Heart-Shaped Hack(52)

Not wanting to impede whatever it was he was doing, she let him be and went back to bed.



But sleep would not come, and Kate stared at the clock, watching the minutes tick by as different scenarios played out in her head. An alarm had to be a bad thing, and an alarm that woke you in the middle of the night seemed even worse. And asking her to pull the batteries from their phones. Kate knew what that meant and half expected him to rush into the bedroom and start gathering up his things.

He’d said he’d tell her if he ever had to leave, but the promise did nothing to lessen the impact of how she’d feel if he actually did.

At 3:48, she got out of bed. Silently she stood in the doorway and watched him. He was still typing, but at a much slower speed. Then he took off his glasses, laid them on the coffee table, and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up and spotted her, he smiled, held out his hand, and beckoned her. She went to him, and he pulled her down onto his lap.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” He scanned her face, and his smile faded as he registered the worry etched in her expression.

“Will you have to leave? I’ll understand if you do, but I don’t want you to.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“No?” she asked, relieved.

“No.” His voice was soft, soothing.

“Then what was that all about?”

“I’ve been monitoring the traffic moving over a network. I wrote an alarm into the code to alert me to any intrusion attempts, but I didn’t really expect to get a hit. It’s kind of like entering a building you thought was abandoned and walking around a corner and encountering someone.”

Though she knew it didn’t work that way, Kate couldn’t help but picture Ian coming face-to-face with the intruder in a dark cyber hallway. “Then what happened?”

“Then I reconfigured the firewall to stop the attack and prevent him from hacking me.”

“Did he try?”

“Yes, repeatedly. He was good, I’ll give him that. But I was better.”

The best, she thought.

“Does he know where you are?” Kate twisted the sash of her robe, and Ian reached for her hands, stilling them.

“I use a proxy server to conceal my IP address. We all do.”

“Then why did you have me pull the batteries on our phones?”

“It’s protocol anytime someone attempts to breach my firewall.”

“I thought disposable phones couldn’t be traced back to us.”

“When it comes to hacking, nothing is impossible. There’s always a vulnerability, a weakness, somewhere. But removing the batteries stops the flow of information.”

“So everything’s okay?”

He wrapped his arms around her tighter. “Everything’s fine.”

She exhaled, feeling some of the bottled-up tension leaving her body.

“Hey,” he said pulling back to look at her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m just not used to being awakened in the middle of the night by a cyberattack. I didn’t know what it meant.”

He smiled and brushed the hair back from her face. “Welcome to the cyberwars, sweetness. Sometimes things get a little bumpy.”

She could sense his exhilaration, almost feel the adrenaline coursing through him. When the alarm sounded and he’d leaped from bed, he’d been wearing only his underwear, but his back felt warm under her fingertips, as if what he’d been doing had invigorated him and kept him warm.

He loves this. He’s a junkie and hacking is his drug, she thought.

He slipped his hands into her robe and kissed her.

“Tired?” Kate asked, kissing him back.

“Wired,” he murmured against her lips. “Do you know what a cyberbattle does to me?”

“I can probably guess.”

“What about you, Katie? Are you tired?”

“I’m not that tired,” she said.

He took off her robe, and now they were both wearing only their underwear. He lay back on the couch and pulled her over on top of him.

“Don’t worry about what happened tonight, okay?” he said, twisting a lock of her hair in his fingers.

“I just didn’t want you to have to go.”

“It would take a lot more than something like this to make me leave you.”

“So it wasn’t a big deal?”

“Pretty mild in the grand scheme of things. Remind me to tell you about the time I got into it with a hacker from the Russian mafia. Boy, did I piss him off. I did leave town after that. It seemed like the smart thing to do.”

“Ian,” she said, hoping he could hear the frustration in her voice. “That’s not helping to ease my mind.”

He grinned. “But it’s such a good story.”

She wedged her hand between their bodies and pinched the front of his thigh, hard.

“Ow,” he said.

“You exasperate me.”

“I don’t mean to.”

“Try to remember that your world is very strange and I’m not completely used to it.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll do better. Now let’s kiss and make up.”

“I’ve already kissed you.”

He reached for her hand and held it, their fingers intertwined. “I think we should kiss some more.” He kissed her hard. Then soft. Then hard again. “Still exasperated?”