Cross Roads, page 13
25
Rohan cursed his idiocy all the way to Lena’s mouth.
The first touch confirmed it was everything he’d imagined it would be.
Soft. Hot. Intoxicating.
He deepened the kiss. Their tongues tangled, the slick warmth sending tingles down his spine.
He wanted her. Wanted her so damn badly that he started mentally assessing places along the road where he could drag her farther into the shadows. Instead, he wrapped a hand around her waist and drew her in close. Trembled at the way her slight curves melded with his body.
A perfect fit.
Too perfect.
Too . . . distracting.
He broke off, backing away several steps. But it wasn’t far enough. He could still taste her. On his lips, on his tongue.
Her scent whirled in his nostrils. A living, breathing reminder of what he couldn’t have.
Of what disaster smelled like.
“This was a bad fucking idea.” His hands rolled into fists to keep from reaching for her again and finding the nearest tree.
He turned and continued down the hill. His heart thundering so loud he imagined the beat echoed off the towering mountainside. Because of this, he didn’t immediately hear the truck’s approach.
When the rumble of a diesel engine finally registered, the vehicle’s headlights had already spotlighted Lena, who stood looking after him. With the lights behind her, he couldn’t assess her expression.
But he had a fairly good idea he wouldn’t be on her Christmas list this year.
He rushed back to her side as the silver truck slowed to a crawl.
“What’s the plan?” she asked.
“Don’t have one.” He nudged her behind him and approached the open passenger side window.
“Looks like you folks had a bit of car trouble.”
The driver wore a wide-brimmed Tilly hat and a pair of camo chest waders. He appeared to be in his upper thirties, solidly built, and tall, given how little headroom he had left in the cab.
The handle of a large hunting knife poked out from beneath the closed visor.
Rohan rested an elbow on the window frame. “Battery, I think.”
“Dead battery on such a fancy new car?” He grinned. “Sounds like you got yourself a lemon.”
“Can’t argue that fact.”
“I’d let you use my cell phone to call a tow, but this is a dead zone. Not gonna get any service until you hit the outskirts of town.”
“How far’s that?”
“About five miles.”
Rohan tapped his palm against the sill and straightened. “Thank you, sir.”
The driver’s attention settled on Lena, lingered there for a beat too long, before sliding back to Rohan. “I gotta drive right through town to get to my place. I’d be happy to give y’all a lift.”
Rohan considered the knife, the man’s outdoor garb, and the trailer hitched to the back of his truck, carrying a fishing boat. He was clearly returning home after a long day trolling the shoreline of one of the many lakes in the area.
But there was something a little off about the way the guy looked at Lena. Appreciation he could understand. She was a beautiful woman.
The hunger worried him. Most men could control their baser urges, yet there were far too many who couldn’t. Or simply wouldn’t.
“Thanks, man, but I think we’ll—”
“Be happy to accept,” Lena said, stepping up beside him. “I’m Lena and this is Rohan.”
The driver nodded. “Dean.”
Rohan smiled at the driver. “Would you give us a moment?”
“Don’t take too long. Folks drive like maniacs through here.”
“I’ll keep it brief.” He drew Lena away a few feet. “I don’t trust him.”
“You seem to have trust issues in general.”
“Only for people who give me good reason. He does.”
“Why? Because he’s hot and appears to like the look of me?”
Rohan blinked. “You think he’s hot?”
She made a disgusted sound. “There’s no way I can walk another five miles in these boots. My toes are killing me.”
He noted the three-inch heel and narrow toe. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“No sense in both of us worrying about it.”
“When you’ve gone as far as you can, I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“He has a knife.”
“What angler-hunter-mountain man doesn’t? I bet you have one in your front pocket.”
Leatherman Skeletool. He never left the house without his multi-tool.
She smirked. “Boys and their toys.”
“Hey,” the driver called, watching them through the sideview mirror. “Y’all coming or not?”
“The next town is five miles away,” she said, before turning back to the truck. “It’ll all be over in ten minutes.”
Rohan followed. His mind running through a dozen “then bad shit happened” scenarios and how he would respond to each one with nothing but a two-and-a-half-inch blade for a weapon.
Rohan followed, drawing his “boy toy” from his pocket. “This is a bad fucking idea.”
* * *
Lena pressed against the truck’s open door as Rohan shouldered her aside and climbed into the back of the extended cab, sliding to the center of the bench.
He gave her a long, hard look before transferring his attention to Dean, whose smiling green eyes watched her climb inside.
The knife Rohan had mentioned was nowhere in sight. Its absence both relieved her and filled her with a low hum of anxiety.
Once they were underway, Dean asked, “Where’re y’all headed?”
“Atlanta,” Lena said, seeing no reason to prevaricate. A-Town was a big city.
“Don’t hear about too many folks going down there. Normally, those people are coming up here to escape the heat.” He gave her a knowing smile. “Must be something special. An anniversary, maybe?”
