Wanted (FBI Heat Book 3) (5 page)

As he waited for the elevator, Dillon furtively glanced around the room. Only a handful of agents were at their desks, working on their computers or talking on their phones. He looked over his shoulder. No one was in the hall.

When the empty elevator arrived, he stepped inside and immediately stabbed the button to close the doors. Sometimes following the rules and proper channels took far too long. Convinced Kat had been a target, he couldn’t wait for the grinding gears of the FBI and possibly the Nuclear Regulatory Commission bureaucracies to be set in motion. He wanted results, and he wanted them
now
.

When he climbed into his Ford F-150 a few minutes later, he unlocked the glove box and withdrew the burner phone he kept for “special” calls. Once he confirmed no one else was in sight, he poked the numbers on the phone and put it to his ear. After a few rings, silence answered.

“Chaos, it’s Shadow,” he said simply.

“Holy shit!” responded a digitally altered voice. “You still alive?”

He rolled his eyes. “Obviously.”

“How fucking long has it been? Five, six years?”

“Four.”

“Is it true what I heard after the Shadow dropped off the face of the earth?”

He snorted at the apt description. “I don’t know what you heard, asshole.”

“That you went straight, gave up hacking.”

“I’ll never tell. Look, Chaos, I need your help.”

“You in trouble? You get caught?”

He chuckled. “No, but thanks for caring.”

“What do ya need, bro?”

“I want you to hack into a computer system for me.”

“No shit, Sherlock. That’s what I do. Don’t tell me you’ve lost your touch.”

“Never,” Dillon muttered. “But my computer usage at my office and my apartment could be subject to…scrutiny. I can’t have this traced back to me.”

“No problem, dude.”

“While I get my equipment set up again so I can work from the shadows”—he grinned to himself—“I need you to figure out how to get inside. But don’t touch anything. You hear me, Chaos? Don’t fuck with a goddamn thing. Got it?”

“Got it, man. Where am I goin’?”

“Patience, grasshopper. Once you can get me inside, I’ll take over. I may still need you to be my extra eyes and fingers, but I make all the decisions. Understood?”

“Yeah. Just like in the old days.”

“Right.”

“I just got one question, Shadow. Who the hell am I visiting?”

“The Diablo Beach Nuclear Power Plant.”

“Thanks, Mom, for bringing Skye to see me. I might’ve shriveled up and died if I’d gone twenty-four hours without her,” Kat said as she cuddled her precious daughter on the couch.

“Skye missed you too, sweetie. Made sense to let her help me bring you dinner.”

“Help? Yeah, right.” She gave the little girl a squeeze. “The stew was delicious, but I wish you hadn’t gone to all the trouble. I have Lean Cuisines and Healthy Choices in the freezer.”

“Those aren’t food.”

“Granted, they aren’t hearty Scottish cuisine, but they take less than ten minutes to prepare. And cleanup is a breeze. For a single mom, sometimes those factors are more important than taste.”

Her mother laughed. “Speaking of cleanup, let me rinse your dishes and then Skye and I need to get home for her bath and bedtime.”

“You’re right.” She glanced around the room at all the pictures of Skye. “At least I have her photos to keep me company.”

“She is quite the camera ham.”

Kat played with Skye until her mother was done in the kitchen. Then she walked them to the door. She gave her daughter a big kiss and handed her over.

“Now you take a nice, warm bath and go to bed, Katie.”

“I will, Mom. Thanks again.”

After locking the door, she trudged into the bathroom and ran water into the tub. As she stripped out of her pajama pants and T-shirt, her body reminded her of the jarring impact of the accident. Even with the seatbelt on, she’d been bounced damn hard.

She was just about to step into a tub of bubbles when the doorbell rang. She smiled as she pulled the terry robe off the hook on the door and slipped it on. Her mother always forgot something.

“What’d you forget this time?” she said as she opened the front door.

But her mother and daughter weren’t on her doorstep.

A man stood several feet away, out of the glow from the porch light, partially hidden in the shadows, intensity rolling off him in waves. Tall. Muscular. Broad shoulders. Narrow hips. A shock of black hair hanging on his forehead and the hunger of a wolf glistening in his blue eyes. His handsome-as-hell image slammed into her, stealing her breath.

“Dillon.” The name left her lips like a whispered prayer.

“Kat.” A sound like a slap in response.

She clutched the edge of the door. She needed to hang on for two reasons: Her knees had gone weak at the sight of him, and if she didn’t cling to the door, she’d throw herself into his arms and beg him to forgive her.

