Wired (8 page)

The door to the closet was closed. Suddenly afraid that maybe someone was still here, I picked up the orphaned speaker and raised it over my head. I approached the closet, my heart still pounding, and flung the door open, shrieking as something came flying out at me.

Nothing. A pack of freebie Post-its with some lame floral design.

I wheeled around, speaker still at the ready, but clearly whoever had been here was gone. I put the speaker back in the center of my vastly empty desk and slumped into my fancy ergonometric task chair.

Pulling out my cell phone, I dialed the police to make a report about the break-in, but all I got was
the all-circuits-busy recording. Again. It was as if all of my information and communication pipelines had been cut off or rerouted. I hung up and realized that I had absolutely no idea what to do.

The landline rang and I grabbed it on the first ring. “Hello?” I yelled into it more aggressively than I meant.

“Just checking up on you.”

Mason. It was
Mason
. A level of rage I didn't even know I was capable of just about blindsided me. “What the hell did you do to me?”

On the other end, a pause. Then: “Didn't we just share a nice hug? Regretting it already?”

“Shut up. My stuff is gone. What did you do with it?”

“What are you talking about? What kind of stuff?” I expected him to laugh at me or admit that he'd taken it—just another of his practical jokes—but the shock in his voice said different.

“My computer stuff. All of my equipment. All meaningful paperwork. I've been robbed blind. And since I was just with Leonardo Kaysar, it couldn't have been him.”

“Yes, it could.” I had to hold the phone away from my ear as Mason swore a blue streak, referring to “that son of a bitch” who was going to be “shut down hard in the end.”

“I'm coming back over,” he growled.

“No, you're not!” I yelled. But Mason had already hung up.

Leonardo's words began racing through my mind again. Who could I trust? I tried to figure out whether my stuff had been missing before I'd opened
the front door and fainted, but there was no way of knowing. What scared me most was the idea that maybe Mason had been inside my place when I'd come home. That would explain how he'd been there so quickly when I'd fainted. Of course, I couldn't be certain of the amount of time I'd been unconscious. I didn't know how quickly he'd arrived.

Within fifteen minutes, there was a banging on the door and a totally excessive amount of doorbell ringing. I stood for a moment, uncertain whether I should answer or not, unsure whether or not I was willing to trust Mason at all. Finally I flung the door open and burst out with, “What the hell is going on?”

“Why didn't you tell me you'd seen Leonardo today?” Mason grabbed my shoulders and looked me over like a horse at market. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you? I can't believe I was so stupid! I didn't think he'd . . . dammit, I should be here with you. You should let me stay. You don't want
anything
to do with Kaysar, do you understand me?”

If he was acting, he was good at it. I would have sworn in court that he thought Leonardo Kaysar had been to my condo and stolen my things. And that Kaysar was the most dangerous man alive. “He didn't hurt me. Nobody hurt me. My
stuff
is gone.”

“Let me see.”

I hesitated this time, not so quick to tell him no. I was feeling the same pull I'd felt earlier, the pull I'd felt in his arms. And yet, there was some saying about inviting the devil into your home, and since I didn't know for sure who the devil was yet, maybe I didn't want to take any chances.

“Roxanne, this is not the time. Please just let me in your apartment so you can show me what he took.”

“There's nothing to show. It's all gone,” I said robotically.

“Be specific.”

“Like I said—computer, storage devices, disks, even the crap like boxes of old floppies. The whole shebang. Everything.”

“All your projects were there? All the code you write?”

“Well, yeah. Everything.”
I think
.

“Did you back it up?”

“Now that's just insulting. Of course I backed it up. But my external hard drive and flash drives and all that stuff is gone too.”

He swore, then raised his hand absently to the side of his face and stroked the stubble. “Anything else? Anything that struck you as odd?”

“No. Well, not here. But when I went to the agency to get my next project, they gave me an empty envelope. I guess someone took the stuff out before they gave it to me, but I don't see how it could be Leonardo. He was talking to me at the time. I doubt he ever saw the envelope, much less took what was in it. How could he? But
you
could have seen what was in it. Maybe
you
took it.”

Mason swore again. Then we stood there for what must have been several minutes while he alternately stared off into space and checked his cell phone. “I guess a fast-forward. But then . . . ,” he muttered cryptically. “Then if he had it, it would all be over. Right.”

The oddness of the sentence pulled everything back into focus. “What did you just say?”

“Just trying to put the pieces together.” He let out a big breath of air.

I couldn't hide the tremor in my voice when I asked, “You said something. You said ‘If he had it, it would all be over.' ”

Mason sighed. “He thought maybe you'd written the code by now. He stole your computer to look for it, but if he'd found it, we would know because then he would have it and this would all be over. But it's not. And Leo's not going to stop trying until he gets what he wants.”

My head was spinning. “Well, that's ridiculous. He knows I haven't written the code. He said so. Why would he suddenly think I have it now unless this is the future you said he wanted?” I said sarcastically. “Enough with this crap already. What's going on?”

“I don't want you to freak out, is the thing.”

“It's a little late for that. Give me an explanation for what you claim Leo has done that I can make sense of.”

He tugged at his earlobe, and then said, “You know at a club, when they scratch a record backwards and forwards but it's always continuing on to the end of the song?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Think of it like that.”

I stared at him in disbelief. It wasn't really an explanation. He was making fun of me. He had to be. But I had a weird feeling like I almost understood. If I opened my mind like he asked me to . . .

The gun was there; the gun wasn't there. The
agency was in one place; then it didn't exist in that spot. Backwards and forwards . . . 
Ridiculous
. Ridiculous.
This is Mason Merrick, the same Mason Merrick you knew before. He says things like this. He does things like this. And like he said, you used to like it. Part of you still does, but what he's suggesting is just too much
.

