Wicked Sexy

12

5

CONNOR

he trendy French restaurant Tabby insists I take her to before she’ll talk is way too froufrou for my taste, but I have to admit the food is incredible. And the pair of young, hot chicks at the bar who’ve been staring at me since we got here are incredible too.

Not because I’m interested. Because Tabby’s noticed the way they’ve been looking at me and is making a valiant effort to pretend not only that she hasn’t, but that she doesn’t care.

It’s f*****g beautiful is what it is. This is my new favorite place.

I say, “Enough with the suspense. Tell me what you know about this Maelstr0m.”

Tabby delicately licks her fingers clean of truffle salt from the pommes frites she’s been scarfing down. I shouldn’t be surprised that she could make such a simple act look sexy as f**k, but she does. And she’s not even trying.

I shove aside the picture that pops into my mind of my hard c**k in place of her fingers. Unfortunately, the big guy downstairs has already started to react to the brief but incredible illusion and twitches against my thigh.

I don’t know what it is about this woman—bad-tempered, foul-mouthed Hello Kitty fiend with a constellation of tattoos on her body and a mind like a maze—but she really does it for me.

“I was living in Boston, in my third year of college—”

“MIT,” I clarify, just because it’s incredible to me that any person would be smart and selfconfident enough to graduate high school at fifteen and go right into the most intellectually rigorous college in the nation.

She glances at me with a wry smile. “I take it you’ve been reading about me in a file.”

“It’s my business to know things about people I work with. Information is power. You know that. Although I have to admit I was surprised there was any information to be found at all after how perfectly you scraped Victoria’s past clean.”

Tabby’s smile falters. When she looks away, I know I’ve hit a nerve.

Victoria Price was Tabby’s best friend and a b***h with a capital B. She had more skeletons in her closet than shoes. Until a few years ago when Victoria’s past finally caught up with her and she fled to Mexico, Tabby’s existence revolved around erasing information about Victoria, hiding her past, making sure no one discovered her entire identity had been manufactured. Tabby did her job so well, even I couldn’t find anything on Victoria, and that was unprecedented.

Tabby says in a hollow voice, “I don’t have anything interesting enough to hide.”

“This from the woman who single-handedly shut down the government’s space program for three weeks.”

She dismissively waves her hand. “I meant personally. My hacks are another story, but Polaroid can’t be traced back to me.”

Polaroid is her hacker alias, so named for her photographic memory. She’s infamous in hacker circles, revered not only for the brilliance of the jobs she pulls off, but also for never getting caught. She went legit after her time with Victoria, started doing white hat corporate jobs for guys like Roger Hamilton, and Polaroid went dark.

Curiosity prompts me to ask, “You still talk to Victoria?”

Toying with her fork, Tabby shrugs. “Yeah. I saw her a while back too. Darcy and Kai honeymooned in Mexico, and we all got together. It was fun.”

I sense the sadness behind her words. “But?”

Looking uncomfortable, Tabby hesitates before she answers. “But she’s busy living her happilyever-after, and I’m busy…doing my thing.”

It’s obvious that she’s happy for Victoria, but the undercurrent is loneliness. I want to reach out and squeeze her hand but know I risk losing it, so instead I try to lighten the mood.

“Don’t worry, sweet cheeks, I’m sure you’ll get your happily ever after too.”

Unsmiling, she looks up. “There are no happily ever afters for people like me.”

People like me? I tilt my head, studying her, fascinated. When she flushes and looks away, I decide to leave that subject for another time.

“Back to you attending MIT barely out of diapers.”

She rolls her eyes. “Getting in at fifteen isn’t that impressive, Connor. My first year there, a twelve-year-old graduated with a PhD in molecular biology. Geniuses are a dime a dozen at that school.”

“Just because you’re used to being surrounded by other stars doesn’t make your star shine any less bright to the rest of us down here on earth.”

Taken aback, she blinks and self-consciously laughs.

I wonder how often she’s been on the receiving end of a compliment. Judging by her surprise, not often.

Why that should irritate me, I don’t know.

She says, “Anyway, as part of a project in my quantum computing class, we were assigned to work on a cryptology software program for businesses that could theoretically be hack proof. Protection for data at banks, universities, hospitals, that kind of thing. Totally hypothetical, of course, but we were supposed to come up with a new way of protecting data, and then test it in a real-world environment.”

“Like with an actual business?”

“Bank of America of all things.” Her lips twist. “I think someone at the bank must’ve been in on it because whoever thought it was a good idea to give a bunch of geeky teenagers with gigantic intellects and no impulse control access to billions of dollars’ worth of financial information was definitely guilty of something. Criminal short-sightedness, at the very least.”

I lean back in my chair and take a swig of my beer. From the corner of my eye, I see one of the girls at the bar who’s been watching me lean over and whisper something behind her hand to her companion. They both look at me and then giggle.