Jacob watched the flickering data intently and occasionally moved his gaze up to the door as he heard a noise in the hall. His foot juddered nervously, heel twitching, as the waiting started to work at his nerves with all the things that could go wrong.
The final byte disappeared off Porter’s monitor. Jacob hissed out a sigh of relief between his teeth and stripped his equipment out of the computer system. The trojans went first, politely self-destructing with a minimum of damage, and then he wiped the current session from the computer menu.
He yanked the code breaker out of the computer as it shut down, broke it apart, and shoved it into the pockets on his boiler suit. No point in wasting time taping it back to his stomach. They’d never been searched on their way out.
The computer shut itself down, the soft glow on the monitor cut off, and Jacob tugged a ragged, bright-orange cloth out of his pocket. He scuffed his fingerprints off the glass. Not that they’d help anyone find him. His prints weren’t on any database out there, as far as he knew. He’d just prefer to keep it that way.
A shrill rattle made him flinch and taste his heart in the back of his throat. He pushed back from the desk and his hip hit the chair. Then he realized it was his phone.
“Shit,” he muttered.
Jacob took a deep breath, exhaled the panic, and grabbed the phone out of his pocket. He slid the chair back into place as he answered it.
“Hey.”
“Hey, babe,” Simon’s familiar, rough voice drawled in his ear. He was gorgeous in person—all dark, controlled male beauty and long, muscled lines—but his voice hinted at how dangerous he was. “You free tomorrow?”
Liquid heat spread through Jacob’s muscles, a cramp of want squeezed his balls like a hand, and that bastard itch popped back into his brain. There it was—what he’d forgotten about, or what he should have forgotten about by then.
“I thought you were busy?” he stalled.
Simon laughed—a short, cat-rough rub of sound. “Playing hard to get?”
“Doesn’t sound like me,” Jacob said. He should have started a fight and hammered in the crack that he could blame the breakup on. Not that he’d ever actually broken up with anyone—the last relationship he had that lasted longer than a week was his short experiment in being straight with his third-grade girlfriend—but he understood the principle. Except what came out of his mouth was “I’ve got a few things to clear up in the morning, but I’m all yours from eleven. I thought you were going to look at buying another rusty ornament for your drive?”
He shoved the door open and stepped out into the hall as he tucked the phone against his shoulder and gave the handle a quick polish. Better to break up in person. Easier to salt the ground so Simon would never want to think about him again. It was a smooth excuse—good enough that he felt a pinch of regret at Simon’s hate—but he’d never been any good at lying to himself.
Professional liars never were. That itch was a smug little shit when you got right down to it. Jacob tried to ignore it as he headed back toward the abandoned buffer.
“Nora said they had a ’69 Firebird,” Simon said. “I asked them to send me pictures, though, and it wasn’t. So I canceled, and I’m going to have to take Nora to the Cars-and-Coffee cruise in Austin so she knows what a Firebird looks like.”
The elevator dinged. Jacob cursed to himself. They weren’t meant to have phones, and recently fired employeesdidget searched.
“Simon, I gotta—“
“What the fuck?” Simon’s mutter interrupted him. At the same moment, Jacob saw the buffer jerk backward as someone got hold of the lead and tugged on it. His stomach knotted with a sick premonition.
“I’m sorry.” It was probably the most honest thing he’d said in a year.
“Sorry?” Simon said. He sounded distracted already. “What for? Look if you can’t make it—”
The lead dropped, and Simon stalked around the corner, jacket tucked back behind the holster of his gun. He looked good, even under the lights that sapped the color from his tan, and then he saw Jacob, and he just looked… confused.
“This,” Jacob said.
He turned on his heel and ran. The rubber soles of his sneakers squeaked on the tiles, and panic scattered his thoughts as he tried to plan on the run. He could hear Simon sprint after him, his boots heavy on the tiles and getting closer.
“Jacob!”
The first time they met, Jacob had seen Simon beat three men bloody. It had been hot at the time—and it wasn’t like the gay-bashing assholes hadn’t deserved it—but not so much right now. Legs burning, Jacob pushed himself to keep moving—hard enough that he nearly overshot the door to the janitor’s closet. He swung himself to a stop and grabbed at the door to get it open. It was metal and heavy enough that Jacob could feel the weight of it in his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Simon grab for him.
Shoving the door open, Jacob fell through—just dodging Simon’s grab—and kicked it shut. He put his shoulder to it and braced his feet on the ground. Simon hit it hard enough to make Jacob slide on the floor and shoved the door open an inch. His sharp, handsome face was bleak with rage. Jacob managed to get it shut again.
“You think you can hide?” Simon snarled and bashed his fist against the door. “Who do you work for?”
Jacob fumbled a screwdriver out of his pocket and wedged it under the door as a block.
“That’s confidential,” he panted. “Simon, fuck, this wasn’t meant to happen.”
