Zero Hour Read online

  “Did he touch you, Wren?” His voice was low, barely above a whisper. “Did he put his hands on you?”

  “It was nothing I couldn’t—”

  “Answer me.”

  “Yes.” Heat pooled in her stomach as his eyes blazed, and she couldn’t stop the tremble in her voice. “Why’re you looking at me like that?”

  He placed a fist in his other palm and cracked his knuckles, an agitated tell he’d had since she’d known him. “Because Wren…fuck.” The curse was a growl. “The thought of him touching you, thinking he can, thinking he has a right”—his hand sliced the air—“it’s driving me crazy.”

  Her throat went dry and words failed her. This was a side of Roarke she’d never seen, never thought possible. He rarely deviated from his aloof scowl, and this possessive side—over her—was kind of turning her on.

  She wasn’t sure if that was healthy, but fuck it, she wasn’t going to lie to herself. “Look, I know you feel obligated to protect me because I’m Erick’s little sister—”

  He turned away with a bitter laugh, flattening his hands on top of his head.

  She stamped her foot. “Will you quit interrupting me?”

  He whirled around and advanced on her so quickly, she retreated until her back hit the wall. Then he was in her space, all up in it, their chests brushing, his thighs touching hers. He braced a hand on the wall beside her head. “You think this is about you being Erick’s little sister?”

  Her head was spinning. She didn’t know what was what anymore. “Roarke, I don’t understand.”

  His jaw was so tight that she swore a light tap would shatter it. He was so close now that she inhaled the scent of his leather jacket with every breath. The tension in his body was a tight coil that seemed about to unleash any second. A large vein in his neck cut through the inked rose, and without thinking, she ran a finger down it. His entire body shuddered.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Where what?”

  A pause. “Where’d he touch you?”

  Oh. She fluttered her hand at her side. “My leg.”

  “Where on your leg?”

  She couldn’t look away from his eyes, and she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. His lips were parted, eyes shining in the dim outside lights of her apartment building. “Roarke, it doesn’t matter—”

  “Tell me,” he said, and this time, his tone held a hint of a plea.

  “My inner thigh.”

  He exhaled roughly. “Did you want him to?”

  She swallowed. “Of course not. He grosses me out.”

  He gave a small lip twitch and then something brushed the front of her thigh. She startled and glanced down to see his fingers grazing her skin. She didn’t move but kept her eyes on that tattooed hand as it flattened on her thigh. “Is this okay?”

  Her head jerked up. Roarke’s eyes were wide, pupils blown. She swore she could feel the pulse of his heart in the pads of his fingers where they rested on her skin. What was going on? Whatever tentative relationship they’d had was shifting beneath her, and she couldn’t get her bearings. All she knew was that her entire body was on fire, and it was taking every bit of self-control not to climb that big body and finally see what those full lips felt like on hers.

  Get a grip.

  She still hadn’t answered his question so she licked her lips, tasting the last of her lipstick on her tongue. “Yes.”

  His hand shifted, and four fingers ran up the inside of her leg, dangerously close to where she ached for him to touch. He curled his fingers around her inner thigh so one rested on the seam of her panty line. She balled her hands into fists because it was the only way to prevent herself from reaching for him. “Roarke,” she croaked.

  “I don’t want him touching you if you don’t want it, do you understand?” he said, his voice ragged.

  “I—”

  “This is going to be a fucking disaster,” he muttered almost to himself, as his gaze began to roam. Down her neck, across her chest, which heaved with deep breaths, and then down to where his hand was tucked between her legs. “He’s going to make one wrong move, and I’m going to fuck up the whole thing by blowing his brains out.”

  “Roarke—”

  “I didn’t want you in because I can’t be objective with you,” he interrupted, his gaze once again cutting to her. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Not really, but when his thumb brushed ever so lightly over her underwear, she sucked in a breath and nodded.

  “But you already made contact with Darren, so there’s nothing I can do now.”

  “Guess not,” she whispered.