All the love she’d buried for the past two years swelled inside her heart and then rose to the surface to steal her voice. She still loved this man more than she could bear. She loved him so much that she’d given him up so he could live his life as he had always wanted. As he needed. Letting him go had cost her dearly, more than she’d ever imagined. Now he stood staring at her, accusation and agony so strong in his eyes that she couldn’t look away.

A hundred questions popped into her head. How could he be standing here when he didn’t know where she lived? Where had he gone when he’d left the San Francisco office? Why had he talked to her on the phone yesterday for the first time in two years and shown up at her door today? The shock of seeing him was so overwhelming that she couldn’t put the pieces together coherently.

“How d-did you f-find…?” she stammered.

His eyebrows arched in an expression that said
Get real: I’m an FBI agent.

“How d-did you get here?”

He frowned. “Drove.”

She shook her head. That wasn’t what she meant. “From…from where?”

“Carlsbad.”

She blinked. “New Mexico?”

He snorted. “California.”

Her fingers tightened on the door.
Oh dear God.
Carlsbad was the next town to the south, no more than ten minutes away. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see with my own eyes that you’re all right. May I come in?” His voice sounded thick with longing.

She glanced over her shoulder. Pictures of Skye everywhere. She turned back to him. “I-I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She pulled the robe tighter around her, feeling vulnerable for being naked beneath it. Dillon’s gaze dropped to the robe and then farther down to her bare legs and feet. He gulped, and his eyes darkened. She remembered his large, warm hands roaming all over her body and his hard dick thrusting inside her. Heat crept up her cheeks. Even worse was the heat settling between her thighs.

He studied her with those piercing blue eyes as if he could see into her soul. “Yeah, you’re definitely right.”

His gaze traveled up and down the length of her body until she swore his fingers were caressing her beneath the terry cloth. She bit back a whimper of need. She hadn’t let a man touch her intimately since she fled from the church, since she ran away from Dillon. She had destroyed their relationship, but somehow, she still belonged to him. Maybe she always would.

She swallowed past the lump in her throat. Why didn’t he yell at her? Why didn’t he demand an explanation of her outrageous behavior two years ago? Why didn’t he ask…why?

He hooked his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans and sauntered closer. His black leather jacket hung open, revealing the T-shirt molded to his firm pecs and abs. The old, familiar bad-boy aura still surrounded him. Ironic, considering he was an FBI agent, a career he seemed so ill suited for.

Kat was trembling by the time he stopped a few feet away. Her heart pounded, and she could barely breathe. She bit her lower lip to stop its quivering.
Kiss me, kiss me,
her heart pleaded.
You’ll only hurt worse when you can’t tell him the truth,
her brain counseled.

Dillon cocked his head, and his eyes drank her in again. “You look good, Kat.”

“You too.”

“You okay? After last night, I mean.”

“Mild concussion. Couple cuts and bruises. No biggie.” She gulped. “Are you…okay?”
After what I did to you, I mean.

His gaze hardened as if he’d read her mind. “Sure.”

He meant
No thanks to her
.

She looked away and drew a deep breath. “Thank you for having Special Agent Regis from the San Diego office call.” As she said it, reality hit her. Her head snapped back around. “You…you work in the San Diego office,” she said accusingly.

His eyes narrowed. “Yeah.”

She lifted her chin. “But
you
don’t want to help me.”

He hesitated a long time and then turned away. She thought he might not respond. But after several steps, he looked back over his shoulder.

“I can’t, Kat. I’d spend the whole time fighting with myself over whether I wanted to tell you to go to hell…or to fuck your brains out.”

“Jesus, I’m such an asshole,” Dillon muttered as he sat in his truck. What had made him say such an awful thing? He hung his head, which directed his eyes downward to the painful bulge in his jeans. “Traitor,” he mumbled. He could only hope Kat hadn’t noticed his hard-on from hell before he had turned and walked away. Damn, he felt like shit.

Sighing, he shook his head and then stared at the front of Kat’s little house. What were little houses like this called? Cozy. Quaint. Homey. A cottage? A bungalow? Yeah, that was it. Perfect for Kat. She never liked anything big or ostentatious. And this place would be just the right size for…one person.

He glanced around. No vehicles were parked in the driveway, and only his truck was parked at the curb. And
she
had answered the door even though she was obviously getting ready to step in the bath or shower. He growled when his dick jerked at the thought.

In addition to lust, he also felt relief. No husband or boyfriend had come to the door to establish his claim on Kat when he heard her talking to Dillon. No chatty female roommate had poked her nose into the conversation either. And there hadn’t been any background noise, like a TV or music, indicating someone else was there. Nope, she was definitely home alone. And yeah, he admitted reluctantly, he was glad she wasn’t living with
anyone
.