Lena forced a conspiratorial grin. “I wish, but we’re headed down for business.”
“Well, that ain’t no fun.” He eased his truck and trailer through a series of sharp switchbacks with an expert hand. “I work in real estate when I’m not on the water. My daughter, Holly, had the day off from school, so I was gonna take her and her mama out on a picnic.” He grew silent for a moment. “But Holly got sick and her mama didn’t want me underfoot, so I hitched up my boat and made a day of it.”
“Sounds like you got the best end of the deal.”
He reached for his wallet lying in an open nook beneath the dashboard and fished out a small picture. “This is my girl. About two years ago.”
Lena took the tattered, much-loved photo and held it beneath her phone’s flashlight. A smiling girl with brown, curly hair stared back at her. She sat in a wheelchair.
The sight relieved some of the tension she’d been harboring since entering Dean’s domain. A man who shared pictures of his disabled daughter to strangers wasn’t likely to go on an impromptu murdering rampage.
“She seems like quite the character.”
“She’s that and more. Got a lot of her mama in her. Thank the Good Lord.”
Lena showed the picture to Rohan, receiving nothing but a short nod in return, before handing the picture back to their driver.
“Got any kids of your own?” Dean asked, dropping his billfold back into the nook. A bold move given he had two unknowns in his vehicle.
“No, we’re not—”
Lena hesitated revealing that she and Rohan weren’t involved. First of all, after their explosive kiss, she wasn’t sure what they were. But mostly because having a virile, knife-wielding guy—no matter his marital status—believe you were taken provided a certain amount of protection against unwanted advances.
“You’re not . . . ?”
“Married.”
“These days, the young and in love—or not so in love—don’t need the vows to have kids.”
“When—if—I have children, there will be a husband in the picture.”
“He’ll be a lucky man.” Dean draped his left wrist over the steering wheel and tapped his thumb against the dashboard. “At your age, I bet your mama’s pestering you about grandchildren. My mother-in-law was damn—excuse my French—relentless about it until we got pregnant with Holly.”
Sweat broke out on Lena’s palms, and she wondered how many more miles until they hit civilization. “I don’t have that problem. My parents passed away many years ago.”
“I’m right sorry to hear that. No little girl should have to grow up without her mama.”
Emotion clenched the back of her throat, and Lena turned to her window. Studied her reflection from the dash lights, though another image, one she hadn’t seen in twenty years, stared back at her.
The woman had features similar to Lena’s, but sharper around the edges. The eyes hard, yet intelligent and kind. Soft hands for wiping away Lena’s tears. An encouraging voice when her little girl got lost reciting the alphabet.
“Mind me asking what happened to them?” Dean’s voice was gentle.
Lena swallowed, regretting her decision to accept this man’s assistance. He seemed nice enough, but his prying unnerved her. She supposed this is what most people called chitchat.
Lena called it nosy.
“Lights up ahead,” Rohan said, breaking his silence.
Gratitude for his intervention filled her chest, and she had a sudden urge to pepper his handsome face with kisses.
Dean waited a heartbeat as if he were expecting her to answer his question, before nodding. “You should be able to pick up a signal now.”
Lena woke up her phone and noticed a new text message from Lynette.
After pulling into the nearest gas station, Dean pointed down the road. “Tough Luck Towing is a half mile that way.” He hooked his thumb at an establishment across the street. “Blanche’s Motel. It don’t look like much, but the sheets are clean and the water is hot.”
As Lena jumped out of the vehicle, a dark gray BMW pulled into the first stall in front of the Quik Mart. A sturdily built man and woman with dark, wavy hair exited the car, stretching extravagantly, as though they’d been driving for hours, before entering the convenience store.
Lena stared after them for several seconds. Something about the woman seemed familiar, but despite the blinding parking lot lights, she hadn’t gotten a good look at either of their faces. Besides, she didn’t know anyone who drove a Beamer.
She shrugged, used to snatches of memory hitting her at the oddest times. Turning back to the truck cab, she heard Rohan offer their savior gas money.
“Keep your money. Something tells me you’re going to need it.” He nodded to them both, his gaze taking in Rohan this time, then drove away. Boat trailer bouncing in his wake.
“You were right,” she said. “There was something a little off with him.”
“Come again? Did you say I was right?”
“Don’t ruin this rare moment of like-mindedness.” She peered down at her phone. “I got a text from your mom.”
“Can’t be good.”
“Why?”
“Because I got one, too.” His thumb flashed across his screen, pulling up the text.
Curious, Lena opened her messaging app and tapped on Lynette’s name.
A second later, her phone went dark.
She tapped the screen to wake it up, thinking she got knocked out of her messaging app. Nothing. She hit the screen again. This time, harder.
Nothing.
“Sonofafuckingbitch!” Rohan exploded, right before he threw his phone across the parking lot.
26
Rohan stared at Lena’s disabled phone, still processing this latest strike by the Collective.
The photo, the car, and now their phones. Fun and games? Pressure for him to return to the group? Or the beginnings of a cat-and-mouse game, where all the mice die?