“So, can I come in now?” Mason asked. “I'd like to see his handiwork.” He gestured behind me to the inside of my house.

I didn't budge, though part of me wanted to despite everything. He couldn't have known how close I was to letting him in this time. But whether all of this was one of Mason's games or not, it was being played with real weapons, and that wasn't something I could just laugh away.

“Okay, fine,” he said tightly, making it clear that it wasn't. “We'll just continue talking here in the doorway. Wouldn't want to sit down and make ourselves comfortable or anything while we talk.”

“No. No, we wouldn't,” I said, not giving an inch.

Our standoff lasted another few seconds; then Mason finally said, “Jesus, I should have known when you went all aggro on me earlier. He got to you and told you a bunch of lies about me.”

I kept my mouth shut and thought about Leonardo's similar reference to Mason getting at me first and “poisoning” me.

“When did you see Leo?” he pressed.

“A few hours ago.”

“Tell me everything he said.”

“He explained that you two are at odds, trying to get this damn code you think I've written. Or that
you think I'm
going
to write. In any event, the long and the short of it is that he's going to try to get it from me, and you're here to stop him.”

“That's actually a really fair summary, all things considered,” Mason said. “Where did he find you?”

“I was at the employment agency and he just suddenly . . . appeared.” I raised an eyebrow. “Why are you doing this, Mason?” I asked quietly. Was it too much to be told the truth? “Why are you suddenly all over me when we haven't seen each other in years? We don't know each other anymore.”

“We know each other,” he argued. Then he admitted, “but I guess that when I think about it, maybe you never really got a chance to know me for who I truly am.”

Oh, please. What a line
. I tried to put him in his place: “How does ‘oversexed hunk of meat' sound?”

He grinned. “It sounds like a compliment. I know you considered it an attractive quality at the time.”

I totally blushed, and the hotter my cheeks got, the more embarrassed I became. “How could you possibly know, much less remember, what I thought about you?” Was I fishing? I didn't want to think about it.

Mason leaned against the wall and gave me the impression he was thinking carefully. “I remember you were . . . complicated. I remember a tense, seething mass of black sitting at the breakfast table eating Cap'n Crunch. I remember the way you looked at me like I was dogshit—when you weren't busy drooling over my ass.”

His mouth widened into a full grin. “One morning I glanced over the top edge of the sports section at you, and it occurred to me that I might be with the wrong
roommate. And I'd have bet a lot of money that you were thinking the same thing. But what sane guy is going to trade a simple girl in for a complicated one?”

It was true. All of it. He did remember. And while I didn't want to admit anything, something else in me didn't want to deny it, either. I liked the idea that he knew I'd once had a thing for him, just as I liked the idea that he liked it too. I liked this all-American Mason in a different way than I had been moved by Leonardo. In a powerful way. So I just stood there in the doorway with an invisible wall up, my arms folded across my chest like armor, trying to again appear like I couldn't stand anything about him.

“You want more?” he asked.

“No,” I said in a disinterested tone. I immediately regretted it as he rolled his eyes.

“Is there anything else Leo said that you forgot to mention?”

I knew Mason would know more about what Kaysar was up to than I did, and that I should give him the details if I were to trust him, but I was still afraid. I didn't know how much I wanted to tell one about the other. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“Right. I see how it is. So, you're not going to let me come in even to look around?”

“Not a chance in hell,” I agreed.

After a long pause, Mason sighed. “Mark my words. At some point you'll be begging me to move in with you.”

I gave him no reason to believe that point would come anytime soon.

Finally, he just nodded. Slipping a really cool device out from the side of his cell phone, he fit it over
his index finger like a finger glove with a small stylus protrusion and tapped some information into the phone. Then he pulled an old-school reporter's notepad from his pocket and twisted part of the plastic device around to reveal a pen. He licked the nib and wrote something down, and for one mad second all I could do was concentrate on the licking.

He tore the sheet off the spiral and held it out to me. “My cell. Call me if anything more out of the ordinary happens. Even if you think it's nothing and you're just scared.”

I felt myself melt a little further as the sweetness in him shone through. How could I listen to some stranger over a guy who lived in my apartment and joked with me and shared with me an unrequited crush for a couple of years? One who'd never so much as harmed a hair on my head all that time? I wanted so badly to believe him. To believe
in
him. But Leonardo . . .

My heart says yes, Mason, but there are a million ways to explain what you are doing here being so wonderful to me that don't involve you actually caring about me
.

“I can't,” I started to say. “I want to; I just—”

“I know. You will. It's okay. Leonardo's a clever man, and I know all of his tricks. But you will.”

I had to fight the urge to collapse against him and hope he'd take me in his arms the way he'd done earlier.

“Wait for me to contact you. Keep the doors and windows locked, and don't let anybody else in.” He chuckled and added, “That shouldn't be too hard for someone like you.”

Someone like me?
Nice
. He just couldn't resist. I guess the bastard realized I didn't have too many men pounding on my door, begging to come in, begging to
move
in, for that matter. So much for sweet. But just because I never brought anybody home during college didn't mean I never brought anybody home now. So what if I couldn't think of one single recent date?

I watched Mason walk to his Mustang. He turned around and lifted his hand in salute. Then he got in the passenger side of his car. I could see some movement inside and wasn't sure what it was all about until I realized he was putting the seat back. I watched for a good fifteen minutes before I realized he wasn't going anywhere. In fact, he was digging in. He was either here to watch over me . . . or to watch me.

Don't buy into a stranger's words so quickly
, I told myself.
You have a choice
. Mason and I had history; he was watching
over
me. He had to be.