A Father's Sacrifice (11 page)

“Orders, eh?” She chuckled and raised her gaze to Dylan’s. He was still smiling, only now it seemed aimed at her. Something sharp and sweet shifted inside her. His beautiful smile was lethal. Her cheeks burned.

“Daddy, I want to sit with Tasha.”

Apprehension sent her heart racing and the heat in her cheeks faded. Why did Ben want
her
to sit with him? She’d only held a child once, and that was when she’d carried a scratched and dirty Ben to his father.

Dylan stood, lifting Ben with him, and walked around the table. As he set him in Natasha’s lap, he whispered in her ear.

“He’s just a little boy. He’s not going to hurt you.”

She cut him an exasperated glance, and tried to ignore the disturbing, exciting heat of his breath on her ear. Then she put her arm around Ben’s little waist and balanced him on her lap. He immediately dug into her plate of pancakes.

“Hey, sport. Leave Natasha some food. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

“Play with me today, Daddy.”

“I can’t today, sport.”

Natasha heard the pain in Dylan’s voice.

“But I will soon. I promise.” He pressed his lips against Ben’s hair.

Natasha held on to Ben tightly as waves of conflicting emotions poured over her. The smell and feel of Dylan so close to her, the unfamiliar and yet comfortable weight of Ben on her lap, and the hollow realization of how much she’d missed, having lost her parents.

“And you…” He touched her shoulder, gave it a gentle squeeze. “Eat.”

Charlene had finished her breakfast and was watching them. When Dylan left the room, she wiped her mouth and folded her napkin.

Without acknowledging Natasha, she came around the table. “Let’s go, cowboy. We need to get all that sticky syrup off you and start your morning therapy.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know. But remember what your daddy said?”

Ben dropped his spoon with a clatter and crossed his little arms.

“Ben?” Charlene stood over him, her fists propped on her hips.

“He said I gotta be strong.”

“Go on, Ben,” Natasha murmured. “Do what Charlene says.” She didn’t look up but she nevertheless felt the daggers Charlene’s eyes shot at her.

“Where’d Daddy go? I want Daddy.” His voice was about to crack.

“Hey, Ben.” Natasha bent enough to look Ben in the eye. “Can I have a syrup kiss?”

The toddler tried to keep frowning, but then his mouth quirked up. “Okay.” He leaned over and put his syrupy mouth against her cheek.

“Eww,” she said. “Sticky.”

Ben giggled. “Eww, softy.”

Laughter bubbled up from Natasha’s chest. “I didn’t know you were such a flirt, Ben.” She kissed his syrup-smeared cheek. “You’re going to be a lady-killer—just like your dad.”

Charlene sniffed.

“Go with Charlene,” Natasha whispered. “I’ll check on you later, okay?”

Ben leaned close to her ear. “Okay.”

A
FTER A QUICK
shower, Natasha pulled her damp hair back into a ponytail and headed down to the lab. She spent an hour studying the schematic of Dylan’s system, testing and retesting to be sure her hardware tied in with his seamlessly.

Across the hall, Dylan was working on the interface. About the time she stood to do a couple of stretching exercises, Campbell walked into Dylan’s office, sending an interested look and a smile in her direction.

The contrast between him and Dylan was obvious even through two glass walls. Dylan’s shoulders were bowed with exhaustion. His hair was tousled where he’d run his fingers through it.

Campbell on the other hand looked rested, freshly showered and generally pleased with himself. She had the feeling he spent a lot of time being pleased with himself.

She thought about the other night, when he’d met Dylan and her in the stairwell. He’d looked like hell then. And he hadn’t shown up at all when the suicide truck crashed into the front gate. She made a mental note to ask Dylan about him.

She sat and started to work on her tracking program. NSA had set up a state-of-the-art firewall on Dylan’s system. According to the log, their spam-blocker was stopping 99.37 percent of all ad-ware robot programs.

The first thing Natasha did was set an alert to capture every single attempt to hit Dylan’s system. NSA might be capable of stopping
virtually
all bots, but she wanted to catch one hundred percent of them. She didn’t want to take the chance that the hacker might disguise a virus as a harmless advertising bot.