  He dipped his head for just a second, and she thought he was going to kiss her, but then he took a step back. She almost reached for him but stopped herself.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and began to walk past her, as if he hadn’t just rocked her world with a touch. “Better get some rest. We’re meeting at eight a.m. sharp.”

  She glanced at her watch. That was in five hours. Shit. “Uh…”

  He was already in the parking lot. “I’ll have Erick text you the address,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Okay!” she yelled back.

  She waited until his car pulled out of the parking lot before sagging against the wall, a hand on her chest as she sought to calm her racing heart.

  In one night, she’d placed her safety in the hands of a very dangerous man and allowed another equally dangerous but also sexy man to touch her.

  She hoped like hell she wasn’t in over her head.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Roarke stared at his orange juice, wishing there was vodka in it. Anything to calm his trembling hands. He’d slept like shit last night and was paying for it this morning with frayed nerves.

  His apartment in Northeast DC was his safe haven. One thirty-foot room on the first floor of an old warehouse with a kitchen on one side, a sitting area in the middle, his bedroom at the far end, and his bathroom with a shower stall behind a curtain. Normally he came here to clear his head, to forget about the last mission he’d completed before he had to focus on the next one. But now everything about this place made him think of his brother. So he wanted to burn it all to the ground.

  Flynn’s laptop sat on the scarred wooden table. On the lid was a peeling Green Day sticker and a scratch along the side where he’d dropped it on the sidewalk outside his apartment. Roarke remembered that day because he’d been juggling his Italian sub along with Flynn’s pastrami on rye while Flynn fretted over his laptop.

  Growing up, they’d always had each other’s backs. Their parents died in a car accident when they were kids, and so their legal guardian was Uncle Frank, their mother’s brother, who worked at a local factory. Frank made it clear from the first curl of his lip while he blew cigarette smoke in their faces that their presence wasn’t wanted in his home, but he was happy to hold on to the money left to Roarke and Erick by their parents.

  It was a mindfuck to go through the formative years of your life feeling like a burden. Flynn had been so young, and while he understood more than Frank probably thought he did, Roarke made it his life mission to be his brother’s shield. All of Frank’s hissed words, his derision, his utter contempt at having to provide their basic needs—Roarke stayed on the front lines of it all. He’d covered the inner scars with the ink on his outer skin, but it hadn’t helped much.

  When Roarke was old enough, he’d thrown himself into the Web—fandoms, chat rooms, any place where he could feel like he fit in. When he found a coding tutorial, he felt like he’d found a home. Within a year, he was doing minor hacks for pranks. As a teen, he did everything from hack into radio show phone lines to ensure he was the fifth caller for Pearl Jam tickets to writing open source code for other hackers to use. Of course, he’d gone too far once, and ever since he’d done his best to stay within the law.

  He’d been so proud when he’d shown Flynn some basic programming skills and Flynn showed natural talent.
It gave them something to bond over, something that shut out the outside world. Roarke had scored a pair of old laptops for cheap when his school sold them because they’d upgraded the staff’s equipment. So he and Flynn sat huddled in the bedroom they shared, threadbare carpet beneath their toes and paint peeling around their heads. And they’d learned how to be a couple of the most elite hackers on the eastern seaboard. They’d been just kids, and it’d all been fun and games at the time, until it wasn’t.

  Roarke downed the rest of his orange juice and juggled the glass between his palms. Flynn’s face flashed in front of his eyes, and Roarke swore he could feel the heat of Flynn’s arms as he gave him one of his famous Flynn hugs.

  He cocked his hand and threw his glass at the brick wall opposite him.

  The crash and subsequent rain of glass shattered the silence. Juice and pulp dripped from the bricks as Roarke stood there, clenching and unclenching his fists as the anger burned through him, hot, bright, and sharp.

