounded well and good in theory. But he knew a little bit about how the real world worked. It wasn’t anywhere near as neat and tidy as she was suggesting.
“Don’t they frown on things like that?” he pointed out. “Answering questions for a civilian?”
Her smile widened. When it came to her work, her confidence was unshakable. He had nothing to worry about. “I can be very persuasive when I want to be,” she told Micah.
He in turn watched her for a long moment. There was a determined expression on her face that utterly captivated him.
“I guess I’m lucky that you’re in my corner,” he finally said, and then he paused, his thoughts switching to something very basic. He didn’t like loose ends. “You know, we haven’t even talked about your fee yet.”
“Sure we did,” she reminded him. The beer, she noted suddenly, was hitting her funny. And then she remembered that, as was becoming more and more frequent, she’d had a protein bar for lunch, and breakfast had been a thought that had never been realized. “I told you I was taking the case pro bono.”
He remembered that part. He also remembered what he’d said to it. “And I said no, you’re not. That I pay my own way. I might have to make payments from now until you’re collecting social security checks, but I always pay my bills.
Always,
” he emphasized.
She laughed and without thinking, she brushed the palm of her hand along his check. “You are a very stubborn man.”
Maybe it was because he’d felt like an emotional yo-yo, first down, then up and then leveled out only to find himself rising up again. That kind of thing made a man lose his bearings. Or maybe it was because he’d just been alone far too long. He loved his sons more than his life, but there was still this void in his life, a void he tried not to think about or acknowledge. But it was still there.
There were a dozen excuses to look to, but for whatever reason, the light touch of her fingers along his skin stirred him. It woke up things within him that were best left sleeping. Best left sleeping because once awakened, they didn’t easily return to a hibernating state.