He sighed again and pressed back against the headrest. What was it about that woman? What had it always been about Katriona MacKenzie? He pushed his hair off his forehead in frustration. Face it, she did something to him no other woman had ever come close to doing. If he hadn’t already realized it before she pulled her Runaway Bride act, he sure as hell realized it after she was gone. While he struggled through the stud-reaffirmation phase, he’d fucked any woman who offered. And not one—not a single, solitary one—had affected him like Kat.

Not only had their sexual chemistry been red hot, but they’d connected on so many other levels as well. Even though their childhoods couldn’t have been more different, Kat understood and empathized with the scars that growing up in foster care had left. She even accepted why he didn’t want children—not children he fathered, at least.

Not many women would’ve gone along with his plan to eventually adopt a couple of older kids, but only after he and Kat had been married for a decade or so. She seemed to get how important it was to him to save other children from the heartbreak of never being adopted, of never being loved enough to be welcomed into a family. There were so many unwanted kids in the world that he figured taking a few off the list was better than making babies of their own. In his mind, the whole of-my-loins and from-my-seed beliefs were simply Neanderthal male-chauvinist holdovers.

He often wondered if Kat had changed her mind about wanting babies. It was certainly one of the ways he could have been ultimately responsible for her disappearance. If that hadn’t been the reason, he felt sure he’d done something else to make her change her mind about marrying him. Hell, even though women tended to throw themselves at him now that he was an adult, no one had wanted him as a kid. For whatever reason, Kat had decided she didn’t either. If he ever let another woman get close, she’d probably leave too.
Unlovable
was Dillon O’Malley’s middle name.

He swore under his breath and started the truck. He’d just pulled onto Coast Highway when the burner phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket. “Yeah?”

“We got a problem.”

Dillon lives in Carlsbad.
The four words whirled in her head, spinning thoughts, memories, and dreams into total chaos. She had never expected to see the man again. And yet, she’d just stood close enough to smell his distinctive scent—a heady mixture of musky cologne, soap, leather, and Dillon—which she would remember forever. He’d been near enough to touch. But she hadn’t dared. His response
and
hers were too unpredictable.

With her fingernail, she poked a large bubble floating in the bathwater. It burst, like Dillon had just burst the carefully protected bubble of her personal life, a sphere that included only Skye and her parents. She didn’t let anyone else inside because she didn’t want any complications, didn’t want to risk heartbreak again. Of course, there was also the outrageous feeling of still belonging to Dillon somehow, which caused her to push away any man who showed an interest. Obviously, Dillon didn’t have a claim to her any longer, but her heart apparently still belonged to him.

Kat smacked the water and watched the waves ripple through the bubbles. Dillon’s sudden appearance would also have a ripple effect on her life. If he’d come fifteen minutes earlier, when Skye and Mom were here, the result would’ve been catastrophic. Armageddon sprang to mind. Even though she’d been lucky this time, the aftershocks weren’t over.

When the epiphany hit, she covered her face and sobbed. She and Skye couldn’t stay here. They had to move. Far, far away. They had to disappear again.

Being this close to Dillon O’Malley was simply too dangerous. Kat couldn’t take the chance that he would learn the truth.

Dillon sped toward his self-storage unit. Thankfully, he’d spent a couple hours setting up before getting the wild-ass idea to go check on Kat. What a mistake that had been. On so many levels. He should’ve just stayed ensconced in his man cave, otherwise known as his secret computer lab, connecting and testing all the electronic equipment.

He hadn’t used any of it since moving down from the Bay Area. Since before the move, actually. When he’d met and fallen in love with Kat, he’d given up his underground Shadow persona. He didn’t need the outlet for his pent-up anger once he met the woman who could calm his soul.
His soul mate.
He grimaced at the label. Yeah, he’d been stupid enough to believe he had actually found his mythical match.
What a crock.
Kat turned out to be like everyone else.

The even bigger crock was what he’d confirmed tonight, what he’d suspected all along but had been afraid to admit. He still loved her. More than life itself.
How screwed up is that?
The woman had shattered his heart, crushed his confidence, and betrayed his soul, but he still fucking loved her.

Plus, he was still physically attracted to her. Damn, that was an understatement.
You look good, Kat.
How lame could a guy get? She looked fantastic: beautiful, sexy, and needy. Her thick brown hair twisted into a pile of some sort on top of her head with wispy strands floating around her face. Her huge emerald eyes wide with surprise. Her full lips quivering with emotion. What emotion exactly, he didn’t know, but it’d been all he could do not to drag her into his arms and claim those kissable lips. The damn robe had driven him crazy with lust also. He didn’t need x-ray vision to know she was naked beneath it. Her long, bare, slender legs and dainty feet were just invitations to unwrap and enjoy the whole package.
Damn, I wanted her. Like always.

