Just Like a Man (21 page)

Avoidance, she told herself. Anything to
not
think about what was really happening.

"So then you really
can
hack into the computers of the Pentagon, the Kremlin, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and Toys 'R' Us?" she said.

"Well, Toys 'R' Us is still eluding me, but Alex managed to crack their code. He now knows when all the new Xbox and GameCube games will be hitting the stores long before anyone else does. It's made him something of a legend in Internet gaming rooms."

"So then, you're not an accountant," Hannah guessed astutely. Which, of course, came as no surprise at all.

"Actually, I am an accountant," Michael told her.

She narrowed her gaze at him. "You are not."

"I am, too," he said, sounding defensive. "I have my own firm. Why is that so hard for everyone to believe?"

"Have you looked in a mirror lately?" she asked.

"What's that got to do with anything?"

She would have laughed had this whole scene not been so bizarre. As it was, she only told him, "Never mind. So Saturday night, when you said, 'My firm always sends someone to this fund-raiser with a big check,' you were talking about…"

"
My
firm, yes," he said.

So then he'd been the one who hired Band Candy Barbie, Hannah thought. How nice.

"And how have you been running
your
firm while working this gig, too?"

"Not very well, lemme tell ya," he said. "Fortunately, I have a very capable team of accountants working for me. And fortunately, I had some vacation days coming. And fortunately—very fortunately—this isn't tax season. But if I don't have this thing wrapped up by the end of the year…"

Hannah still couldn't believe everything he'd told her. This was nuts. This sort of thing didn't happen in real life. It certainly didn't happen to people like her, people who strove to live a normal, stable, uneventful life. How could she have become a part of something like this? Was her luck really that bad?

"So, what, is there a secret handshake or something that you have to learn to join this OPUS organization?" she asked sarcastically.

"No, of course not," he replied impatiently.

"Do you have, like, a decoder ring?"

He leveled an intolerant look on her. "No."

"Invisible ink?"

He set his jaw hard for a moment, then, "Actually, a little lemon juice on onion skin works better," he said.

She nodded. "How about a code name? Have one of those?"

The spots of red appeared on his cheeks again, and she gaped at him. "No," she said. "You don't really. I was being sarcastic. You don't honestly have code names."

He dropped his gaze to his lap then, worrying a loose thread in his blue jeans. "Uh, yeah, actually. We do."

"And you are?"

He blew out another one of those exasperated sounds, but still didn't look at her. "Raptor," he said.

Hannah, in turn, felt another one of those hysterical giggles bubble up inside her again. "Like… a bird of prey?"

He nodded quickly. And continued to not look at her. "Yeah. Like that."

"It fits you," she said.

He snapped his head up at that, gazing at her full-on. "You think so? I've never much liked it."

"Oh, yeah. Trust me."

"Look, Hannah," he said, his tone returning to the no-nonsense, ruthless sonofabitch one he'd had such good command of earlier, "the reason I've told you all this is because now that you know about it, it taints you."

And, oh, wasn't
that
something a woman wanted to hear from a man with whom she had, only a couple of nights before, engaged in a very compelling oral examination?

"
Taints
me?" she echoed.

He nodded, more eagerly than he had since they'd started talking. "Once the guys at OPUS know I've told you what's going on, they can't make me 'use' you."

And, oh, wasn't
that
something a woman wanted to hear from a man with whom she had just been anticipating a thor-ough body cavity search? "Oh, I think it's a little late for that," she said. " 'Cause believe me, Michael, I feel plenty used."

He closed his eyes tight and actually flinched, as if she'd just slapped him across the face. "I'm sorry about that, Hannah," he apologized again. And this time, he sounded sincere. He opened his eyes and met her gaze levelly again. "Really, I am sorry. If I'd known what was going to happen between us…"

"Yeah, about that," she said, regaining her hold on her righteous indignation.

He looked at her expectantly, almost hopefully. "What about it?"

"It won't happen again," she told him decisively.

Now he looked resigned. Unhappy, but resigned. He nodded again, disconsolately this time. "I understand."

"Oh, I sincerely doubt that," she said. And then, because she really didn't want to dwell on it, she added, "You still haven't told me who the guy is that you're after. And I have a right to know that, too. Especially if my school is at risk."

"I don't think the school is at risk," he said.

"You don't
think
so." It was a statement, not a question.

"I'm reasonably confident that the school isn't in any sort of danger," he qualified. Sort of.

She waited until his gaze met hers again before saying, "And I was reasonably confident that you cared about me."

"Hannah…"

"Who is it, Michael?" she asked point-blank. "I deserve to know."

For a minute, she didn't think he would tell her. Then, dipping his head forward in concession, he said, "Adrian Windsor."

