Chapter Fourteen
Sweat poured down his face as Drew pushed himself harder around the track. At least when he was running, he was numb. He could blank his mind and focus only on the slap of his feet against the track and forcing his muscles and lungs to function at their max.
Unfortunately, despite the edge of pain dulling his brain, he still couldn’t shake Cassie’s face from his mind—those amazing eyes accusing and disappointed. In him. Her parting shot hurt because she was right.
I am an asshole.
He ran faster, trying to outrun the thoughts chasing him.
Even as he was falling for her—and he could no longer fool himself, he’d fallen hard—he was trying to suss out wrongdoing and lay it at her doorstep. It didn’t matter that he’d disassociated the job from the girl, or that he now had enough information to put her away. Sleeping with her, no matter how he justified it as a final good-bye in his mind, made him even more of an asshole than if he’d kept his distance and remained her coworker or, at most, her friend.
But he hadn’t wanted to be just her friend. Every part of her spoke to every part of him in a way that didn’t happen every day. He’d been so convinced any illegal actions taken at Data Minds couldn’t be hers…
Drew pulled up, and leaned over, hands on his knees, as his starved lungs sucked in oxygen in heaving bursts.
Max, who he’d left behind a few laps earlier, jogged to a stop beside him, also breathing hard. “Shit, man. If I knew you were going to punish yourself today, I’d have stayed home and saved myself the pain.”
Drew didn’t comment. He was too busy breathing and berating himself.
“What’s with you anyway?” Max demanded.
Maybe calling his best friend for a weekend workout had been a bad idea, given his current mood. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Drew jackknifed up and headed for where he’d left his towel on the bench.
“No?” Max challenged his back. “Want to know what I think?”
Drew propped his foot up on the bench to stretch, and tried not to be pissed off. Max hadn’t been the one to fall for a criminal. That honor lay squarely on his shoulders. “What do you think?”
Max crossed his arms. “I think you’re being a dick.”
“Thanks,” Drew muttered.
“As your best friend, it’s my job to point these things out.”
“Consider your duty done.” He grabbed his towel, mopping up his face.
“You know I can’t leave things like that. I have a detail-oriented personality. And you, my friend, are only a dick when you think you’re in the wrong.”
Drew said nothing to that, though he gave a mental grimace. If he was that easy to read, he was in the wrong profession.
“What’d you do?” Max joked now. “Blow your op?”
The teasing question hit way to close to home. “Fuck you.”
Drew walked off only to be jerked around, Max getting right in his face. He’d never seen his friend so livid that a vein in his neck stood out.
“Fuck me?” Max threw the words back at him in a low, controlled voice. “I’m trying to be your friend. Fuck you, Drew.”
Max stalked away.
Dammit. I am a total asshole.
Max slowed and turned, eyes squinting against the mid-morning sun. “I’m glad you can finally see it.”
Wait, had he said that out loud? Clearly, Cassie’s habit really was catching.
Drew blew out a breath. “Sorry. I had a…rough night. Your comment about the op was close.”
“How close?” Max moved closer, arms crossed.
“I slept with her, even after I had evidence against her. She found out.”
Max gave a low whistle. “That was a shitty thing to do.”
Even pissed at himself, Drew couldn’t help but smile at Max’s forthrightness. Which, again, reminded him of Cassie. He couldn’t get away from thoughts of her. “I know. But I fell for her.”
He jumped back as Max snapped his towel at him. “Dammit, Drew. I warned you not to get too close.”
“I know.” Drew scrubbed a hand over his face. “I was sure she didn’t do anything, and I let my guard down.”
“Way to go, hotshot.”
“Not helping,” Drew growled between clenched teeth.
All evidence screamed Cassie was the perpetrator of the cybercrimes at Data Minds, and that she acted alone. Every single thing he needed, his team had pulled from her hard drive. He had more than enough to put her away for years. A plethora of…
Drew paused.
Was there too much evidence stacked against her? The glut of information, which he’d never been able to find before, might’ve been a little too perfect.
Had someone planted the evidence and framed her?
That’s all it took. One ray of doubt casting light on a different answer than the one he’d assumed had be true. Drew tried to assess everything he knew about her and the evidence they’d collected the way a lawyer would.
I know Cassie. She has too much integrity and pride to do something illegal. No, if something’s off, it’s coming from someone above her.
