What She Doesn't Know (23 page)

She was left to follow him to Brian’s room, where she found him already turning on the computer.
 

He searched the files on the computer. “He has a gaming computer but no games. He has an email address that he pays for but seemingly doesn’t use. Something’s not right.” He went back to the file organizer and pored over every folder for several more minutes. Then we went through Brian’s files, opening one that was labeled
COMPUTER
. “Ah hah. He’s got a hidden partition in his hard drive.”

“A hidden partition?”

“Basically he’s divided his drive into two parts, and one’s hidden.” He showed her a receipt that listed the computer’s features. “See, he bought a computer with 100GB of hard drive space, but when I look, I only see 60GB. Where’s the other forty?” He dropped the receipt on the desk and turned back to the computer. “I can boot from that partition and see what’s there.”

Rita’s heart sped at the prospect of finding something concrete at last. When a password prompt appeared, he tried a series of words and then glanced around the desk.
 

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“A lot of people use something that’s around them for a password so they don’t forget it. It also makes it easy for someone else to guess what it is.”

“Oh.” She was guilty of doing just that.

She searched the walls for clues. “Have you tried Xanadu?” He nodded. “King? Masquerade?”
 

He tried those, and then
Caspian,
Brian Caspian,
and
Prince Caspian.
“Bingo.” He did some searching around. “Here’s another Internet and e-mail program.” He opened the mail program and clicked on account information. The ID was
Alta.

He pulled a square of gum from the pack in his shirt pocket, as though to fortify himself. She perched on the arm of his chair and watched as he checked Brian’s inbox and found one e-mail, a new letter from someone named Vitar.

King Alta:

Please respond right away. I find your absence disturbing in light of Sira’s last declaration.

“Sira,” Rita whispered.

“
King
Alta?” He shook his head. “Cripes, he was still hung up on being king.”
 

She leaned forward, bracing her palms on the edge of the desk. “This Vitar guy obviously doesn’t know Brian’s in a coma. We could answer as Alta and see what we find out.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.”
 

Vitar:

Am here, but have been ill. Please advise status and Sira’s declaration.

He signed it “King Alta” and sent it off. When he opened the Internet browser, the website selected as the home page wouldn’t load. The Web address was a series of nonsensical letters and numbers. He checked the list of recently visited Web pages; they were all connected with the defunct address. The list of Brian’s favorite sites didn’t include anything other than the default selection. He even did a search on the Internet but didn’t come up with anything relevant.

When Rita turned to look at him, the waves of her hair brushed his ear. A warm, bubbly feeling overtook her and intensified when he looked at her. Her throat went dry and she had trouble swallowing. What was he thinking? What did he see when he looked at her? More than she saw when she looked at her reflection, that much was evident.
 

She focused on the border Brian had painted—the one that matched the cityscape. She considered that instead of the enigma beside her, feeling her insides caving in and not wanting him to see it on her face. The man didn’t want to kiss her, didn’t want to let her help heal the pain of his past. She shouldn’t want to do either, not with the way her nose was tingling at the mere prospect.

She focused again on the two pieces of tape on the wall with the traces of sketch paper left on the sticky side. “The sketches you found at the office.” She walked back into Christopher’s room, but movement stopped her short. The filmy curtains undulated in a cool breeze. The French door was ajar, and the sketches were on the floor between the bed and doors. The wind must have blown them off the bed. She picked them up and locked the door.

He was leaning against the desk facing the door when she returned. “Just as I suspected,” she said, holding the paper up against the tape. “Brian had sketches like these hanging here. Someone took them.”

“Maybe Brian took them down and didn’t remove the tape.” Although he seemed to be dismissing her theory, he was at least studying the tape and sketches. He looked back over the bedroom, at the clothes piled over chairs and the lump of bedclothes at the foot of the bed. “It’s not like he was trying to be neat in here.”

He tapped the rolled-up sketches on the edge of the desk and then walked out.