She couldn't have been more surprised if he'd told her it was her secretary Dorothy. "Adrian? But he's so… he's so…"

"He's so dangerous, Hannah," Michael finished for her. "And his name isn't really Windsor. It's Padgett. Adrian Padgett. You should stay away from him. Especially since we still have no idea what he's up to. Or even what he's capable of. All we know is that where Adrian goes, trouble follows. And it just keeps getting worse."

"And you think he's going to do something at the presidential debates," she said. "What? Like an assassination attempt or something?"

"That's one possibility, yeah."

"Do you really think he'd try something like that? That he's capable of it?"

"At this point, Hannah, I honestly don't know what Adrian is capable of doing."

She thought for a minute about everything Michael had just told her, mulling it, dissecting it, analyzing it. Much, she supposed, in the same way he had once performed his job. But she thought, too, about things Michael didn't know. Things about Adrian. Things about Emerson. Things about herself. And then she made a decision.

"No, I'm in," she said.

This time it was his turn to look confused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm in," she repeated, even more forcefully than before. "You guys brought me into it, and now I'm staying in it."

He shook his head, his eyes wide. "Oh, no, you're not."

"Oh, yes, I am," she told him. "My school, my kids, may be at risk, Michael. Adrian sits on the board of directors. And I won't tolerate my school being at risk. If there's any way I can prevent something terrible from happening, I'll do it."

"Hannah, there's no evidence to suggest something terrible is going to happen to Emerson."

"Is there evidence to suggest something terrible
isn't
going to happen to Emerson?"

He didn't answer her on that one. Which was really all the answer she needed.

Knowing that he wasn't going to allow her to be part of what was happening, regardless of her role at Emerson, she played her trump card. "You have no choice but to let me be part of this, Michael."

"Oh, don't I?"

"No. You don't."

"Why not, pray tell?"

"Because I can get closer to Adrian than any of you can."

"How?"

"He's invited me to be his guest at a reception the night before the presidential debates that his employer is hosting. He's told me he'll even get to meet the candidates. He might even get to sit at one of their tables. I told him I'd have to check my calendar, and I've been putting him off, because I really didn't want to do it. But suddenly I remember that I'm totally available that night, and I can tell him I'd be delighted to come."

"Hannah…" Michael said warningly.

"Bet none of you OPUS guys has an official invitation to the reception," she said.

"Hannah…"

"Bet none of you gets to sit at the candidates' tables."

"Hannah…"

"So now, Michael, you'll have to let me play your little spy game. Won't you?"

Lon Chaney, it had been said for years, was the Man of a Thousand Faces. Selby Hudson, on the other hand, had been, for years, the Woman of a Thousand Jobs. Because if there was a demeaning, dead-end, poorly paying position out there, Selby had held it at one time or another—often several of them at once—beginning at the age of fourteen, when she'd started running the dishwasher at her mother's diner after school.

Not that her mother had owned the diner, mind you. No, Sheila Hudson had only worked there as a waitress. But she'd finagled a job for Selby even before it was legal for Selby to work, because she'd told the owner her daughter was sixteen and needed a job. Though really it wasn't Selby so much who had needed the job. It was the entire Hudson family who had needed it. They had needed all the jobs—all the income—they could get, thanks to Frank Hudson's preoccupation with Pernod and the ponies, two things that frequently left him without jobs himself.

Selby's three older brothers had all worked, too, in jobs no better paying—or personally fulfilling—than hers had been. But the boys had received one perk Selby hadn't. They had escaped the nonpaying position of housekeeper, which she had been required to perform alongside her mother as soon as she was old enough to wield a mop and broom. She was, after all, a girl. And that was pretty much all girls were good for. Never mind that they brought home an outside paycheck, too. Girls weren't nearly as important as boys were. All they were good for was taking care of the house and the men. And someday, if they were good at it, bringing more men into the world.

At least, that was what Selby's father would have had her believe, and that was what he taught her brothers to believe, too. Even her mother had bought into it, probably because Sheila had had a father just like her husband. But Selby had always been smarter than the average Hudson. And she'd known, deep down, that someday she'd do more than clean and cook and breed. Someday, some way, she was going to do something no one else in her family had ever even aspired to do.

Someday, Selby Hudson was going to travel all the way around the world. If she had to lie, beg, borrow, or steal to do it.

So far, though, she hadn't had to resort to any of those means. Because she'd resorted to hard work instead. It was, after all, what she knew. Even when she'd been working at the diner, she'd always siphoned off a little bit of her weekly pay before handing it over to her father, and had stashed a buck or two in a rusty coffee can that she kept wedged beneath a rotting tree root in the woods near the double-wide trailer the Hudsons had called home.