Burned: Black Cipher Files #3 (Black Cipher Files series) (6 page)

“Hey, are you the Blue from Blue’s Bar?” Zeke asked. I assumed he was trying to deflect Blue’s attention. I couldn’t figure out if that would work in my favor or against me. I was off balance from Zeke’s appearance and his kiss. Why had he done that?

“Yeah.”

“Looks like a great place.”

“It serves its purpose.” Blue’s tone made it clear he didn’t want to let the question go. “Embarrassing?”

“How about if I explain later,” I said desperately, and knew I’d have to come up with something plausible. “Zeke,” I hesitated over his name, “has to go.”

“I'd like to get that cup of tea with you like you promised, Sunshine.” Zeke smiled easily, glanced at the fancy techno watch on his wrist, then back at my mother. “If that’s okay with you.”

“It’s my morning to open.” I lied, hoping that I didn’t sound as desperate as I felt.

Blue looked like he was going to protest. My mother squeezed Blue’s arm, and they gazed at each other with silent communication and...love transmitting between the two of them.

In that instant, I was lost.

What about me?
I wanted to shout like a little kid forgotten in the backseat of the car.

“Enjoy your morning. I’ll open.” Mama turned back to us, the intimate glimpse of them gone. “Do you live around here, Zeke?”

“Just visiting. I...had some time off and thought I’d spend a few days surfing.”

“Time off in October?” Blue asked.

“I’m in the private sector now,” Zeke replied. “Hoped Sunshine could join me at the beach for a day.”

“Sunny doesn’t go to the beach,” Mama blurted out.

I laughed as if I didn’t have a care in the world. “No time.”

But he’d picked up on my mother’s statement. I didn’t go to the beach, as far as anyone knew.

“Really?” Zeke Thorn, whoever the hell he was, gave me a speculative look.

I had to get him out of here now.

“Sunny should have you to dinner while you’re in town.”

Over my dead body.
“Sure.”

My face was stiff with displeasure and worry and a totally fake smile that seemed to be permanently curving my cheeks and hurt like heck. I, we, needed to get out of there before the situation deteriorated any further. “Be back in a bit.”

I grabbed his bicep, his skin hot against my palm, and tugged him out of the store. The heat rising from his body was immense.

For a minute, we walked along the sidewalk in silence. His step was jaunty and a little too enthusiastic. After all, he’d gotten what he wanted.

I should just ditch him but I needed information from Zeke Thorn before I sent him on his way.

As soon as we were far enough from the shop that my mom and Blue couldn’t see my animosity, I asked abruptly, “How did you know my mother’s name?”

“I asked about you and someone told me your last name.”

Which sounded good, except he was lying. If he’d asked about either of us, the gossip network in our small, close-knit town would have kicked in and someone would have called to tell us a stranger was asking around. “Really?”

“It’s been my experience,” he shot me an inscrutable look, “that lying about a situation tends to backfire on you. After I was a T.A. in physics at Cal Poly, of course.”

“Okay. Fine. I’m a liar.” But so was he.

“Why’d you pick physics?”

“Because I audited a physics class there.”

He gave me a long silent look. An indecipherable question in eyes the same blue as the pictures I’d seen of the ocean surrounding the Hawaiian islands.

What the hell.... “And in my experience most surfers have at the very most a rudimentary understanding of physics. It seemed like a good fit.”

“You lie well under pressure.”

“Yippee. Something to be
super
proud of.” I decided beating around the bush was pointless. And I purposefully chose an incendiary word to raise his defenses. “Why are you stalking me?”

“I’m not trying to stalk you,” he said with exasperation. “I wanted to thank you one more time. Properly.” He sounded sincere and he kept his body language relaxed, leaning slightly toward me, which usually meant sincerity. But I could sense, at the very least, he was not telling the whole truth.

I needed to find out why he was coming after me. It couldn’t be as simple as a thank you, could it? “Really?” I injected as much cynicism into that one word as I possibly could.

He looked chagrined, but didn’t answer, instead he countered with a question of his own. “Why didn’t you want them to know you were on the beach?”

“None of your business.”

“Why’d you go to the beach in the middle of the night?” he rephrased the question.