“What’s wrong with you?” Lena looked at him as if half of his brain had picked up and left home.
He raked shaking fingers through his hair. “The bastards disabled our phones.”
She snatched her phone back and stared at the logo hovering against a black background. She tried turning it on and turning it off, everything he’d already attempted. The logo didn’t move.
“Who did this?” she asked. “How did they do it?”
“It’s a type of smishing—phishing via text messages. Only they weren’t after our personal information. They just wanted to screw with our phones.”
“They can kill my phone without me clicking a link or opening an attachment?”
He nodded. “All you have to do is bring up the message.”
“But it was from your mom.”
“Display name spoofing. If we could pull up the sender’s information, you would see the message didn’t come from Mom’s phone number. Spoofing is common with email, but this is the first time I’ve come across it with text messages.”
“Everything on my phone is gone?”
“Not gone in the sense that it’s deleted, but you no longer have access.”
“Can they get to the cloud?”
“Doubtful, if it was password protected.”
She released a sigh of relief.
“Although,” he stared at the phone in her hand, at the logo, going through his mental database.
“Although, what?”
“The phone is in a type of stasis. They could be mining it for passwords and usernames.” He met her gaze. “You don’t keep your login information in a notes app, do you?”
The relief melted from her features.
“Fuck,” he said, feeling the weight of responsibility. He should have anticipated something like this. Should have warned her to be extra cautious.
Yet he had fallen victim to the same scam. The hacker part of his brain admired the technique for its brilliance. Opening up a text message from a familiar contact was as instinctual as blinking. No one would suspect a message from “Mom” to be anything else.
The human side of his brain silently, relentlessly flailed him for not being three steps ahead, for not preventing the attack.
“I’m sorry, Lena. I really am.”
“You know who did this.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“What’s with the ambiguity, Rohan? You either do or you don’t.”
“I know the players responsible, but not the individuals themselves.”
“You’re speaking in circles.”
A harsh reply flew to the tip of his tongue, but he forced it back. His attention had snagged on the station’s surveillance camera above them.
“Come on,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“To see Blanche.”
* * *
As it turned out, Blanche had died a decade ago from complications of COPD, or so her daughter Ruthie, a plump, jolly, quite gossipy woman, had informed them—in excruciating detail—when she’d handed them the key to her last available room.
Rohan had to force himself not to think about the kiss he’d shared with Lena. Not when they’d entered the small room, not when he noticed the full-sized bed and no couch, not when Lena kicked off her boots, and especially not when she emerged from the bathroom wearing a form-fitting T-shirt and ass-molding running shorts.
It was going to be a long, agonizing night.
He had enough on his mind to balance at the moment. Adding thoughts of a smoking hot client’s body to the list would tip the scale toward disaster. He wouldn’t let that happen again.
Promising to find them some food, he’d backed away from temptation and sprinted across the street to the Quik Mart.
* * *
Rohan set two soggy-bread sandwiches and two bottles of water on the counter. “I didn’t see any prepaid phones on the shelf,” he said to the pimple-faced clerk.
“No, sir. Sold my last two not ten minutes ago.”
Coincidence or had the Collective followed them?
He shot a glance across the street. Every nerve ending screamed at him to get back to Lena.
Turning his attention back to the clerk, he noticed the large rectangle in his front jeans pocket.
“My phone died, and I need to make a phone call.” He nodded toward the kid’s pocket. “I’ll give you twenty bucks to use your phone so I can call my brother.”
The clerk looked uncomfortable. “Uh, I don’t know—”
“Forty bucks,” Rohan interrupted. “Please, it’s important.”
With evident reluctance, the young man slid his phone from his pocket and unlocked it before handing it over.
Rohan placed the forty dollars on the counter, plus another twenty for the food. “I’m just going to step outside for some privacy. I’ll be back in five to get my food.”
“Don’t make me call nine-one-one, sir.” The clerk pocketed the two twenties, then scanned a bottle of water.
“I won’t.”
Once Rohan finished his call, he removed the number from the clerk’s phone and returned the device. “Thank you.” He collected their dinner from the counter and rushed back to the motel.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, Lena reached for the food and drink, her dark eyes fixed on him.
“Thanks, now explain to me what’s happening.”
Rohan ripped off his glasses, tossed them on a nightstand near the Holy Bible, and plopped down in the most uncomfortable chair ever built.
He had thought about how this moment would play out over the past decade, but never once had he imagined sharing the darkest moment of his life with an artist, in a motel room, in the middle of nowhere.
“In my senior seminar course, my team was assigned to a budding energy bar company, owned by Troy Neff. They tasked us with building a system that would protect the company’s secret recipe along with the rest of its intellectual property and assets. The seminar helped small businesses get off the ground, while giving students real-life experience.”
“Interesting story, but what do energy bars have to do with someone hacking my phone?”
“Patience, Grasshopper. It will all make sense in a second.”
