Chapter Twenty-Four

Of course, a few hours later, my silly costume was the very furthest thing from my mind. In ten minutes, the FSG’s Chicago videos would be live to the world. As the seconds on the website’s countdown clock plummeted, I started to twitch.

Max sat at an elaborate workstation in the corner of his living room. At least three laptops surrounded him, and they were plugged into larger monitors that shone down on his face, illuminating the lenses of his glasses. Except for the clickety-clack of his keystrokes, he’d been completely silent for the last forty minutes. “Getting prepared,” was the only thing he’d grunted when I’d begged for a status update.

I knew he wished I would just sit calmly. Instead I was bouncing off the goddamn walls. One minute I wanted to do shots of whatever booze Max had in the house. The next I was absolutely positive I’d vomit up anything I drank. The more fidgety I got, the stiller Max sat. He looked positively rigid in his sensible, ergonomic chair. Maybe he was even more nervous than me.

Three minutes on the countdown clock. “Do you need a shoulder massage?” I asked, hopping on the balls of my feet. I pictured him as the boxer and me as the crusty old dude giving him a pep talk. Maybe I should go grab a towel from the bathroom and hang it over my shoulders. I could dab perspiration out of his eyes. Of course, right now I was the one who was sweating.

“No,” he said curtly.

I popped to the kitchen and pulled open his fridge door. “How about an energy drink?” He didn’t answer, probably because he already knew what I’d discovered; he didn’t have any energy drinks.

Heck, why not throw caution to the wind? Maybe he needed to be uncharacteristically hardcore tonight. “Do you want some cocaine?” I trilled. I was pretty sure I still had the numbers of a few dealers in my phone. You met all types at Fizz.

“Tess!” His voice was like an ice pick. “What I need is for you to sit down and shut up. Can you do that?”

If forced, I supposed so. I lowered myself onto the sofa. Now that I was motionless, the roiling in my stomach was even more noticeable. I hated every piece of this. I hated how random strangers were about to watch me having sex. I hated how everything was out of my control.

And most of all: “I hate that you’re going to see it,” I said to Max, the small tremble in my voice surprising us both. But seriously, what girl would want a new boyfriend to view graphic footage of an old one-night stand? Ugh. Quickly, I forced myself to lighten the mood. “At least my ass looked really good five years ago. So enjoy that.”

He swiveled and smiled at me. Kindly. “Boots,” he said gently. “It’s not like I’m going to settle in with popcorn, sweetheart. Once I verify it’s you, I’ll just be focusing on the file’s metadata and the server’s configuration and security properties.”

I took a deep breath and looked out the window. For the first time, I wondered about all the other Chicago victims of the FSG. Were they crouched over their computers, terrified of what would be released in less than a minute? Or were they happily oblivious tonight, completely unaware that tomorrow some sexist asshole might tag them as a whore on social media and that life as they knew it would change forever?

“Max,” I said suddenly. “Do my video first. Obliterate. Make it disappear. All that. But if you have time and you see the other Chicago videos on the server…can you get rid of them too?” I swallowed. “No one deserves this—”

“I was already planning on doing that,” he cut me off with a grin and a gleam in his eye.

Oh.

As the countdown timer hit the ten-second mark, I watched Max do an exaggerated arm stretch and knuckle-cracking routine. Five seconds. “Do not ask questions. Do not say a word. Got it?” His voice was low and commanding and… Yowza.

“Got it,” I answered. How inappropriate of me, in this moment, to hope he’d use that tone of voice in bed later.

The timer on the website went off with pipsqueak ding. “Here we go,” Max said.

I shut my eyes and put my head between my knees. I was so anxious that the skin on my arms and chest was blotchy, hot and pink. But my bare feet were freezing cold. I felt nauseated and jittery, like I’d drank an enormous pot of acidic coffee on an empty stomach.

Please, Max.

I don’t know how long I sat like that, bent in half, almost praying to the man across the room. My ears were hypersensitive to every noise he made. I could tell when he leaned forward in his chair—was it good or bad? A few times I heard him jab the same key in a row—was that the backspace, and if so, what he was deleting? I wanted to ask him how long it would take, if things were looking better or worse than he expected. But I didn’t. Partly out of respect for him and partly out of fear for the possible answers.

From time to time, he murmured. It was so quiet it was almost under his breath, so I held mine and angled my head up to catch the words. Almost immediately, he said, “There, there you are. Can’t hide anymore.” Which sounded promising until he went dead silent again.

Every second seemed like an hour, so I wasn’t sure how much later it was when he scared me to death by saying in his normal speaking voice, “Holy Christ. You dumb motherfucker.”

That sounded like good news, right? Unless he was talking to himself. What was going on?! But I forced myself to keep my mouth shut as I looked at the clock—12:16 a.m. How many guys had watched me in the past sixteen minutes? Oh please God, let no one who knows me have watched it. Or, OK, fine. If someone who knows me did watch it, please let it be someone who doesn’t post something about me on social media and link to it. That’s not too much to ask, is it, Lord?

At 12:38, Max swiveled around and said, “Done.”

I shot to my feet. “Done? What do you mean done?”

He took his glasses off, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and then slid them back on. “Your video is no longer on the site.”

“Really?” I screeched. “Oh my God.”

He looked at me with an air of suppressed excitement. “Because of the preparations I’d made in advance, I was able to remove your video from the site within forty-five seconds of it posting.”

My thudding heart slowed. “Forty-five seconds? You mean, no one really could have seen anything at all? Oh my God. Max. That’s incredible. You’re incredible.” I sank back down onto the sofa cushions, my lungs and muscles recovering from the emotional wringer. “The other Chicago recordings? Is that what were you doing the rest of the time?”

