“No,” he says, “although I gave them plenty of reason to.”
I’m intrigued. “Really? The strong, smart, courageous, popular hero who’s the star of his own fairy tale wasn’t a perfect little boy?”
“You forgot handsome,” he says with a straight face.
I shoot back, “Handsome? You look like a before picture.”
He pretends outrage. “Are you getting smart with me?”
“How would you know? If you had another brain, it would be lonely.”
From there, it rapidly devolves, and although both of us stay absolutely poker-faced, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
“Yeah, well your head is so big, you have to step into your shirts.”
“We all sprang from apes, jarhead, but you didn’t spring far enough.”
“Just remember Jesus loves you, sweet cheeks, but everyone else thinks you’re a pain in the ass.”
“If brains were dynamite, you wouldn’t have enough to blow your nose.”
“Ha! Maybe if you ate some of that makeup you’re wearing, you’d be pretty on the inside.”
“Do you ever wonder what life would be like if you’d had enough oxygen at birth?”
“No, but I bet whatever your problem is, it’s really hard to pronounce.”
“The village called. They said they were missing their idiot.”
“Tabby, if your heart was made of chocolate, it wouldn’t fill an M&M.”
“Connor, if I wanted to kill myself, I’d climb your ego and jump to your IQ.”
“I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers to let you know how I feel about you.”
Trying desperately not to laugh, I say, “A hundred thousand sperm, and you were the fastest?”
Connor looks over at me. A brilliant grin spreads over his face. Behind him, the setting sun flares into a golden nimbus around his head, and he looks so heart-stoppingly handsome, it takes my breath away.
He says, “Earth is full. Go home.”
Our eyes lock, we stare at each other, and I can’t look away. Slowly, his smile fades. With the sensation that we’ve just driven off a literal and figurative cliff, my stomach drops.
I finally break eye contact and stare out the windshield, blinking hard into the distance.
I don’t like him. I don’t. I refuse to. He’s everything I detest in a man.
And yet…
“Let’s talk about Miranda,” I say abruptly, gazing at the range of blue-purple mountains we’re headed toward. Their tips are lit fiery red by the setting sun as if they’ve been dipped in blood.
“Fine.” His voice is low, slightly rough, all the teasing gone.
“When did she first contact you about her situation?”
He clears his throat. “I’ve been on retainer with her for years—”
“For security?”
“As a technical advisor,” he says, gripping the steering wheel so hard, I think it’s in danger of breaking. “Stunts, fight scene coordination, training actors in weapons handling, anything military related that needs an expert to add realism to a movie.”
“Oh.” I’m impressed. “That sounds cool.”
“It is.”
He says it flatly. I resist the urge to glance at his face to see what it’s doing.
“So what happened?”
He’s quiet for a moment, tapping a thumb against the steering wheel in a restless, staccato rhythm. “She received an email a few weeks ago. It said she was to deposit ten million dollars into an account in the Cayman Islands or there would be a serious data breach on her company’s network. One that would make the Sony hack in 2014 look like child’s play.”
“Blackmail.”
Connor nods. “What was unusual is that serious blackmailers already have the information they want to extort money for. In this case, it was simply a threat of a breach. One hadn’t actually occurred.”
“That fucking colossal ego,” I murmur, watching the craggy mountain tops fade from red to purple.
“Pardon?”
Feeling the beginnings of a headache, I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. “S?ren. He wanted to give Miranda a heads-up that her system was going to be attacked so she’d close any holes there might have been in the network.”
“Why would he do that? It makes no sense to forewarn your enemy that you’re on the march.”
I smile, but it’s humorless. “Because he doesn’t want it to be easy. He wants it to be as difficult as possible, so that when he beats you after giving you fair warning, it will hurt twice as much.”
Silence as Connor digests that. I open my eyes and glance at him.
I say, “So let me guess how this went. You couldn’t trace the source of the email because an anonymous proxy server was used to hide the IP address. You didn’t think it was a credible threat because not only did he forewarn his intentions, his alias isn’t identifiable with any known hacker collective or has been associated with any prior hacks, high level or otherwise. How am I doing so far?”