White-Hot Hack (Kate and Ian #2)(16)

Thinking of Charlie and Phillip and the rest of the task force members only added to his bad mood. He and Charlie had always enjoyed a little friendly-yet-cutthroat competition, but by voluntarily withdrawing from undercover work, he’d catapulted Charlie right into the hot seat.

Where he used to sit.

Where all the action could be found.

And the task force needed him. Charlie had said so himself. But he’d told Kate he wasn’t going to work undercover anymore, and he wouldn’t go back on his word.

The only way to salvage the remainder of the day was to spend it with his wife. She’d left in the Spyder after lunch for one of her drives, but he really thought she’d be home by now.

Ian: I feel like taking a nap. The kind where we’re both naked and neither of us are sleeping. Are you in?

He returned to his work, but twenty minutes later, he was still waiting for her to respond. He probably should have called because she wouldn’t be able to text back while she was driving. He clicked on the locator app to see where she was and blinked to clear his vision because she appeared to be heading west on a rural byway almost twenty-five miles away.

What the hell?

He opened another app—the one that had come with the car—and reached for his glasses. He clicked through the pages for distance driven and fuel efficiency, and read the number for her current speed: 112 miles per hour. He reviewed the stats for the past week and was shocked to discover she’d consistently hit speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour. Three days ago she’d reached an all-time high of 132. What was she thinking?

He blamed himself. Giving her an incredibly fast car and then being upset when she drove it incredibly fast was on him. He was the one who’d encouraged her to increase her speed when he’d put her behind the wheel of the Shelby. But he’d been with her then. He driven with her enough to know she was more than competent behind the wheel, but this was nuts.

Her speed slowed to a much more acceptable level as she neared the town of Berryville. It looked as if she was turning around and heading back the way she’d come. He kept the phone in his hand, monitoring her speed all the way home, relieved to see that it never rose above seventy-five.



He was waiting for her in the driveway. When she got out of the car, he held up the phone, the app still open, and said, “One hundred and thirty-two miles per hour? Are you out of your mind?”

She looked surprised. “There’s an app for that? Dammit. I should’ve known.”

“Kate.”

Her smile faded because he’d never spoken to her in that tone of voice, but she’d scared him. He pictured the Spyder in a mangled, twisted, smoking heap of metal and his stomach clenched.

He reached for her hand and softened his voice. “I just want you to slow down before you get hurt. Or worse. You’re married to a man who enjoys driving fast, but come on. Do you have a death wish I don’t know about? What were you thinking?”

“I’m bored,” she blurted.

He’d promised Kate that life with him would never be boring. Boring was bad. “Bored like you were bored with Stuart, bored?” He sounded alarmed.

She laid her hand on his arm, quick to reassure him. “No, nothing like that. Maybe bored isn’t the right word. More like restless.”

A restless wife didn’t sound good either.

“It’s just that I’m not used to having so much time on my hands.”

Ah, so that’s what this was about. “Come with me.” He led her to the porch, and they sat down on the wicker love seat Jade had delivered the day before.

“If you let me help with your social engineering, I’d have something to keep me busy.”

He’d known that’s what she was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. “I’m on probation with your dad—for life, I might add. I hurt his daughter and dragged his family down a path I know he’d rather none of you were on. How do you think it would go over if he found out I’d turned his daughter into a hacker?”

Kate looked down at the ground. “I used to be an attorney. Then I built a nonprofit organization from the ground up. I had a board of directors. I had employees and volunteers. I worked hard to provide assistance to my community. Now I’m a housewife who goes to Pilates and makes paninis.”

“You’re much more than that. And your paninis are so good.”

She looked up and the yearning in her eyes cut through him. He didn’t want Kate to be bored, but more than that, he never wanted her to be unhappy. To have second thoughts about the sacrifices she’d made to be with him. He’d already used up his allotment of that emotion with her, and it killed him to see even a trace of sadness on her face.

“You can’t hide me away forever, Ian.”

One of the things he’d struggled with the most when Kate had been hacked was that whoever had done it had unlimited access to every photo on her computer. Any picture of her and her friends and family had been right there for them to copy and save. They’d probably also taken pictures of her as she walked down the street. He was convinced that the hacker who’d come into the food pantry was the one who’d doxed him and hacked her, and the thought of the guy saving those images, possessing any pictures of his wife, filled him with rage. He started to say that he wasn’t trying to hide her away, but he bit back his words because that’s exactly what he was doing, and he of all people should have known that his fearless, adventure-seeking wife was never going to be satisfied with that.