She had no doubt that her program would be better than NSA’s. After all, she’d helped to train many of their programmers.

She glanced at the computer’s clock as she massaged the back of her neck. She’d been working for over three hours. Her cramped fingers and stiff muscles confirmed that. She arched her back and stretched her arms.

A flurry of activity caught the edge of her vision. Across the hall, Campbell had kicked his computer chair back against the wall and was pacing, his fingers digging into his scalp.

Dylan said something to him. Campbell glared at him and shook his head violently. He made a fist and aimed it at the glass wall in front of him. Dylan was up and across the room in a split second. He grabbed Campbell’s arm, talking intensely.

After a few seconds, Campbell nodded, alth
ough his face was still distorted with anger. He grabbed the water bottle that always sat next to him and stalked out of the room.

Dylan wiped his face and turned back toward his workstation. Then he looked up and caught her eye.

Busted.
Averting her gaze would only make her look like what she was—an eavesdropper. So she raised her eyebrows in a silent question.

Dylan looked at his hand that still held the stylus, set it down and disappeared through a door on the west wall of his workroom.

Before she could blink, he was standing in her doorway, arms crossed, leaning against the door facing.

She jumped. “You’re going to have to show me that secret passage one of these days.”

He smiled wearily. “No problem.”

He’d showered and shaved. His hair was slightly damp and he had on a white T-shirt and faded jeans. Her eyes lingered on the metal zipper of the jeans for a couple of seconds too long.

“Um—what’s the matter with Campbell?” She forced her gaze back to her computer screen.

“He’s been searching for that error he swears is the last one. He can’t find it. His nerves are shot, just like everybody else’s.”

“Where’d he go?”

“He said he was going to take a shower.”

“Let me take a look at the program.”

“That’s what I just said to him.”

“That’s what had him so upset?”

Dylan nodded. “You have to understand. He’s been working with me on this for over a year. The
area he’s looking at is at least fifty thousand lines of code. He said it would take you several days just to get up to speed with the program. He doesn’t think we can afford the time.”

“And you agree with him?”

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have to see the whole fifty thousand lines of code. Just the section he’s isolated as the source of the bug.”

“Look, I’m no programmer, but from what he told me, even the best would need at least twelve hours of review to distinguish good code from bad.”

“I
am
the best.” She sat back in the ergonomic chair and gazed up at him. “And I can promise you it won’t take me that long. I’ve never met a bug I couldn’t squash.”

He laughed softly.

The sound coaxed a smile to her face.

“I’ll get him to show it to you.”

“Dylan, you know in general what Campbell is doing. Show me now.” She stood.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m ready to work now. I guarantee you anything he can do, I can do—probably better.”

“You’re pretty confident, aren’t you?”

“I know what I can do.” She paused for an instant. “How well do you know him anyway?”

Dylan’s gaze sharpened. “Pretty darn well. Why?”

“You seemed suspicious when he came out of the computer room Tuesday night.”

Her comment had caught him off guard. She watched as his mind went back over that moment.

“Not suspicious really. I was surprised. When I left the lab around 2:00 a.m., he promised to lock
up in a few minutes. Said he wanted to check a section of code one more time.”

“Then we came down at around four o’clock.”

“He should have been in bed.”

“If
you
quit at two, why did he stay two more hours? He doesn’t strike me as the obsessive type—especially in comparison with you. Plus he looked like he’d been in a tussle.”

Dylan nodded grimly. “I noticed that.” He straightened. “Come on. I’ll show you the code. If you can make sense out of it, great.”

Natasha followed Dylan across the hall and into the virtual surgery lab.

Natasha studied the room. Sure enough, as she’d already figured out, Dylan’s computer was set up to work with an electronic drawing pad and stylus. On the monitor was a 3-D conceptual graphic of a human spinal cord, with its spaghetti-like tangle of nerves and muscle fibers.

She walked over to Campbell’s computer. A streaming matrix of code filled the screen. “Is this the section where he found the bug?”

Dylan stood just behind her. “Probably. Like I told you, the machine code means nothing to me. He said he’d isolated the area.”

