Ride: A Bad Boy Romance (56 page)

“You just described everyone in the tech world,” Garrett said.

“But you know who I mean.”

“Max and I were partners,” he said. “I taught myself to code in my early twenties, because I was traveling a lot, and had shitty jobs, and wanted to not have shitty jobs anymore.”

“And... you met Max?”

“We were bartenders together in Reno for a couple of weeks. I coded the first version, he helped me fix my crappy code — he actually went to college — we released it. Soon, it was popular, he was talking to investors, and I got to quit being a bartender. It kind of exploded after that.”

“And Max got all the glory?” she said.

Garrett crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, smiling.

“We split the money,” he said. “He got to have his face everywhere, which I never wanted. I didn’t even move to California with him.”

Ellie just stared. She didn’t know how much SnapGram had sold for, but she knew the number had a
lot
of zeros after it.

“I’m hiking my rates,” she said.

“That’s fair,” he said.

Ellie looked at the wall again, trying to take it all in at once.

This is at least a day of reading
, she thought.
And that’s just to wrap my head around it all
.

“That’s the overview,” Garrett said, his voice quiet. “You can read over everything. But I think whoever’s behind BTVS is also behind your office getting smashed up.”

“You know what that means, right?” Ellie asked.

She felt the familiar
thump
of adrenaline that she got when she worked on a case she could
really
sink her teeth into.

“What?” asked Garrett.

“Means you’re close,” she said.

S
omething caught
in Ellie’s voice. Garrett looked down at her, her brown eyes flicking over the slew of information on the wall, concentrating.

She’s having a good time
, he realized.

“So you’re still on the case?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound light.

If she’s not, I’m fucked, because now she knows nearly everything
, he thought.

He’d never told
anyone
the full story before. At first it was just because he knew how crazy it sounded.

The story
did
start with, “My mom and brothers can turn into eagles whenever they want,” and from there went to “I think someone is trying to
get
me.” It wasn’t the kind of thing sane people said or did.

“Yeah,” she said, and looked at him. “Those fuckers broke into my office and left me a note about what I should and shouldn’t do. Now I’m
pissed
.”

Despite himself, Garrett grinned.

“That reminds me,” Ellie said. “Do you know a blonde lady who dresses like she runs Liberace’s ranch?”

“Does what?”

“Wears a lot of rhinestones and cowboy hats,” Ellie said.

“I don’t think so.”

“She wanted me to follow you,” Ellie said, and told him about the cowgirl who’d claimed to be his ex-wife. As she did, Garrett started pacing back and forth in the living room.

“Shit,” he muttered. “The other day, I was getting a burrito at Loco Taco and there was this woman in there, and she wasn’t dressed like that, but I could have
sworn
I’d seen her before but I didn’t know where. But then I thought I was just being paranoid.”

Ellie looked at him, opened her mouth, and then closed it, looking at the floor.

“I don’t have an ex-wife,” Garrett clarified. “And definitely not a current wife. I haven’t even had a girlfriend in a couple years.”

Sure, tell the hot detective your relationship problems
, he thought sarcastically.
Women go nuts for that kind of thing
.

“You ever heard the name James Wilson?” Ellie asked.

“Was he a president?”

Ellie laughed.

“That’s who she told me you were. I’d almost convinced myself that it was a picture of someone who looked a
lot
like you, but with all this...”

She waved one hand at the wall and at Garrett. Then she snapped her fingers.

“The camera,” she said. “Do you have a computer?”

“Do I have a computer?” Garrett said, teasing her. “How do you think I found all this? I didn’t even leave my apartment.”

Suddenly, Ellie laughed, then stood from the couch.

“
Now
it makes sense,” she said.

“It does?” he asked. “Which part?”

“The part where you asked for my help,” she said. “None of the stuff you’re looking for about your parents has even
seen
a computer. It’s all paper. Your
weakness
.”

“There are worse weaknesses to have,” he said, and led her to the dining room.

There were three monitors arranged on the table, all hooked into one laptop.

“I feel like I’m ready to blast into space,” Ellie said.

Garrett logged her in, and minutes later, she was scrolling through the footage from her security camera, totally concentrated on the task at hand.