She couldn’t have done it. The truth—one his heart had already known if only his head would’ve caught up sooner—glared at him with startling brilliance. He’d been blind and stupid. But he could fix it.
“Max…”
His friend held up both hands. “Oh no. I know that tone. Whatever it is you’re thinking, if it has anything to do with this case, my answer is let it go.”
“I think my first instinct was right, and she’s innocent.”
Max snorted and started walking toward the gym. “Can you prove it?”
Drew scrambled to keep up. “Not yet.” But he would.
Hand on the door, Max paused to give Drew an assessing stare.
Drew returned the gaze with a steady one of his own.
“Then it looks like you have some work to do.”
A fiercely protective instinct drove him through showering and dressing in record time. He hustled a grumbling Max upstairs to his offices. From there, he called his team. He’d already started them down this path, looking at other people in the company, particularly the partners.
Now he had a new mission: figure out who was using Cassie and falsely implicating her in illegal activities.
He and his team needed to bust out some stellar work this weekend if he was going to get ahead of having to arrest Cassie.
No way was he going to let her take the fall for something she didn’t do. After he proved her innocence, he’d be in for some serious groveling.
…
“Cassandra Elaine Howard, why did you even come home if you were going to work all weekend?”
Cassie dragged her gaze away from her screen to find her mother standing in the kitchen doorway, hands on her hips, and “the look” plastered on her perfectly made-up face.
In a desperate bid to escape the miserable thoughts that followed her out of Drew’s apartment and all the way home, she’d hopped on a train and come to her parents’ house. Not for peace and quiet, because her mother was anything but peaceful. Instead, Cassie had come for the distraction.
Her gambit hadn’t worked. She was spiraling. She felt like she was being tossed about and sucked down into a whirlpool of madness. Drew’s accusations still rang in her head, like a fire alarm when the batteries wore down. Only she couldn’t shut it off.
All the way here on the train, and ever since she’d arrived, she’d been pouring over her computer files. What, exactly, did Drew find in her data?
She’d always prided herself on being above reproach and the best data analyst working in the city. Maybe even the country. Could she have done something wrong inadvertently? Big data was such a new field, they were still figuring out boundaries, limits, and loopholes, but she was always careful.
Drew had been right that Data Minds had exploded and won a bunch of contracts no one, not even she, expected. But she’d taken that as a point of pride, not a point of concern. Had she been naive?
Now her mother’s glare had the same effect as piercing a water balloon with a needle. Tears welled in Cassie’s eyes. “I’m in trouble, Mom.”
Whether the tears did it, or the fact that Cassie never laid her issues in her mother’s lap, Susan Howard’s irritation melted to be replaced with concern.
She crossed the room and sat beside Cassie at the table, scooting her chair close so she could rub Cassie’s back. “What kind of trouble is so bad my brilliant baby girl can’t figure it out?”
Cassie sniffed. Her mother thought she was brilliant? “Do you remember Drew?”
Her mother wrinkled her forehead in thought. “The man you were kissing in the taxi cab? The man from work?”
Cassie huffed a watery, slightly hysterical laugh. “Yeah.”
“The one who couldn’t keep his eyes off you?”
Or his hands. Asshole. “That’s the guy.”
“What’d he do? Breakup with you? Or something at work?”
Cassie sighed. “All of the above. He…he works for the FBI, and he thinks I’m some kind of…”
Her mother frowned. “Of what?”
Cassie threw her hands up in the air. “Some kind of cyber criminal. And he slept with me anyway!”
On that massive statement, she proceeded to burst into tears. And not pretty tears, either, but big gulping ones that shook her entire body and scrunched her face up like a Cabbage Patch Kid. Instead of lecturing her or telling her to pull herself together, her mother surprised her and pulled Cassie into her arms, running her hand over her hair in long, soothing strokes until Cassie’s sobs quieted into hiccups.
Finally, Cassie pulled back, scrubbing at her face with the back of her hand. She’d left a big wet stain on the shoulder of her mother’s pink silk blouse. “Sorry.”
Her mom smiled, unperturbed. “Feel better?”
Marginally. She had needed to get that out. Cassie nodded and sniffed.
“Good.” Her mother tucked a stray lock of hair behind Cassie’s ear. “Now, why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything before I call your brothers and send them down to the FBI office to beat this guy up.”
Cassie sniggered, though in a weepy way. The image of her uber-intelligent brothers beating anyone up was just too ridiculous.
