“Thanks.”
Conrad dropped the book and Troy caught it in midair, accepting it without hesitation. He’d helped Conrad out last week with hacking into a news site for stock returns. The limited computer access hadn’t been quite as tight as they’d claimed. Except in one realm. “How is it that I can get into any system except where they keep their tests?”
“Uh, hello, they know you’re here.” His arm arced down and he swatted Troy with a pillow. “They must be paying Bill Gates a fortune to keep that out of reach.”
“Funny.” Not. It was frustrating being confined to this place. He flopped back and started thumbing through Conrad’s notes. Notes that were damn near Greek. “Must be nice being a friggin’ math genius.”
“If I was a genius I wouldn’t have gotten caught. I would be at some after-homecoming dance getting blown by a debutante who gets off on the fact that my old man is rich enough to buy me a Porsche for my sixteenth birthday.”
“I think you wanted to get found out.”
Conrad ducked his head to the side, looking down. “You think I wanted this? You’re nuts. Why did you do it?”
“I’m not sure. ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’s’ attention instead of a new toy? Fame and recognition? Who knows? The court-appointed shrink just says I’m antisocial.” And how damn weird was it that now, here, he finally had a real friend. “How did you get caught?”
“I let a female knock me off my game. I got sloppy. It’s my own fault. Women have always been my weakness. Take it from me, man. Never let a woman be your Achilles’s heel.” He ducked back to rest on his own bed again. “But you, you never do anything you don’t mean to.”
In his six months here, he’d never seen Conrad’s confidence shaken.
“Sure, I do, Hughes. I blurt out crap all the time that I don’t mean to say. Teachers really hate that, by the way.”
His buddy laughed, shaking off some of the darkness. “So I see every day. You do take the attention off the rest of us, and for that, we thank you, man.”
From the far corner, the guy he’d thought was asleep jackknifed up and threw two fistfuls of brass buckles across the room. “Do you think you two could hold it down? Take the belt buckles, just go and let me sleep in peace. I’ve got some sort of stomach bug. Leave or you might catch it.”
Stomach bug? The loser was probably coming down off something. He was some piano prodigy who’d been busted for drugs and shipped here.
Troy tossed a belt buckle. “No, thanks, Mozart. I’ll pass on Marching 101.”
“Really, dude—” Mozart swung his legs over the side of his bed, holding his stomach and wincing “—if you would stop worrying about being a moody whiner all the time, you could learn something. To infiltrate the system, learn to work it from the inside. Use those brains of yours to play the game. Polish your damn brass.”
Conrad did that uppity sneer thing he had down to an art form. “You’re actually telling us to kiss ass, Beethoven? Because you sure as hell don’t.”
“Exactly.” Mozart/Beethoven grabbed the Pepto-Bismol from his bedside table. “There are other ways….”
Troy scooped up a remaining buckle and tossed it from hand to hand. “You make people laugh. Good for you. That’s your gig. You’re a people person.”
After guzzling a quarter of the bottle of stomach meds, he swiped his wrist over his mouth, smearing away the pink stain. “Studies say that a sense of humor is the true measure of intelligence.”
“Just because you took that psychology class, Bach, don’t think you can trick me into doing things your way by playing mind games.”
“Whatever. I’m offering you a new tool for your arsenal.” Mozart/Beethoven/Bach—aka Malcolm Douglas— shrugged, stretching back out again. “It’s up to you if you want to take it.”
“Knock-knock jokes, Douglas?” Troy tossed the final buckle back. “Are you for real?”
Douglas applauded. “See, that was well-played sarcasm. You’ve got potential.”
The door exploded open across the room.
Colonel John Salvatore stood framed in the opening. “Gentlemen, you’d damn well better be hurling right this second or you will be by the time I’m done running you.”
* * *
Troy shoved up from his computer workstation and pushed open the door to where Hillary slept. Curled up on her side, she hugged the wool blanket he’d picked up on an African safari. Her red hair splashed an auburn swath over the white Egyptian cotton. His hand itched to cup the curve of her hip. He ached to slip into bed and lie behind her, tucking her body into his. He would wrap his arm around her waist, the undersides of her br**sts resting against his skin. He would breathe in the scent of her shampoo, stay right there until she woke up and rolled into his embrace, inviting him to indulge in more.
Indulge in everything.
He wanted Hillary in his bed for real, not just to sleep, and he had wanted that since he’d first seen her. But he needed to have his thoughts in order, be in control of himself. He wasn’t the impulsive teen anymore who blasted through security firewalls without thinking of the consequences.
And as he thought this through, he was beginning to realize his preference for keeping things simple wasn’t going to work with her. She was the type of woman that asked for, demanded, more from a man. She had a way of getting him to talk that no one had managed before. Maybe because she wasn’t some groupie who glamorized what he’d done. Even when she didn’t agree with his choices, she listened. She wanted the real story.
That was mighty damn rare and enticing.
As he watched the even rise and fall of her chest as they powered across the ocean toward the Costa Rica coastline, he couldn’t deny it any longer. He would do anything to sleep with her. Anything.
And he would need everything he’d learned from Salvatore, from Hughes and from Douglas to win her over.
Eight
His Costa Rican getaway wasn’t at all what she’d expected.
She slid out of the Land Rover, sounds of the tropical wilds wrapping around her. The chorus of isolation, of escape, echoed. Birds and monkeys called from the dense walls of trees. His home rested on a bluff, with a waterfall off to the side that fed into a lagoon. Wherever he looked out from his home, he would have an incredible view.
Sure, it was a pricey pad, without question. But not in a flashy way. She’d expected a sleek beach place with gothic columns and swaths of gauzy cabanas on a crystal-white beach.