Hannah Whelan.
That was a pleasant surprise for a Wednesday morning.
Cute face. Nice tits. Great legs.
Quiet but coy. Soft voice. Eyes that met mine and then looked away.
A nice distraction.
Lord knew I needed one of those.
Because this job was going to fucking kill me.
“Mason, you coming? Derek is starting the briefing in five.”
I glanced up at the curvy, blond-haired woman standing beside my desk, a serious, no-nonsense expression on her otherwise lovely face.
“I’m coming. Just finishing up this report I was supposed to have done last week.” I held up the thick file and gave my former fuck buddy a wan smile.
“You’ll piss him off if you’re late again,” Madison reminded me. As if she needed to remind me that I lived my life on the bad side of the agent in charge, Derek Sanders.
“I won’t be late. Just need to cross a few more t’s,” I said, still wearing that painful-as-hell smile.
Madison pursed her lips and finally turned on her heel, walking away with the giant stick still firmly planted up her ass.
I had been working in the Richmond FBI field office for only a little over six months. It shouldn’t have been enough time to mess things up so royally. But I was always known as an overachiever.
Madison Armiger had been a mistake of the worst kind.
The kind that you had to see. Every. Single. Day.
Screwing a fellow field agent wasn’t the best way to make an impression. I hadn’t been after anything serious. Madison had seen me as her reason to settle down. It was safe to say that our needs hadn’t meshed.
After I had cut things off with her, she had taken it like a stereotypical woman scorned.
Not well.
FBI agents may have a reputation for being serious and all business, but they gossip like ten-year-old girls when given a juicy piece of scandal.
And the newbie fucking—and discarding—a senior agent was bound to get around the office and a surefire way to look like a dick. If not fired.
I was just lucky that my superiors had either been ignorant of my indiscretion or chosen to look the other way. Otherwise a bad reputation would have been the least of my worries.
I had been transferred to the Richmond field office from DC to assist in their backlog of cases in the cybercrime unit. I had been working as a special agent for a little over ten years, having been recruited two years out of college when I was working as an IT specialist for a large tech firm. My tech aptitude and hands-on expertise made me a prime candidate. I had jumped into the deep end without thinking twice.
I had done pretty damn well for myself too. I had personally taken down over two hundred cybercriminals during my tenure. I was the guy you called when shit got tough.
I had planned to come to Richmond, solve their hardest cases, and go home even more of a badass than I already was. I had been slightly deluded when it came to my hero fantasies.
Things weren’t exactly going the way I had planned.
For starters, I had caught a case of stupid in the week it had taken for me to leave my leased apartment in Reston and settle down in the state capital.
Getting drunk on my first weekend in town with a group composed of my fellow agents hadn’t been my smartest move to date.
But I had been flying high on my own self-importance. Only two months earlier I had busted a hacker responsible for a nasty bit of ransomware that had been making the rounds in corporate America for over six months. The man responsible had swindled more than $10 million from companies desperate to get their data back. No one could locate him. Three weeks after being assigned the case, I had Stanley Obermain of Wichita, Kansas, behind bars awaiting trial.
So when I had been asked to lend a hand to the Richmond office, I had thought I was the big important agent coming down to teach these guys how it was done.
