Promises (The Kings of Guardian #14) - Kris Michaels Page 0,17

gave a half-hearted smile. “Point taken.”

She shimmied up his body and dropped her elbows by his head, making direct eye contact with him. “No one knows the future. We could live to be a hundred or we could die tomorrow. I’m positive you’d make a wonderful father. I’ve seen you with your nieces and nephews.”

He held her eyes but shook his head slightly. “You can’t know that.”

She smiled down at him. “Just like you can’t know you won’t be. Look, I’m not trying to rush you into anything. Take all the time you need. If you think about it and you’re still not sure or you don’t want to have kids yet, that’s fine. Starting a family isn’t something one of us decides. We both need to be ready.”

“How did I ever get so lucky?” He wrapped his hand behind her neck and brought her down for a kiss.

She pulled away and whispered against his lips, “We weren’t lucky, Mr. King. What we have—it was destiny.”

Chapter 7

Zane opened the last cabinet in the bathroom. Not there. Damn it, he’d bought extra toothpaste. He remembered it distinctly. “Babe, where did you put the toothpaste?”

Not getting an answer, he popped his head out of the bathroom. “Jewell?”

“Huh?” The distracted call came from the living room.

He sighed and padded down the hallway. “Babe, where did you put the extra tube of toothpaste?”

She blinked up from her cross-legged position. “The what?”

“Toothpaste,” Zane repeated.

“Ah… try the maintenance cabinet.” She stared down at the tablet, once again lost in the program she was working.

“Maintenance cabinet. Perfectly logical.” For his wife and about three other people in the world with her intelligence. He muttered the words as he spun on his heel and headed toward the small cabinet that held the hammer, screwdrivers, tape measures, and the odds and ends that they used to fix up things around the apartment. And there it was. He grabbed the boxed tube of minty freshness and shut the cabinet. He started to go into the bedroom to finish packing for them but stopped short. No. He had to ask.

“Babe.” He waited to see if she heard him.

She blinked up at him. “Wasn’t it there?”

“It was, but I have to ask… why did you put it there?”

“Oh, we had a full tube in the bathroom, and I read somewhere you could use toothpaste to patch holes in the wall.” She lowered her head and ran a finger across her tablet. “Why would he put the same code in twice?”

Zane sat down beside her. “Who are we talking about?”

Jewell dropped her tablet to the couch. “Vista.”

“Okay, let’s assume I don’t know what you’re talking about. Start at the beginning.” He had no earthly clue what she was talking about, but the name Vista rang every warning bell he owned.

Jewell sighed heavily. “When Tempest was debriefing the Fate in Russia, she said that One had the hard drive. We are surmising the drive I had was the original, but if there was a clone or a ghost of that hard drive kept for security…”

“You do that. You ghost all of your hard drives.” He’d seen her do it.

“Right, so if they fail, I have the programs already loaded on another drive and partitioned exactly how I want it to be. But ghosting the drives is insurance against failure, so you can recreate your systems with little problem. If that is what they have, we have no worries. But if he cloned the hard drive, the Fate or whoever has access to it would have access to the information we found on Vista’s drive.”

“But we—and by we, I mean you—have mitigated all the damage knowledge of that information could cause.” Zane reached over and rubbed her back. She leaned into his touch and then literally fell into his side.

“But what if I haven’t?” She sighed again and looked up at him. “I found something.”

“What?”

She scooted closer to him and tucked under his arm. When she was feeling insecure, she’d cuddle close and talk quietly. “I found a duplicate code on his hard drive.”

“And what does that usually mean?”

“It doesn’t. I mean, you have code that runs the programs and orders the information in the programs. Having an exact duplicate set of code for one hard drive is useless and redundant.” She sighed again. “Vista was methodical and intentional. This wouldn’t have just happened unintentionally.”

Zane pulled her into his lap and held her close, his chin resting on the top of her head. “So, you