DAVID: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security) Read online

  Let some of them run this place for a day or two and see what they come up with for a plan. I’d be more than willing to change my plans if someone could show me a place where I could cut the excess without hurting either the employees or the customers.

  They called me a cold-hearted bitch. I’d seen it on one of our own sites—the cold-hearted bitch who thought she’d built the company all on her own without the labor of her subordinates. Like it hadn’t been my idea to start the employee compensation package in the first place. Like I hadn’t wanted to give back to my employees by handing them shares of the corporation. Like I didn’t donate generously to their retirement plans. Like I didn’t offer the best healthcare package this side of Silicon Valley?

  How soon they forgot.

  “Ms. Dennison?” Jacy’s voice said over the intercom.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a David Grayson on the phone for you.”

  Grayson? I didn’t know…oh, I bet he’s Ash Grayson’s brother. The former FBI analyst.

  I’d done my research before I hired Gray Wolf Security.

  “Mr. Grayson, what can I do for you?”

  “Ms. Dennison,” he said, slightly breathless, “first, let me tell you what an honor it is to speak with you. I’ve been following your career since the Bear Den virus you released ten years ago.”

  My eyebrows rose. I hadn’t realized anyone had connected me to that virus.

  “Well, I’m not sure what to say to that, Mr. Grayson.”

  “I’m just…I’m a bit of a fan.”

  I covered my mouth with a couple of fingers to hide the snicker that wanted to escape. “That’s nice,” I managed to say.

  He was quiet a second, as though he was trying to figure out how to take that. Or maybe he was simply embarrassed. I don’t know. I seem to embarrass a lot of people without really meaning to embarrass them.

  “My company was hired to seek out a security breach in your system?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Ash tells me you would prefer that the work not be done remotely.”

  “As I’m sure you can understand, our system contains a lot of confidential information. Not just the code that runs most of our sites, but also personal information on our clients. If any of this got out—”

  “Of course. I understand. But I’m sure you understand that any information we discover in the process of seeking out the breach would be handled with the utmost respect.”

  “I’m sure it would. However, remote access would make the system vulnerable to anyone else who might be seeking a way in.”

  “I assure you that my methods are designed with the utmost of care. I’ve never experienced an outside breach while remotely connected to a client’s system.”

  “There’s always a first time, Mr. Grayson.”

  He cleared his throat, the sound clearly covering irritation. “Ms. Dennison—”

  “I hired your company in part because I’m also aware of your reputation, Mr. Grayson. You are well known in certain circles. I am well aware that you are extremely security aware. I’m also aware that you prefer not to leave the safety of your compound there in Santa Monica. However, I will not budge on this issue. I want to be present during your search of my system, and I want you to do your search here. If that is not a criterion you can adhere to, then I’ll have to find someone else to help me.”

  “No, of course I can come to you. It just seemed simpler to do it from here.”

  “I apologize if I’m making your day more complicated, Mr. Grayson.”

  “No. It’s no problem. We will be there in a few hours.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Grayson.”

  I set the phone down, my fingers lingering on the heavy plastic as if it was his face sitting there rather than the impersonal instrument. I wondered what he looked like. There were no pictures of him on the internet, though there were dozens of his brother. David Grayson was apparently much more camera shy than his former-Green-Beret brother. Not that looks mattered much for what I needed him to do. However, I was still a woman despite the fact that several of my detractors insisted I was really a man in drag—something I tried to take as a compliment in this male-driven society.

  He had a deep voice that vibrated through my body even over the phone. I liked men with deep voices. And it had been so long…

  Chapter 3

  At the Compound

  Ash stood at his desk and watched David speaking on the phone to Ms. Dennison. He knew David wouldn’t like this. It had been two years since he last got into a car, since the day he moved here. David developed a phobia about cars after the accident that killed Ash and his parents. He blamed himself, which was absolutely ridiculous in Ash’s opinion. It was a damn accident, that’s why they’re called accidents. No one could have seen that patch of black ice!

  David was guilting himself out of life. He moved from his cottage to his workstation and back again, never going out, never relaxing, never seeing the large number of friends he’d had before the accident. He was isolating himself. Ash knew that wasn’t good. It was one of the first things they told soldiers coming home from a war zone. Don’t isolate. Don’t push people away. But that’s what David had been doing from the moment he woke in the hospital.

  Not only was the guilt over their parents’ death causing David to isolate himself, but it was also keeping him from getting his legs fixed. And that was unacceptable. Why remain in a wheelchair when the doctors could fix the situation? When he could very possibly walk again? Why put himself through all this?

  But David wouldn’t even listen to his arguments anymore. They fought furiously over the issue for months after the doctors told David what they could do. There wasn’t even that much risk, considering that it was major spinal surgery. They could go in laparoscopically, take out the bone fragments that were causing the inflammation around the spinal cord, and be out of there before more than three hours had passed. It was much better than the surgery David endured the days after the accident. And it could allow him to walk.