I should be protesting, asking him why he wouldn’t let my behavior go. But instead I was drawn to the mysterious depths of his ocean blue eyes. I’d left the store with him to get him away from Mama and Blue. With that accomplished, I should walk away.

Instead I was dizzy with temptation. If I let myself go I could fall into the warmth and compassion of his gaze and he would save me like I’d saved him last night.

But that wasn’t going to happen. It was a false sense of hope, a false sense of connection, so I brought up last night to push him away. “Why’d you go surfing in the middle of the night?”

“Stupidity.”

If he was embarrassed, he hid it well.

And his honesty made me want to smile. No sugarcoating it.

“Well, you’re welcome.” I cracked my lips up in a parody of a smile. “Nice meeting you.” And I forced myself to turn around to head back to Scents of the Sea even though I wanted to stay so badly.

I didn’t even take one step before his fingers curled around my forearm, his hand hot through my cotton sweater. “Hey. Please don’t go.”

I tugged discreetly at my arm. I didn’t want to cause a scene. Didn’t want to do anything that would draw attention to him, us.

“Please,” he said again softly. The sincerity in that please had me turning around. Wishing that we’d met under different circumstances, and wishing for just a few moments that I was a ‘normal’ woman.

“I’d really like to have tea with you.” He was just the slightest bit earnest, and he seemed to be almost as ill at ease as I was.

“Okay.” And really, I still wasn’t convinced that he hadn’t somehow selected Mama and I. Maybe he wasn’t stalking me, but something else?

We waited in line at the English Tea Shop. I smiled at Ernie. He and his partner, Joe, owned the little shop and were the happiest couple I knew. Mama frequently went to tradeshows with Ernie looking for little tchotchkes to stock the retail section of our store and Joe would be my backup while she was gone. “Thanks, Ernie.”

“No problem, doll.” Ernie eyed Zeke speculatively but didn’t say anything that would embarrass me in front of him. But I could tell he was dying to quiz me. I predicted a nosy phone call in my future. And when Zeke turned around to head outside, Ernie rounded his mouth and bugged his eyes, then gave me a thumbs up.

I flushed. This was going nowhere. It couldn’t go anywhere.

We took our ceramic mugs to a small bistro table outside on the brick patio. A wooden pergola, with wisteria twining around the thick posts and over the slats, blocked afternoon heat on sunny days, but this morning’s fog still lingered in the cool Fall air.

Once we sat down, I couldn’t let it rest as I analyzed his insistence and my own out of character reaction to what was in essence a mini-date. Because I didn’t date. Ever. “Why are you really here?”

“That could be answered so many different ways.” He prevaricated. “Why am I here, as in, on the planet? Existential theory. Or why am I in California? Or why am I having tea with you?”

“Two and three.”

“Two. Vacation.” But I watched him and knew he was lying again. This wasn’t a guy who took vacations. He worked constantly and when he wasn’t working, if his lean fit body was any indication, he exercised. If he was on vacation, Cambria wouldn’t be his first pick, and so it probably wasn’t his choice.

“And three?”

“I have no damn idea why.” The truth rang in his words. I supposed I should be hurt by the fact that he wasn’t overcome with lust or dying to go out with me. But I was more relieved that he didn’t seem to have a subversive agenda. He stared down at his hands, shook his head, his blond curls bouncing with the movement. He whispered, “It’s a really bad idea, and I seem to be full of them these days.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Right now, nothing,” he said glumly.

I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. My body language was defensive and I didn’t care.

He sighed. “Computer programmer.”

I narrowed my gaze, catalogued his corded muscles and broad chest. “You don’t look like a programmer.”

“Is that a compliment or a criticism?”

“Compliment.” I guess. I didn’t have a lot of experience with programming. I loved the idea of puzzles, but beyond a little bit of hacking research, mostly to protect my mother and me, didn’t have any practical knowledge. What I did know is that it required serious brain power.

“I’m really just a hacker. I design encryption programs and test them for vulnerabilities. I also test other systems for ways to break in.”

“Is it fun?” I couldn’t conceal the wistful tenor of my question.

“Uh,
yeah
.”

I was supposed to be interrogating him. The vibe coming off of Zeke Thorn was rueful and not at all threatening. But I needed to know for sure. “Are you here to harm us?”

“What?” Zeke shoved back from the little bistro table with a screech. “No!”

