Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,14
the Palace of Paranoia and it’s very likely even the bathrooms were wired and there was an AI somewhere monitoring us, always. So we created an out. A special message board in the darknet where you have to beat fire-breathing dragons and climb a mountain of thorns to get in. Impenetrable. And it can also display text steganographically. The messages can be embedded into whatever is on the screen. I wrote that little algorithm. We could complain about Dolby and no one would know. We also warned each other if some other particularly obnoxious guy was coming our way. And we helped each other out with problems.”
The skin had tightened over Luke’s cheekbones. The skin over his temples pulled as his jaw muscles clenched. “You got a lot of that? At the NSA? Harassment?”
She sighed, looked down at her hands where her fingers intertwined then pulled apart. “We got a lot of that, yeah. Not just at the NSA. We’re used to it, but sometimes it just … it just rankles, you know? We were working so freaking hard and we just kept getting undercut. So it was hard.”
His mouth was a thin line. He nodded jerkily.
“Anyway, it was our safe room, the HER room. Felicity was admitted by popular acclaim though she wasn’t at the NSA long. We talked, vented. When one of us has a problem she just sends up the bat-signal and help is on the way. So I sent up the bat-signal. It’s weird that Emma and Riley didn’t answer but Felicity answered right away. I didn’t actually know where she was and that she was married and pregnant. Not only pregnant but with orders to stay in bed because she could lose the baby.”
“Babies.” A faint smile crossed Luke’s face. “Twins. Boys.”
Her face lit up. “Oh my gosh! How wonderful! I hope her husband treats her right.”
Luke nodded. “Oh yeah. He loves her. He takes really good care of her. She is his life. He was the one who arranged for everything. The pickup in Boston, the flight over, me. Any friend of Felicity is a friend of his. And mine.”
Hope hardly heard him. Only heard — he loves her. He takes really good care of her. She is his life. Hope wasn’t jealous of Felicity, not a bit. Felicity hadn’t had it easy and she deserved every ounce of happiness life could give her.
But oh … to have someone love you. Really love you. What must it be like? Hope had friends who were fond of her, but no man had ever loved her in her life. Emma, Riley and Felicity loved her but none of them even lived in the same city.
Well, that was pathetic. Right now she was in danger, a friend had died because of her, her doorman had been killed and now a brave man — a decorated soldier — was right here, right now, ready to lay his life on the line for her.
That’s what she should be thinking about, not romantic notions of love.
She was tired. That was it. All that adrenaline coursing through her system, it had made her loopy and sloppy.
“So.” She tried to straighten her spine. “That’s it. That’s basically all I know. Well, except for one more thing.” She tried and failed to keep the misery out of her voice. “Whoever my real father is, apparently he wants me dead.”
Whoever my real father is, he wants me dead.
Those were the saddest words Luke had ever heard. How could anyone want this woman dead? Let alone … her father?
She looked so fragile and delicate, perched at the edge of the seat of the sofa as if she would fly away at any moment. So pretty and so smart. Felicity hadn’t said much about her — there hadn’t been time — but she said Hope was wicked smart and coming from a wicked smart woman herself, it really meant something.
Felicity hadn’t mentioned she was also wicked pretty. Not that Luke was noticing. Not much, anyway. Pretty as she was, she was also in imminent danger. Big time. Her story was horrifying and it took a lot for him to keep his cop face on. Expressionless and stolid, when inside he was screaming.
He’d expressed the fact that the shadowy forces against her were powerful without letting on that they might be facing fucking Satan himself, on steroids. Anyone who could corral two teams of efficient operators within the space of maybe half an hour … that was