Her mom smiled as well. “Or talk some sense into him.”
“That seems more likely.”
Taking a deep breath, Cassie started to talk. And once she got started, everything spilled out of her, like the Hoover Dam had busted its gates. A flood of information and emotions gushed in a waterfall of words—meeting Drew and her initial assumptions about him, their flirtation and how it spilled into what she’d hoped would be a lasting relationship, the weird things she’d found in the systems, what she’d discovered at Drew’s place, and the accusations he’d flung at her before she walked away.
Her mother, bless her, sat quietly and listened. Not one interruption. Not one tsk. Not one critical comment.
Eventually, Cassie wound down. Exhausted, she lay her head down on the table. “Mom. What do I do? What if they haul me off to jail?”
Susan pursed her lips. “We both know you didn’t do anything, and you know we’ll fight it together.”
A small amount of the weight crushing her heart lifted. Her mother believed her. That was a start, at least. The fact that Drew didn’t…
No. She couldn’t think about him right now. She had to clear her name first.
Her mother tapped Cassie’s computer. “I suggest you find out who did do something wrong. It sounds like you were already on their trail. Follow that first. Then maybe you can prove they set you up. While you do that, I’ll call our lawyer.”
Cassie sat back, her mind already surging. Rather than spinning her wheels trying to trace Drew’s evidence, she’d compile her own.
Invigorated with a purpose now, she pulled her computer toward her and tapped the screen to wake it up.
“Should I call any of your brothers?” her mom asked.
Cassie didn’t even glance up. “No. They may be amazing in their fields, but they’re useless when it comes to computers.”
A soft chuckle reached her. “Once you’re done being brilliant with the computer, what are you going to do about Drew?”
Cassie paused and blew out a long breath. She didn’t want to think about Drew. It hurt too much. “He was using me. I’m not going to do anything about him.”
“Do you love him?”
Cassie just twitched her shoulders in a semblance of a shrug, unable to lie, but still too upset with him to admit to her feelings. “It doesn’t matter.”
Her mom stood and pushed her chair in. “I’m not so sure. A man doesn’t look at a woman the way he looked at you unless it’s love.”
Cassie’s jaw dropped. Was her mom taking Drew’s side? “He’s an undercover agent. He can fake love.”
Her mother delivered a haughty stare. “I happen to be an eminent psychologist. If a man looked at me that way…” She fanned herself.
“Mom,” Cassie protested.
Her mother tossed a superior smile in Cassie’s direction. “I was once young, too, you know. The things your father made me feel—”
Gross. “I get the point,” Cassie rushed to head off any further comments on this topic. “But that’s not what’s happening here.”
“You’re right. He was an asshole to sleep with you believing what he does. But don’t forget you did the same, despite your suspicions. And given that he’s FBI and not a criminal hacker, think of the tough position that put him in.”
“He slept with me for his job.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t something more?”
Cassie snorted. “I’m sure.”
Her mother sighed, but quit the topic. She pointed at Cassie’s screen. “Figure out the cyber crime issue. I have a feeling that once that’s out of the way, things with Drew will fall into place naturally.”
Whatever that meant.
The FBI might always get their man, but Cassie couldn’t claim the same. Besides, her mother might be an eminent psychologist, but that distinction had not given her much insight into her own daughter, at least until today. Cassie decided not to bother getting her hopes up where Drew was concerned. The best outcome here was she cleared her name, avoided jail, and never saw Drew Kerrigan again.
Maybe, one day, she’d convince her heart that was best. Until then, she’d let her head do all the talking. Decision made and goal in sight, Cassie tuned out the world and her own thoughts, and put her head down to work her corn nuts off.
…
Almost twenty-four hours, very little sleep, and gallons of coffee later, she had what she needed. Still, she reeled from the shocking discoveries she’d made—vacillating between righteousness at proving herself innocent, fury at how her work had been used, crushing disappointment in someone she’d trusted, and deep sadness at the implications for Data Minds.
Still, the right thing to do was obvious. She ran up to her bedroom and fished out her cell phone, which she’d turned off and tossed in her backpack before hopping on the train to come to her parents’ house.
Checking the number, she hit dial, not sure if she’d get sent to voicemail given how they’d ended things. When a voice answered, she didn’t bother with preliminaries. “I have information you might be interested in hearing.”