He stood behind her, one hand on the table, leaning over her. Her hair smelled light and spicy, like honeysuckle and pepper or something. Garrett took a deep breath of it, trying very hard not to seem like he was smelling her.

“Here it is,” Ellie said, and tapped the screen with one finger.

The video played, and a blond woman walked into Ellie’s office.

“Can you change the angle on this?” Garrett asked.

“There’s only one camera,” Ellie said.

“Can you zoom in?”

She did, and the woman’s face got blurry.

“Sharpen that.”

“This isn’t a TV show,” Ellie said, starting to sound annoyed. “I can’t make it better than what the camera actually recorded.”

She zoomed back out.

“Is that the woman at the burrito store or not?” she asked.

Garrett stared. The women sat, handed over a photo to Ellie.

“I think so,” he said at last. “Did you get her name?”

“She said it was Marlene Robinson,” said Ellie. “Anything?”

Garrett just shrugged, and Ellie scrubbed forward over hours of stillness in her office until suddenly, there was movement again, and she hit play.

Garrett held his breath, leaning forward so far that his chest bumped the back of Ellie’s head.

The glass of her office door shattered inward and a crowbar appeared, then disappeared, knocking glass from the edges. A hand appeared and opened the door from the inside, and two men wearing black clothes and black face masks appeared.

“Shit,” Ellie muttered.

They conferred for a moment by her door, and then methodically began destroying the office, kicking over plants and chairs, tearing cables from her computer. One of them went at the desk with a crowbar, hacking at the locked drawer and then finally prying it open.

“I guess it wasn’t an axe,” Ellie said, her voice quiet.

Garrett put a hand on her shoulder, without thinking. He could feel her warmth through her shirt, and she suddenly felt small and delicate, almost
breakable
.

The men on the tape left the note in the drawer, took the computer, kicked over her chair, and left. The whole thing had lasted two minutes.

Ellie sighed and put her face in her hands, and Garrett’s stomach knotted. A wave of anger rushed over him, and he glared at the video.

I’ll kill whoever did this to her
, he thought.

“Sorry,” Ellie said. “It’s just — God, I worked really
hard
.”

She took a deep breath, and Garrett crouched next to her, his arm draped around Ellie.

“And just watching someone
destroy
it in two minutes,” she said, shrugging.

“We’re gonna find them, and make them pay,” Garrett whispered.

And I’m going to fucking kill them for making you cry
, he thought.

Ellie didn’t say anything, and Garrett took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.

“When I told you I was bringing trouble, I didn’t think there would be this much of it,” he said.

That
got a smile out of her.

“I thought you were just trying to sound cool,” she said. “Maybe I should have believed you.”

“And if you had, would you have turned me down?” Garrett asked.

Kneeling on the floor, he was still almost as tall as she was, sitting in the chair, his arm around her. Ellie sniffled a little, smiling and still crying at the same time.

“If I were smart I would have,” she said.

“I don’t believe you for a second,” Garrett teased.

“You don’t even
know
me,” Ellie said, but she was smiling.

“I know you well enough to know that trouble is like
catnip
to you,” he said. “The second you saw that note you were out for blood.”

“That’s not true,” Ellie protested.

“So you’re here because of some other reason, then?” Garrett said.

She frowned. Garrett grinned at her, and after a moment, her frown softened.

“I’m not giving into terrorists,” she said. “I’m in the middle of all this trouble because I have to be, not because I want to be.”

Garrett just raised his eyebrows.

“Catnip,” he said.

Ellie sighed.

“It’s not true,” she said. “I’m a perfectly reasonable person who weighs risks and rewards carefully and chooses the best course of action.”

Garrett opened his mouth, but Ellie put one finger on his lips.

Fire jolted down his spine, and Garrett nearly fell over.

“Don’t say anything,” she told him. “Just give me everything you have.”

Garrett swallowed, and she took her finger off his lips.

Everything
in his entire body was
screaming
at him to lean forward and just kiss her on that perfect, full mouth. He could barely breathe, thinking about it.

Then Ellie broke the spell, her eyes flicking back to his computer screen.

“Perfectly reasonable,” Garrett said, and stood.