He took a deep breath, his expression inscrutable. “I was pretty sure I’d be able to delete your video from the offshore server easily. But I assumed that the Sex Ghost would have his own copy or copies, and when he saw it wasn’t on the site anymore, he’d upload it again. So I was using the attributes of the file to modify a program I wrote over the past few weeks. Basically, the program was written to recognize your video, corrupt it, and notify me for as many times as he tried to post it. I figured it would be such a pain in the ass that he’d eventually stop trying.”

I processed everything he said and swallowed hard. “You are so smart.”

He took another deep breath, his eyes gleaming. “And then something even better happened.”

I hopped to my feet again. “What? What?”

“He must have noticed right away that your file was gone,” Max said. “He was probably monitoring all of the files closely because of what happened with the teaser. Maybe he figured it was a weird system glitch with that particular set of recordings. Anyway, he logged on and tried to upload the file again.”

“And? And?” Oh yeah, totally shrieking now.

Max stood too. For the first time, I noticed his hands were shaking. “I’m trying to figure out the best way to explain…um…he clearly didn’t expect someone like me, because he logged on to the server without any, ah, protection.” He looked at me, a little dazed. “It was an open connection. I was able to slide right into his own machine, his own servers, all of his backups. His whole damn system, Tess.”

“What did you do?” I whispered, my eyes locked with his.

In an instant, his face transformed from one of wondrous disbelief to one of pure, cocky, badassery. “I annihilated it.”

Oh my. The confident tone of voice. The smirk on his lips. The way his shirt was rolled up his forearms. The flood of relief and victory in my veins. I licked my lips and walked toward him.

He watched me move closer. I wondered if my pupils had fully eradicated the bright amber of my eyes, making them look black. “Explain the annihilation,” I ordered.

A flash of teeth. “I deleted every video or picture file he had. Everything from Chicago—and every other city. Everything was axed from the offshore servers, everything disappeared off his main computer, every file off of every server he was connected to—vanished. And I was just getting warmed up.”

Was this the first time in the history of the world that a woman had become completely aroused by a discussion of the deletion of digital files? I made a mental note to Google it tomorrow.

“So you’re telling me that the Ghost lost all of his files? That no one can watch them? That he can’t repost them?” If I was understanding correctly, Max was a hero.

He moved his head from side to side. “I think so. If he was smart enough to have an unconnected backup location then maybe not. But since I took a virtual snapshot of his entire system and copied it to mine, I’ll figure it out. And if he posts videos again, I’ll keep taking them down and corrupting their replacements. As an afterthought, I put a kind of GPS tracker on every piece of his equipment I could remotely access. Won’t be useful if all the equipment is stationary, but if there were some laptops or phones, we may be able to track his movements.”

“Wow.” I was too high-pitched and breathy. I sounded like an airhead pinup girl from the ’50s. But apparently the vigilante hacking was an aphrodisiac for Max too, because he was looking at my lips and chest and breathing hard.

I wanted him quick and hard and immediately. I put my hands to his shoulders and pushed down until he was seated in his desk chair again. His eyes were blazing behind his glasses, and I was pretty sure he was going to like what I had in mind.

Standing between his knees, I shimmied out of the pajama pants I was wearing and pulled the long-sleeved thermal shirt over my head. “I know I said I’d put on the costume, but—”

“Later,” he interrupted, his voice raspy and with that edge of command I’d found so attractive when he started his work. “Get up here.”

He didn’t have to ask me twice. The chair was wide enough that I could climb on board, my knees on either side of his thighs. His mouth was on my breasts and his hands gripping my ass before I had even caught my balance. “Oh,” I moaned, not caring that I was loud. Or that we were partially silhouetted in his window. I might not want to be on the internet, but it didn’t bug me if a few folks on the street below caught a dimly lit show.

“I want your mouth,” he said, releasing my nipple. I bent down to press my lips to his. We were starving for one another, and the kisses were ravenous and wild. After long minutes of the kind of kissing I’d dream about for the rest of my life, he continued the assault on my neck and I carefully removed his glasses. I wanted more, more, more of him. How had I let days go by without this?

The scruff of his face brushed against my sensitive skin, and I hoped that it would leave marks. When I looked in the mirror tomorrow, I wanted to see evidence of his claim to me. And I wanted to brand him as mine too; I bit his bottom lip hard enough for him to gasp. He returned the favor by pinching my bottom so tightly I squeaked.

His hands were everywhere. Down the muscles of my back, unfastening my bra, sliding under my panties. I yanked his shirt over his head and rubbed myself shamelessly against his wiry body. “Jesus, Tess,” he growled.

I raised myself higher on my knees and fumbled with the button on his pants. “Help,” I begged. “Get these off. I want you inside.”

With a strangled moan, he anchored me to him by fisting my hair and kissing me until I was panting and sobbing. Then he shoved me to one side of the chair and somehow got his pants off his hips. “Good, good,” I encouraged.

He laughed. “You still have your underwear on, you know.”

I pushed back and smiled down at him. “They’re pretty flimsy.”

Max’s eyes narrowed. Without looking away, he ripped my silky panties right off my hip. “Very efficient,” I congratulated, reaching down to grip his length.

He closed his eyes and let out a harsh sigh. “I’ve never wanted anyone like this,” he bit out. “Like I want you.”

I wanted to laugh and dance and cry all at the same time. “Same,” I assured him.

Then I rose again, guided him inside me, and sat. We both moaned as he filled me. And oh my…it was so good. I rode him, up and down. He put his hands on my hips to guide the rhythm. And there was that deep kissing, broken up by wonderful interludes on my nipples and neck. When we were both close, he moved his hand exactly where I needed it, and I broke over him, with him, screaming and quivering.