  Roarke was a fixer. Flynn had called him that. If there was a problem, he fixed it. He wasn’t about empty promises or platitudes. But he couldn’t fix Flynn. He couldn’t bring him back, and the helplessness was nearly crippling. Flynn, his little brother, with his big, white grin and lanky limbs and infectious laugh, was dead. He’d failed to protect him, and the way to get revenge was to place in danger another person he cared about—Wren.

  He closed his eyes and pictured how she looked last night, lavender hair framing her face, those bright red lips, that fucking body he couldn’t help but touch.

  He’d crushed on her as a teen, but as an adult, he fucking wanted her, like he’d never wanted anyone before, and wasn’t sure he’d ever want anyone else in his life. When all he’d had of her was links and lines of code, he could handle it, but now that she was back, in the flesh, all rules he’d set for himself regarding her were breaking apart.

  Roarke had seen Darren Saltner a couple of times. He was a smarmy bastard. His touching her, flirting with her, thinking he was worthy of her attention was like a vice in Roarke’s chest. He’d wanted that to be his touch, his hands between her legs.

  Fuck, he was an asshole.

  As a teenager, he’d tried to ignore the gorgeous, charming younger sister of his best friend. He’d practiced his scowling in the mirror, as if it would ward off everything he was feeling for her, but it never worked. She’d tagged along with him and Erick, asking questions about programming. She smiled and laughed and always smelled like a dream—how did women always smell so good?

  So he did what a fuckhead teenage techie who was crushing hard on a girl did. He hacked into her online journal. Total dick move. He squirmed every time he thought about it.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for, maybe a poem where she professed her love for him? He sure as fuck didn’t find that. He found a whole manifesto about what she wanted for her future—a husband and three kids and a happy domestic life with a house in the suburbs and a dogwood in the front yard.

  That wasn’t him. Even at sixteen, he knew that was never going to be him. Erick and their parents placed her on a pedestal, and he didn’t want to be the person who dragged her off it.

  So he’d turned off the part of him that wanted Wren. That hadn’t stopped him from tracking her life as best as he could from behind a monitor. So maybe he’d done a little puppet mastering behind the scenes and made sure Wren never saw the strings. Watching her life for ten years through a web of links was not satisfying, but it’d been all he had.

  Which was why it burned him that he hadn’t known what she’d been up to with Dade. Dade Fucking Kelly.

  With a frustrated growl, he turned away from the mess he’d made and sagged against the wall until his jean-clad ass touched the floor. He stared at his bare feet, a roaring lion inked on the top of one and a sleeping lion on the other.

  So Wren was back, and she’d changed, but he hadn’t. He’d known since he was thirteen that he’d never have a normal life with a nine-to-five job. He’d always wanted to travel and play a little fast and loose with his profession. Hell, he paid taxes on only about a third of his income. The government thought he was a landlord. They had no idea his main source of income was from hacking. Hacktivism was the term he preferred, or white hat hacking. He wasn’t a criminal. He maybe did criminal things, but it was all in an effort to defeat the real bad motherfuckers.

  Flynn had been his sidekick, along with Erick, since they were teenagers. A couple of years ago, Flynn had said he wanted to get straight, have a family, and be an active member of society. So he got a job at Saltner Defense—a computer security software company—where he’d planned to work and pay taxes and fit into the general population.

  Until he uncovered something he wasn’t supposed to and paid for it with his life.

  Roarke stared at his hands, where GAME OVER was tattooed on his knuckles. He cracked them, deep breathing to get himself under control before the hot rush of anger took over and he did actually burn his apartment down.

  After glancing at his watch, he rose to his feet. He had a half hour to cross town to where his team was meeting in the basement of a warehouse he owned.

  He finished getting ready, grabbed a can of his ever-present addiction, Diet Coke, for the road, and was in his vintage Mustang within five minutes.

  Roarke owned an old warehouse in Southeast near the Anacostia waterfront. When he arrived, he tossed his empty soda can into the dumpster and entered the code to the door. The keypad beeped, and he opened the heavy metal door. It latched shut behind him as he descended the stairs that would lead him underground. After another code and another door, he entered the room where the team was gathering. There he found Jock, their best programmer, hunched over his computer at the single conference-style table in the corner of the room.