  It was a no-brainer to Ash. There was nothing standing in David’s way—not money or a lack of health insurance or the doctor willing to do it—yet, he still refused.

  Ash was at his wit’s end trying to figure out how to help his brother. So when this call came in this morning, this woman computer exec whom he knew David admired, he was hoping it might be the catalyst that would at least get David out of the office. But now…

  “He’s trying to get her to give him remote access,” Donovan told Ash.

  “Yeah, I kind of figured that’s what it was.”

  “Do you think she will?”

  Ash shrugged. “I doubt it. She seems like the kind of woman who likes to get her own way.”

  Donovan smiled. Ash wondered if he was thinking about his own girl. Some would describe Kate Thompson the same way, but again, her stubbornness likely saved Donovan’s life when she ran for help when they were attacked by a mentally ill woman a few months ago.

  Maybe this Ricki Dennison would do the same for David. That was, of course, if he let her get close enough.

  “How are we going to get him into a car?”

  “If he wants to go badly enough,” Ash said, “he’ll go willingly. If not…I guess we’ll deal with that when it comes up.”

  “Do you think it’s wise to push him?”

  “I pushed you and look where it got us?”

  Donovan nodded slowly. “And I’ll forever be grateful. But are you sure—?”

  “He’s my brother, Donovan. I can’t just sit back and watch him waste away when it really isn’t necessary. Those doctors swear he could walk again, but the window is closing. They tell me another few months and removing the bone fragments will be too complicated to even try.”

  Donovan nodded, his eyes moving slowly to Ash’s brother, to the young man they’d all grown to care about despite the fact that he did the best he could to push them all away. David saved Donovan’s hide a time or
two. And he saved Kate the night Amanda tried to break into her house. Just that was enough to make Donovan want to do all he could to help him. If Ash was right about this, and it could inspire David to have the surgery, he was willing to do just about anything to help.

  “What can I do?”

  “Just help me get him out of here. After that…all I can hope is that he’ll find a reason to want to be the man he was before.”

  That’s all anyone could hope.

  Chapter 4

  David

  They couldn’t possibly understand how hard it was for me to get into a car. I sat there on the driveway, staring at the SUV Donovan wanted me to climb into—and all I could think about was the ball of junk that was the Mercedes I’d been driving the night my parents died. I hadn’t gotten into a car since that night. Not willingly, anyway. The doctors actually sedated me when I left the hospital. And Ash plied me with alcohol before moving me here to the compound. So I guess it would be more accurate to say I hadn’t been inside a car in a sober, alert state since that night.

  The memories were just too much.

  It wasn’t just the actual memory, either. There was the sensory memory. I could feel the leather under my legs and the cold seeping in through the glass despite the warm air pouring from the heater. It was a nasty night. They were predicting snow that night. Snow. In central Texas. It happened from time to time, but it was so rare that it had the power to paralyze the entire city. I guess that was part of why my father had insisted we wait until all the volunteers left the hotel before we headed out ourselves. We could have left earlier, before the moisture in the air created dangerous road conditions. Or we could have stayed and slept in the suite that the campaign paid for so the family could watch the numbers come in in relative comfort. But my father wanted to go home and sleep in his own bed.

  I understood that. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, too, but it was more than a thousand miles away that night.

  I hadn’t realized how drunk my father was, or how tired my mother was. Mother fell asleep in the backseat almost the moment we left the hotel parking lot. And Father…he was a chatterbox when he was a drunk. Some would argue that wasn’t much different from his normal behavior, but that would be someone who didn’t know him well. Unless he was nervous or in a room where he was meant to be the center of attention, my father was perfectly content to sit back and watch others, to study human behavior and learn something from it. He once told me that the best way to learn about human nature was to stand in the center of a party and watch the way people behaved around one another. And he was right. You could learn a lot just watching the way people interacted with one another.

  We were laughing when we walked out to the car. Father had commented on the hotel manager, something about the pinched look on his face when he watched us leave. It was impolite to laugh, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

  That was the moment I preferred to think about when I thought about my parents.

  “Do you want me to help you up?” Donovan asked, as he came around the side of the vehicle.

  I shook my head. The passenger seat of the SUV was fairly high off the ground, but I was used to having to lift myself up onto high seats. My arms were much stronger than they once were, thanks in part to the necessity of wheeling the chair around all the time, and in part because of the weights I always kept handy, doing curls whenever I had a free moment. I could do this.

  The question was, did I want to?

  “I could talk you through the search,” I said to Donovan. “Tell you where to look and what to do when you found it.”

  “Do you really think Ms. Dennison would appreciate me showing up and insisting on working within her secure system with you talking to me through an ear bud?” Donovan shook his head, answering the question for me. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’d probably go over much better than me arriving at her office hyperventilating from panic.”

  “You’ll be fine, David.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We all have to face our darkest nightmares at one point or another.”