The truck’s tires squealed when he spun into the storage facility driveway. At the security gate, he entered the pass code for the unit he’d rented under a fake name and for which he always paid in cash.

The elderly couple who ran the place had appreciated his suggestion and then his help to set up their wireless router so they could advertise the availability of a hotspot on the premises. More than two hundred renters received the network key. Dillon had told himself that he never planned to use it, but here he was in need of access to the Internet that would be difficult to trace back to him. Maybe he’d known all along that he’d eventually return to his hacking ways with Kat gone.

After parking the truck, he strolled to his unit, instinctively aware of the three other people on the property. No one paid any attention to him, which was good. He let himself in and locked the door behind him—the inside lock, only one of his personal improvements to the unit.

He threw his leather jacket on a pile of boxes and dropped onto a metal folding chair at the table. If it turned out he’d be spending significant time here, a more comfortable chair would be a necessity. But for tonight, his ass would just have to go numb.

Once both laptops were fired up, his fingers flew over one keyboard and then the other. In no time, he delved into the dark web and signed onto the TSK site. He put the burner phone on speaker and called Chaos. “Hey, man, what’s the problem?”

“This Diablo Beach shit is locked up tight as Fort Knox.”

“We hacked Fort Knox.”

“Oh, duh, you’re right. Then tighter than Fort Fucking Knox. It’s a damn devil. Get it?”

“Yeah, I got it. But what? You lost your skills, Chaos?”

“Nah, dude. You think I just been fartin’ around for the past four years? I got mad skills now, bro.”

“Then I repeat, what’s the problem?”

“Nothing’s workin’. And I mean nothin’.”

“Fine. Let’s take a look together,” Dillon said.

Before Chaos could respond, a message from someone named Digger popped up on the screen:
Who the fuck are you?

Dillon stared at the question in disbelief.

“Don’t mind Digger. He’s only been around about a year,” Chaos said, obviously seeing the same message at his end.

“The guy should show a little respect,” Dillon muttered. “You did vet him, right?”

“Does a wild bear shit in the forest?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dillon’s fingers danced across the keys:
I’m the S in TSK, dickhead.

Digger:
I thought S stood for “shit.”

He sneered and wrote:
You don’t even know the name of the dark web hacker group you belong to?

No response.

Chaos sighed. “Finish him, man, so we can get to work.”

Dillon typed:
FYI, prick, TSK stands for The Shadow Knows. And I’m the goddamn Shadow.

Digger’s message popped up:
FUCK!!!!! You’re a legend, man!!!!!

“Better,” Dillon murmured and responded:
Remember that. Now get lost.

Yes, sir
, Digger posted and then all his messages disappeared.

“You better be taking me someplace more private,” Dillon said.

“Of course, Boss,” Chaos said, chuckling.

Dillon followed him through five consecutive foreign servers that his hacker buddy used to reach the Diablo Beach computer system, making it harder for anyone to retrace their tracks. “Niiice.”

“They got some badass firewalls, encryption, and security shit. I don’t see a way in. I tried everything.”

“You didn’t leave any evidence, did you? Nothing that’ll show up on the logs.”

“Nada.”

Dillon leaned closer to the screen. The old, familiar excitement built; his pulse accelerated.

While in college, he’d formed TSK as a Robin Hood and his merry men sort of thing. Except they didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor. They didn’t steal anything but information on bad guys. Using their superior computer skills, the group of ten or so hacked into computer networks all over the world gathering information unobtainable by law enforcement agencies through legal channels. The documentation or evidence would miraculously show up at the appropriate district attorneys’ or government agencies’ offices. Most of the time, TSK’s work was sufficient to get an arrest or conviction, but always enough for the local LEOs to get the necessary warrants to confirm the information themselves.

Toward the end of his tenure as leader of the group, TSK had focused most of its energy on terrorist websites. In those cases, their goal had been to shut down as many of the Islamic extremists’ recruiting pages, propaganda sites, and social media accounts as possible. It was a never-ending battle. But any chatter they caught about plots or potential attacks was passed along to the NSA or Homeland Security.

All their work was done anonymously and for no compensation other than the knowledge they were doing good and helping catch bad guys. Dillon had always been proud of what TSK accomplished, but he couldn’t share those achievements with anyone. Not even Kat.

“Did you find anything useful?” he asked.

“Someone’s been gettin’ in and plenty.”

“Who?”

“Don’t fuckin’ know,” Chaos admitted grudgingly.

“How’d they get in?”

“Looks like someone on the inside is helpin’.”