And I believed him. His reaction was seriously horrified.

Before I could apologize, his cell phone rang. Zeke glanced at the screen and blanched. “I’m sorry. I…have to go.” He jumped up from the table and ran. So, after practically begging me to have tea with him, he abandoned me almost immediately.

Well. I guess that was that. As I watched him take off, I wondered at the peculiar sense of loss from his rejection.

For a few moments I’d felt like a regular person. Not closed off, secretive, protective of my privacy, or constantly searching for nefarious ulterior motives. Just a girl on a date. But clearly I wasn’t meant for every day interaction with the opposite sex. So, I shoved that sense of melancholy down into the box where I corralled all the things I couldn’t do, couldn’t have.

I needed to forget about him. Because, odds were, I’d never see Zeke Thorn again.

Nine

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Zeke stared at the display. Jamie Hunt was calling him. Zeke was thankful he’d bolted from Sunshine. For some reason, he felt very protective of her and he didn’t want Sunshine on Jamie’s radar any more than necessary. Zeke pressed the answer button on his phone. “Yo.”

“We didn’t find her.” Jamie didn’t bother with hellos or any other pleasantries.

And then he realized Jamie said we. “You’re with Lucas?”

Lucas Goodman was Jamie Hunt’s new boyfriend—who had seen that coming? Certainly not Zeke who’d had a massive crush on Jamie for a while. She’d never dated anyone at the office, anyone ever, as far as Zeke knew. He’d tried several times to get her to go out with him. But a few weeks ago she’d hooked up with Lucas Goodman while she’d been undercover, searching for the people responsible for kidnapping agents and experimenting on them. Ever since then Jamie and Lucas had pretty much been inseparable.

“You missed the point. We’ve got squat.”

Jamie and Lucas had gone looking for Susan Chen, the escaped scientist who had conducted the illegal experiments on unsuspecting espionage targets, in the most logical destination: Seattle. They believed she’d head to the Pacific Northwest to see her young daughter.

Zeke wondered about the implications of Chen not going where they expected. He didn’t think they had any other avenues to pursue at this point. “What’s next?”

“Dammit. I don’t know.”

Which did nothing for Zeke.

Susan Chen was also the perpetrator of the plot that had put Zeke in the position of being suspended. The reason he was red-badged. The reason he’d been banished to Cambria to keep an eye, from afar—yep, he’d failed that directive—on Sunshine Smith.

Susan Chen was his only hope at clearing his name. He needed to find out how she had gotten his encryption program,
and
if he had revealed any other top secret information to her and her accomplice while he’d been drugged. He hadn’t believed that he was susceptible to Sodium Pentothal.

So that fact that Susan Chen’s files on the illegal, unethical experiment had been encrypted with Zeke’s classified NSA program had fucked him.

A program he’d developed, and the only way to access the programming code was through his brain or NSA computers, which pretty much meant that he must have given up information when he’d been abducted.

But how much information, and exactly what had he revealed? He didn’t remember.

When they’d had Susan Chen in custody, the scientist hadn’t talked. Hadn’t said a word. Nothing to defend herself. And definitely nothing that would clear Zeke.

After they’d grilled Chen in a maximum security prison and gotten nowhere, they’d tried multiple techniques to get Zeke’s brain to cough up what he’d told the kidnappers. They’d even tried hypnosis, but whatever he’d done under the influence of the Sodium Pentothal was lost in his grey matter somewhere. The idea that he couldn’t access it was pretty fucking freaky.

The NSA needed to know what else he’d done.
He
needed to know what else he’d done. Zeke had been banned from going after Susan Chen. He couldn’t be alone with her without compromising the evidence chain. So right now he was relying on Jamie to find Susan Chen.

But last anyone knew Susan Chen was in the wind. She’d escaped from a prison she should have never been able to breakout of and vanished.

“The daughter made the most sense.” Jamie huffed.

Zeke knew that Jamie had spent years protecting her little sister. So naturally her first thought would have been that Chen would protect her daughter. Except maybe Chen was protecting her by staying away, just like Jamie had done.

“Where is Chen’s little girl?”

“Safe and sound with the sister- and brother-in-law, who claim they haven’t seen Susan.” Jamie sighed. “I believe them. They’re terrified of the kid being taken away.”