Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,85

God, a lifetime of never crying and here she was, springing leaks everywhere. Thank you, Luke, she said in her head, but not aloud. He didn’t agree with her, but it was what she wanted, so he was going to help her do it. If he’d fought her on this, she wouldn’t have known what to do. But he hadn’t.

“Wait, wait!”

He was scrolling through his contacts list and she stopped him, alarmed. Holding out her hand, she said, “May I?”

“Sure.” Without hesitation, he handed her his phone. It was a nice one but not as nice as hers which was the beta of a new type of phone. She added a stronger layer of encryption, turned off the location setting with a secret app that worked when the phone was off. And switched it from being a cell to a satphone, which a year ago would have been impossible.

“There you go.” She handed it back to him. “I added 256-bit AES encryption, plus a WPA2. Your location setting is temporarily switched off and you now hold a satphone and not a cellphone, so you’re not operating off the local cell tower. As of this moment, your phone cannot be tracked.”

He cocked his head. “So let me get this straight. You essentially cast a magic spell over my phone that makes it invisible and you turned it into a powerful wizard.”

“That’s right.” Luke was handling his phone gingerly, as if it might wake up and bite him. “By the way, as soon as we get back to Portland, you’re changing phones. This one is primitive.”

He made a choking sound. “Yeah, uh … it’s the latest model.”

“Primitive.” She clucked her tongue. Latest model if you were a caveman. “Can you call Jacob Black? I didn’t disable the ID function so he’ll see who is calling if you’re in his system.”

Luke scrolled and tapped, on speakerphone. On the second ring, it was picked up, and a man appeared on the cell’s monitor.

Jacob Black.

Hope didn’t pay that much attention to corporate gossip but Jacob Black was a living legend. Founder and owner of what was by all accounts one of the largest and most powerful security companies in the world. Also a billionaire several times over. That didn’t faze her. In tech, she’d dealt with billionaires before. Most of them were like children, only with money. Tech smart and life stupid.

Jacob Black didn’t look even remotely like a child. He had a hard, narrow face burnt dark brown by the sun and reflective sunglasses that gave him a robotic look. In the background was a harsh blue sky with a bright pitiless sun that gave an intense glare. Everything else was a dun color — the street, the walls of the buildings, the men dressed for battle in desert camo. There was a lot of mechanical noise in the background.

Luke had caught Black in the middle of something, but neither his voice nor his expression betrayed impatience. “Hang on, Luke, let me get out of the street.” The monitor’s images bounced up and down as Black entered a building and shut a heavy door behind him. The image again stabilized, focused on Black’s dark, hard face. “So, what can I do for you?” he asked.

Which was a remarkable statement for a multi-billionaire warrior to make. Hope had known some tech giants who answered their phones with a barked, “What?”

What can I do for you was a strange thing for such a powerful man to say. And yet his expression hadn’t changed. He wasn’t irritated or angry. Just waiting to hear what Luke had to say.

Luke didn’t mince words. “Sir, you know Bard Redfield, correct?”

If he was puzzled at the question, Black didn’t show it. “I do. He was my first commanding officer.”

“And your opinion of him?”

“Excellent.” Black’s expression changed slightly. His brows drew together and his lips thinned. “He was my XO in the darkest days of Iraq. He’s a fine man, the best. And my friend.”

The emphasis on those last words was clear. Bard Redfield was Black’s friend and Black wasn’t going to like it if someone spoke ill of him.

Hope was a little intimidated. Granted, Black was a billion miles away. In Afghanistan, would be her guess, though that background could have been any combat zone in a desert area. There were a lot of those. There was nothing he could do to her on the other side of the world. Still, she shrank back a little. Thick black eyebrows were drawn