“Like you can talk,” she said, following him back to his room. “Your room isn’t much better.”

He tossed the sketches on the table next to his laptop. “I’ve never had to impress anyone. Who are you trying to impress, making your bed so neat I could bounce a quarter on it?”

“Myself,” she said, wondering when he’d seen her bed. “I like my space to be orderly. That’s just the way I am.”

He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops on his jeans. “Did your father make sure you made your bed every morning?”

Her throat went tight at his words. “My father never came to my room. I kept it neat for me.”

He lowered his head. “Or just in case he looked in and saw how neat his daughter was.”

Because she didn’t want to be a bother. “Stop it.”

“What’s the matter?” He moved closer and stood in front of her. “Thought you didn’t mind being analyzed.”

“Don’t throw my words back in my face. I trusted you when I told you about my father.”

His voice was soft and low, his eyes smoky. “Didn’t I tell you not to trust me?”
 

“I know about the tableaux, about how you were always the bad guy. It was only pretend. You didn’t have to take your role so seriously. You still don’t.”

His expression gave away nothing, but her words did quiet him for a few moments. At last he said, “Maybe I like the role.”

“I think you do. It keeps people at a distance.”

“I don’t see a lot of distance between us right now.”

“You’re just trying to intimidate me.”

“Is it working?”

It was working, but not the way he wanted. Her heart was rushing heated blood through her veins, but not out of fear for bodily harm. It was for the possibility that he would grant her request of a kiss. She had been sure she’d only wanted to prove herself, but now….now she wasn’t so sure.
 

“No,” she lied.

He grasped her chin and made her betray her answer with a slight intake of breath.

“You struck me as someone who could easily be intimidated that first day we met.” He was leaning over her, forcing her to look up at him. “Now I don’t know what to make of you.”

Just as she was ready to back away, those words filled her with a heady power. Rita, tower of strength. Yeah, right. But hey, she’d fooled him; maybe she could fool herself, too. Unfortunately, just the thought of him kissing her, with that gorgeous bed so close, made her knees feel wobbly, and worse, made her nose start to tingle. So much for the tower.

“Who is the Highwayman?” she asked, annoyed that it came out a whisper. That’ll make
him
back away, she thought.

He, however, did not back away. He did drop his hand from her chin and shove the tips of his hands into his jean pockets. As he looked away for a moment, she realized she needed to know. Because despite his warning, she did trust him, at least on some level. She needed to know more about the boy mentioned in those newspaper articles and the teenager Emmagee had had a crush on. She wanted to know Chris.

She could see by the dark glitter in his eyes that he wasn’t going to let her into that part of him.
 

“Maybe I’m a masked bandit who roams the information highway in search of victims to pillage.”

“Maybe you are, and maybe you’re not.” A masked bandit wouldn’t make sure the kittens that had adopted him were being fed. “Maybe you find out things about women and track them down. Find them at work, and try to intimidate them.”

He leaned slightly toward her. “You know I do.”

“But with me it was to find the truth about your brother. What else does the Highwayman do?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because…I just do.”

He searched her eyes, waited her out, possibly weighing what to tell her. She would not relent, would not be intimidated. The tower was back. Finally he let out a long breath and looked away.

“Like I told you, I’m a hacker.”
 

“When you need to be.”

“Yep.”

“What do you hack, exactly?”

“Creeps.”

“Explain,” she said, following his one-word precedent.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t we leave it at me being a plain out evil hacker?”

“As a matter of fact, no, we can’t.”

He flopped down on the bed, his arms bent and hands beneath his head. “Say that someone was harassing you on the Internet. It happens a lot. Sometimes it’s vengeance, like bombarding someone with e-mail from various addresses. Other times, it’s sexual harassment. A man you met in a chat room won’t leave you alone, finds out where you live and shows up at your door, then gets nasty when you tell him to bug off. The creep might post a message in your name, giving your address and phone number and inviting men with kinky tendencies to drop by.”

