“Just tinkering with something I started working on a while ago.” I save my files and start shutting down my system.
“You don’t have to stop if you’re not done,” he says, gently resting his hand against the back of my neck.
“I was just playing around,” I tell him. “I didn’t think you were coming over tonight.”
“The meeting ended early.” He massages my neck in a way that’s both soothing and arousing as fuck. “And I didn’t get tapped for any duties, so I snuck out as soon as I could.”
“I still can’t believe you can get in here like some sort of ghost.” I close my laptop and lean back into his touch.
The first time Xave ‘broke’ into my room was just over a week ago, the night after we slept at the cabin together.
I had no idea he was coming over, and he just told me he’d see me later when we parted ways at the edge of the woods.
I thought I was going crazy when I could feel him in my room while I was working on a paper. And I wasn’t nearly as shocked as I should have been when I turned around and found him standing in the doorway of my closet with a sexy-as-fuck grin on his too-handsome face.
We didn’t do much talking that night, and I didn’t find out about the program Jace made him until after we were lying in bed after an enthusiastic round of sex.
That started a pattern of Xave sneaking into my room every night and sneaking out in the early morning while everyone is still asleep.
The risk of having him in my room, especially with him evading our security, is huge. And I don’t even want to think about what would happen if we were caught, but the added danger makes everything way more exciting, and it makes the many rounds of sex we’ve had that much hotter.
“I have some news,” he says.
I roll my gaze up so I can look at him.
“Jace is getting close to nailing down the asshole who arranged those hits on you.”
“He is?”
I’m not much of a computer guy, so most of what Xave has told me about Jace’s search for whoever hired my would-be assassins has gone right over my head. As far as I understand, whoever it is seems to have a background in IT and coding, or at least know someone who does, and they were meticulous about covering their tracks. I don’t understand how Jace did it, but he was able to find a mistake or flaw in some of the code they used, and he's been tracking them through that for the past week.
Neither of the searches Xave’s cousins did of Richard’s office or residence gave us any real answers, but they’ve all been working nonstop trying to track the mastermind behind the attempts on my life.
It's crazy to think about how much time and effort they’re putting into helping me, especially since they don’t know me at all. And it’s sad to think about how they’ve done more to help me than anyone in my life has since I was eleven.
“He managed to track them down,” Xave says, still rubbing my neck in that way that makes my insides feel funny. “Now he’s just waiting for them to take the bait from the traps he set so we can get their location and ID them.”
I know about as much about hacking as I do about making a sourdough starter, which is nothing, but Xave explained that a lot of hacking is pretty boring and all the stuff you see in movies where people are battling it out in real time and breaking into systems after five minutes of trying is fake.
Most of the time is spent combing through data and code to find flaws or inconsistencies, then exploiting them to find what you’re looking for. And there’s a lot of downtime once you do find them because you have to set traps and wait for people to make a mistake so you can get access to their systems.
It’s all way above my very basic understanding of computers and coding, but even with my limited knowledge, I know Jace is extremely skilled at what he does, and I’m damn lucky to have him and the other Hawthorne men on my side.
“Have you thought about what you want to do about your gig next week?” Xave asks as he lets go of my neck and goes to sit on the edge of my bed.
“I have no idea,” I tell him honestly. “What do you think I should do?”
From everything Xave and his cousins were able to dig up about my upcoming gig, there seems to be a 50/50 chance that it’s some sort of trap.
The company hosting it is a numbered LLC that was registered a week before they contacted my business manager to see if I wanted to headline it, and there’s no other info about the company online or in any business registries that they could find. The pay is exorbitant, more than twice what I’ve made for similar shows, and the short timeline is sus as hell.
The only reason I haven’t canceled it is that the show sold out in less than a day after it was announced, and I don’t want to punish my fans because the event organizersmightbe part of a scheme to hurt me.
“Honestly, if it was my choice, I’d lock you up and make sure no one can get anywhere near you until we figure out who this asshole is,” Xave says, and his blunt, matter-of-fact delivery makes me smile.
It should probably freak me out how possessive over me Xave is, but I like it. He somehow found the perfect balance between possession and control, so while he says all sorts of stuff that would make a sane person run for the hills, he never actually tells me what I can or can’t do. He doesn’t even try to persuade me one way or the other and just tells me what he’s thinking in his own unique way.
I was worried that things between us might fizzle out once the clandestine nature of things faded and we started to spend time together when we weren’t naked and fucking, but the opposite has happened.