“Okay, great. Let me figure out where this is and find the same area on my computer. Do I have full access?”

Dylan nodded. “I made sure he took care of that first thing this morning. All you have to do is sign on, place your right thumb on the fingerprint reader then enter the current number from your pass code generator.”

Natasha looked at her thumb. “Is it always the thumbprint?”

Dylan shook his head. “With Alfred in charge? He has a rotating system. Everyone has to change fingers at random intervals. If anyone uses the wrong finger or the wrong pass code twice in a row, the system locks down.”

Locks down.
She suppressed a shudder. “What does lockdown consist of?”

“You saw it in the family wing. Every door slams shut. Only the four master pass codes can reverse lockdown, and then not for at least an hour, depending on the area.”

“What if someone’s trapped in a locked-down area?”

“Alfred has notifications on all computer monitors and over a loudspeaker system, giving a fifteen-to-thirty-second warning. I told you, he likes triple redundancy.”

“But what if someone screws up the pass code or uses the wrong finger accidentally?”

“That’s why Alfred built in a second try.” He smiled and raised his brows.

She shook her head. “Two tries. Good thing nobody ever gets nervous and misses a number.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll save you if you get locked in.”

Doing her best not to give in to the fear his words invoked, she sucked in a lungful of cool air and sat in Campbell’s chair.

She had to force her mind to stop flashing images of doors slamming, latches clunking shut, walls closing in.

She deliberately studied the section of code on his screen, jotting down certain unusual strings of numbers.

Dylan leaned over, his hand on the back of her chair. The scent of soap and cinnamon mouthwash filled her head.

“So can you tell anything about it?” he asked softly.

“It appears to be part of your virtu
al surgery program.” It took all her concentration to stay on subject. All she wanted to do was turn and rub her cheek against Dylan’s, to glean even a small portion of the love he lavished on his little boy.

“How did you come to hire Campbell?” she murmured.

“This program was developed by NSA. He interned with them during his college years. Came with excellent references.”

“When was that?” She knew he hadn’t been in any of her classes at NSA.

“Probably four or five years ago.”

Before her time. She’d started participating in NSA computer training around two years ago. “So if NSA liked him that much, why didn’t they keep him?”

“Think about it. He’s hardly their type. Besides, he told me he didn’t want a nine-to-five job.”

“So instead he’s working twenty-hour days for you.”

Dylan chuckled, and his soft breath wafted across her cheek, reminding her of just how close he was.

“I suppose he likes to think he’s a colleague, not an employee.”

“Is he a colleague? How much do you trust him?”

“He’s got full access to the program that will save my son’s legs. I have to trust him. I have to trust someone.”

Natasha heard the desperate note in his voice. “But you’re not sure.”

She turned her head and realized she was way too close to him. His gaze flickered down to her mouth.

Her pulse leaped as his hot blue eyes and warm breath heated her skin.

“We’re talking about my son. I don’t trust anyone absolutely.”

“Except Alfred.”

His gaze met hers. “Except Alfred.”

Natasha’s pulse fluttered in her throat. She was about to say something she’d never said to anyone. “You can trust me.”

His eyes softened and the lines on his forehead relaxed. “I believe you.” He raised a hand, hesitated for a microsecond, then pushed a few strands of her hair back behind her ear. His fingertips skimmed the edge of the scratch on her cheek.

“You were injured protecting Ben.”

She closed her eyes, reveling in the feel of his fingers on her skin. His breath warmed her cheek and she imagined that it was his lips and not his fingertips that feathered across her skin.

She’d never liked cinnamon that much, but the clean, spicy scent that surrounded her made her mouth water. Though it was more likely the proximity of his lips than the scent that was affecting her. Because the sensation swirled through her and centered at her deepest core.

Then cool air fanned her heated skin. She opened her eyes to find that he’d straightened, frowning.

Embarrassed, she scooted her chair back. “I’m going to—”

“I’ll just—”

They both spoke at the same time. Dylan backed up a step and she saw his throat move as he swallowed.

Natasha prayed that she could keep her voice steady. “I’m going to print this screen, so I can find the area from my computer. If there’s an error here, I’ll get it.”