She shivered as she perched on the far corner of the bed. “Is it that easy to find out where people live?”

“Easier than you want to know.”

“Like how you found me?”

“Exactly. All I need are a few pieces of information and I can find out almost anything.”
 

He was staring at the ceiling, and she leaned over him to get his attention. “So what does the Highwayman do?”

“I intervene. First I send the harasser a threatening message, telling him to cease and desist. If he’s only annoying, I might sign him up for an email list at the Prayer-a-day site. I might call him if he’s menacing. If he—or she, I should add—doesn’t get the message, he might find that a large chunk of his bank account is now missing, but he’ll never find out it’s been wired to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.”

“You can actually do that.”

“When I have the right information. That’s why it’s not the best thing to have your mother’s maiden name as your password to authorize bank transactions, especially if you use on-line banking.”

Oops, she did that. She raised an eyebrow. “So you’re an Internet vigilante?”

He shrugged. “Sort of.”

Now the message she’d seen made sense. He was helping some woman who was being stalked. She rather liked the image of a dark soldier anonymously helping strangers. “But why you?”

His expression shadowed. “Someone has to.”

“You could have left it up to someone else. Why you?”

He still stared at the ceiling, his eyes somewhat glazed now as he shut her out. “It doesn’t matter why.”

“It does to me.” The Highwayman wasn’t the whole story. She knew there was something behind it, something that compelled him to help. But he didn’t elaborate. “You would rather have me think of you as a no-good hacker than to know the reason behind it?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “You do like playing the bad boy, don’t you?”

My, she wanted to reach this man. The need twisted her insides. “If you were really all bad, you would have taken advantage of me up on the roof. You would have taken my kiss and then more, purely for your own gratification. But you held back, for me and, I suspect, for Brian.” The subject of his rejection was still a fresh wound, but she ignored the sting.

He sat up, but as he spoke, he shifted his gaze. “Maybe I didn’t want you.” The words came out in dull thuds, each one another lance to her wound.
 

Her fragile ego writhed in pain. She had to look away, wondering why she was putting herself on the sacrificial altar for a man who had no problems with his own ego.

He issued a soft curse and looped his hand around the back of her neck. Before she could even gain her senses, he had pulled her close. His mouth devoured hers, filling her senses with the taste of grape. Could the fingers that caressed her throat feel her pounding pulse?

She had been kissed before, but no one made her feel as though she were cresting on a tidal wave. No one made her terrified that she would drown in the surf. No one made her feel as though this was her first kiss, that her awkwardness would show as their tongues slid against each other.

Then she wasn’t worried anymore. She gave in to the tightness inside her that threatened to explode. She gave herself to all of the sensations bombarding her: the way he smelled, the texture of his tongue.
 

He finished the kiss, though he kept touching his mouth to hers as though he couldn’t bear to part from her. Then his hand slid up into the hair at the nape of her neck. He lowered his head and pressed his forehead against hers. What didn’t he want her to see in his eyes?

Disgust? No, she wouldn’t believe that, not with the way his chest was rising and falling in an effort to restrain his desire.

Finally he looked at her, cradling her face in his hands and taking in every feature. His eyes looked like the sky just after a thunderstorm, dark blue and hazy.

“Rita, I want you.” Those low, thick words ran through her body like molasses, salving her wounds. His thumb traced her lower lip. “But I shouldn’t.”

“Because of Brian.”

“That’s the simplest reason. I can’t steal my brother’s girl while he’s in a coma.”

“No, not even the bad prince would do that.” She wondered what the other reason—or reasons he shouldn’t want her were.

She had to remind herself that she shouldn’t want him either, for reasons other than Brian. She couldn’t think straight with his hands on her face. She wanted him to run his thumb over her lower lip again, as though that was as close as he’d allow himself to another kiss. That simple touch was nearly as powerful as the kiss it tried to substitute.