  Jock glanced up, his blue eyes taking in Roarke’s appearance before he nodded and resumed whatever he was working on. The man had earned the name Jock long before Roarke met him; it was a hacking term that meant using brute force tactics. One look at the six-four, two-hundred-fifty-pound Jock and anyone could see the name fit.

  Roarke met Jock—real name Jamison Bosh—on a job a couple of years ago when they were hired to hack into a terrorist cell’s network. Jock was a silent mastermind, stoically dismantling the cell’s communications until the leader lost contact with his team. It wasn’t until later that Roarke learned Jock’s brother—while on deployment—had been killed by the cell. He’d shown zero emotion, and when the task was done, he’d walked away.

  He knew Jock would understand why this was so important, to avenge the loss of his brother just like Jock had done. When Roarke asked the man to participate, he hadn’t hesitated.

  Marisol Rosa was the next to show up, the buckles on her black boots rattling as she stomped her way across the concrete floor. She blew a bubble of pink gum and popped it with a click of her teeth as she tilted her head. Her purple hair was shaved on one side and long on the other, so it draped over an eye as she took him in with purple contact-colored eyes. “What’s good, Brennan?”

  He could never figure out if she was coming on to him or punking him. Gender didn’t matter to Marisol when it came to loving and fucking, so it was anyone’s guess. “Pissed off.”

  She grinned at him. “Wouldn’t want you any other way.” After winking, she sauntered over to where Jock sat. She hopped onto the desk beside his computer, where she perched with her legs swinging. “Can I touch your beard?”

  He didn’t acknowledge her presence. She shrugged and smacked her gum. “Guess that’s a no.”

  Marisol was a little unpredictable, but she was loyal and crafty. She grew up in the Bronx surrounded by her Puerto Rican family, who had no idea they had a social-engineering mastermind in their midst. Marisol had an uncanny ability to ferret out information from anyone and could change her appearance and personality easily to slip into situations. Hacking wasn’t just coding, it involved using people skills. The greatest security thr
eat was human stupidity, and Marisol had a lock on finding the weakest links. That wasn’t even getting into her coding skills, for which she’d served three years in the New Jersey prison system. She operated legally now, mostly, and Roarke had worked with her recently on a server’s security breach. She’d outsmarted every offense the hackers had thrown at her, smiling the whole time. It was all a game to her. But it was a game she played to win.

  Voices drew Roarke’s attention, and he turned to see Erick trudge inside, dark circles under his eyes. He glanced at Roarke and jerked a thumb behind him. “So she wore you down, huh?”

  Roarke shifted his gaze to the door as Wren walked inside. This morning, he’d wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing, the heat of her soft skin on his palm, the sound of her breath catching in her throat, the rise and fall of her chest.

  This was going to be a fucking disaster. He wasn’t impartial with Wren. She was a wild card he couldn’t control, and he couldn’t keep a handle on the emotions surging through his blood.

  And of course, she was looking as hot as ever. She wore tight jeans, a blue shirt that hugged her curves, and heeled brown boots. Her hair was pulled up onto the top of her head, and her nails were tipped with hot pink polish.

  Her eyes didn’t leave his as she made her way to where he was standing. Roarke had to force himself not to look at her breasts, which were close to spilling out of her shirt. He swallowed and looked at a random point over her shoulder.

  A wolf whistle sounded in the cavernous space, and he whipped his head around to see Marisol wiggling her eyebrows. “No one told me there’d be pretty eye candy on the team,” she said.

  There was a beat of silence before Wren started giggling. He narrowed his eyes at Marisol. “No fraternizing with other members of the team.”

  She rolled her eyes at the empty threat. “You’re a buzzkill.” She beckoned to Wren. “Come on over, sweet cheeks. I don’t bite, and I’m really good with my hands.”

  Roarke dropped his chin to his chest. “Fuck me.”