* * *

F
or hours
, Ellie sifted through everything that Garrett had: piles and piles of documents, business licenses, surveillance tapes, even courtroom testimony. She didn’t ask how he’d gotten any of it, and Garrett didn’t volunteer.

He suspected that she knew some of it hadn’t been precisely legal.

He microwaved frozen burritos and they ate quietly, Ellie on the floor of the living room, surrounded by paper and Garrett’s spare laptop. He had two spares, actually.

“Okay,” she finally said, and stood. It was almost three in the afternoon, and she stretched, reaching up and then touching her toes.

Garrett watched, fascinated. He was at the kitchen counter, maps spread in front of him.

She didn’t mind when I touched her earlier
, he thought.
I could offer her a back rub, and then we could get on the couch and I could...

He blinked and looked at the counter again.

What are you, fifteen?
He thought.
A back rub? Come on.

“Okay what?” Garrett asked.

She picked up two pieces of paper and walked over to where he was sitting. They were both barefoot, and she leaned on the counter, smiling like she’d cracked a code.

“The owners of a business registered in a foreign company aren’t actually secret when a company is registered in the United States,” she said.

“You found a name?” Garrett asked. “I’ve been trying to find a name for
months
.”

“Not yet,” Ellie cautioned. “I’m just saying that there’s a name, and I think I can get it.”

Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

“Are you going to tell me how, or do I have to drag it out of you?” Garrett said.

He leaned forward on the kitchen counter.

“I’d like to see you
try
,” said Ellie, nearly laughing.

“I have
techniques
,” he said.

He was so close that he could feel her body heat, and he felt himself stiffen.

Garrett fought away a vision of Ellie on the counter, his face between her thighs as she moaned.

Ellie swallowed, and then straightened up. Garrett forced himself to focus on the matter at hand.

“For everything that gets registered as a business in the United States, there’s a local office that has a lot of paperwork,” she said.

Her cheeks turned a pleasing pink, and suddenly, she couldn’t look Garrett in the eye.

“For example, the clerk in Mistin County, Delaware,” she said. “Which is where BTSV is registered. Nobody in Washington is going to give us what we want. It’s not even on a computer, it’s probably in a vault right now, and there’s someone whose job it is to
just
retrieve paperwork. And whoever has that job, at the federal level, knows damn well that they’re not supposed to be telling anyone what’s on that paperwork.”

“But not the clerk in Mistin County?” Garrett asked.

“
Maybe
not the clerk,” Ellie said. “Right now it’s almost five on the east coast, and I bet that Nate Plotkin just wants to go home.”

She grabbed the laptop off the floor, and Garrett saw that she had the Facebook page of one Nate Plotkin pulled up: a smiling, slightly overweight man wearing a polo shirt.

Ellie held her phone up, dialed, and winked at Garrett. He could hear the phone ringing, and then a man’s voice answering.

“Oh, thank
goodness
you’re still there!” Ellie exclaimed. “It’s Linda, from the clerk’s office in Chesapeake County? Over in Maryland?”

There was a pause. Then Ellie
giggled
into the phone.

“I’m so sorry, I’m sure you don’t remember me. We met at the inter-county softball tournament, and I guess I just remembered your name, even though we hardly talked at all. You had that red shirt on, didn’t you?”

I’d definitely fall for this
, Garrett thought.

“Well, your potato salad was just
killer
,” Ellie said. “Anyway, I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to keep you on the phone but I’m wondering if you could just scan a page of something for me? It won’t take you but a minute.”

A pause.

“It’s the registration documents for some company called BTVS. Maybe BTVS incorporated? I finally just got the fax that I requested from the document office a couple of weeks ago, and it’s mostly great but the first page is just so light that I can’t hardly read a
thing
.”

As she listened, Ellie ran her tongue along the underside of her upper lip.

“Listen, Nate, I really don’t mind requesting it again, I just hate creating all that
work
for everyone again when I just need this one page, you know? I had to use the 540UG form, and then because there were stakeholders with a dividend compliance issue there’s the BNF1050, and you know what a pain
that
one is, and it always takes an extra week because a judge has to sign off on it...”

Ellie listened intently.

“Please, no, I’m sure the bad copy is just an accident, don’t get angry with anyone on my account. I’m sure it was an honest mistake.”