  “And what was yours? Blowing up faceless people in a foreign country?”

  Donovan’s face tightened. I’d known it was a cruel thing to say before it slipped through my lips, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly.

  Donovan just shook his head. “We all have things in our past that we’re not proud of. We’ve all done things we wish we could take back. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a right to find happiness.”

  “Just because you found Kate…”

  “That’s not all I’m talking about.” Donovan touched my shoulder. “You’re not the only one who lost his parents. Do you really want to force Ash to lose his brother, too? Don’t you think he’s lost enough?”

  I glanced back at the house. I could feel Ash watching us. I didn’t know which tinted window he was standing behind, but I knew he was there. It pissed me off. We’d always looked out for each other. I didn’t mind him watching over me. It just seemed so fucking one-sided these days. I just wished there was something that could balance the scale a little.

  But, again, if he hadn’t been on some sort of wild goose chase, searching for Alexi, his fiancée, instead of in Austin with the family as he’d promised he would be, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe Ash could have been behind that wheel and he could have controlled the spin better than I did. Maybe he could have saved our parents where I couldn’t.

  “Get in the car, David.”

  Donovan’s tone was not cruel, but it cut through me just the same. He might as well have been asking me to slice my own wrists.

  But I got in. I grabbed the armrest on the door and the outer edge of the high seat. It took some real strength to pull myself to a near standing position, but I managed it. Then, with my hip against the silky leather, I slid up over the seat, dragging my useless legs into the vehicle behind me. Donovan stood close the whole time, watching to make sure I didn’t screw up and find myself face first on the crushed rock of the driveway. But this was one thing I could do. I’d fallen often enough in the first few months I was out of the hospital to teach myself precisely what I had to do to prevent it from happening again.

  Donovan waited while I adjusted my legs, then handed me the seatbelt which I secured around my chest and waist. I knew how to do that much. I waited while he folded my low, fiberglass wheelchair. It was custom made, designed to be easy to maneuver…even in tight spaces. I wanted to be as independent as possible, and the chair helped make that possible.

  And then we were on our way, and my heart was pounding so hard in my throat that I was pretty sure I was about to choke on it.

  The movement of the SUV on the drive reminded me of the potholes we’d run into in the city.

  “Really should get someone to do something about those,” my father said. “Damned sorry way to greet dignitaries that come to these hotels during their stays in the state capital.”

  “Didn’t the mayor promise to fix them during his campaign?”

  “Damn idiot isn’t worth the paper his title’s written on. The only reason he keeps getting elected is because he has the right people in his pocket.”

  “That’s pretty strong language, Ashford,” my mother said from the backseat. “You should watch yourself. You never know who’s listening.”

  “Only David, my love,” he said, leaning over the seat to reach for her hand. “Only our boy. And we can trust him.”

  Ironic that I killed them both not fifteen minutes after he said that.

  My hands were clammy. I wiped them on the thighs of my jeans, hoping Donovan hadn’t noticed.

  “Ash and Ms. Dennison arranged for me to take an entry level job in the IT department at Friend or Foe Corporation,” Donovan said, clearly trying to keep me distracted. “They both figured it wouldn’t require me to do more than help secretaries with frozen operating systems.”

  �
�They’re probably right. My guess is that Ms. Dennison is so protective of her code that she’d only let high-level techs work on it directly.”

  “I suppose I’d be a little paranoid, too, if I had billions resting on a few lines of unique code,” Donovan said. “Do you know much about her? Ms. Dennison?”

  I shrugged, trying not to look out the windshield. The world that came hurdling at us at fifty-five miles per hour was a bit overwhelming. Every time we passed a tree or an electric pole or another car, I tensed for impact.

  I knew what Donovan was trying to do. He was trying to distract me. And I appreciated it. But concentrating at the moment was proving more difficult than I was willing to admit.

  “I know her code. I know what she did before she founded her corporation.”

  “And that was?”

  “She was a first-class hacker. There were rumors that she’d broken into more bank computers and government computers and corporate computers than any other hacker active at the time. But she never did it for personal gain. She always did it just to prove that she could. A lot of people were disappointed when she threw in the towel and went legit.”

  “Why did she?”

  I didn’t know. That was actually a question I wanted to ask her.

  We flew around a tight curve, and I grabbed the armrests with all the strength in my hands. I felt the blood rush from my face. Logically, I knew the chances of us getting into an accident were about six thousand to one. But that didn’t take the fear away.

  I was distracted. Mother was asleep in the backseat and Father was chattering about the election, the voters, and the volunteers who’d helped him win the campaign. He was chattering incessantly, and he kept reaching over, touching things. I slapped his hands away from the radio half a dozen times. We were almost to the house, a lovely colonial-style house set back from the road on part of its twenty acres, the home where Ash and I grew up. I’d learned to drive on these roads ten years earlier. I knew that the curve was coming; I knew I needed to slow down. But I was distracted—and the ice was already forming…