LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to defaming Grant Davis,” Ty said coolly.

      “Gabby isn’t a criminal,” Maria said, her accent thickening with anger. “And besides, there must be a hundred Web sites like that.”

      “Thousands of ’em,” Ty agreed. “But this is the only one the vice president asked me to monitor personally. He and Liam…let’s just say they have a history.”

      Gabby’s lips trembled. “So you thought that gave you the right to pretend that you—” She broke off, unable to continue.

      She might’ve ended the relationship, but that hadn’t prevented her from thinking What if. What if they did meet? What if he proved to be a better man than his predecessors, and hadn’t minded that she couldn’t drive or play golf, and that she sometimes fumbled her way around? What if?

      Never once had she thought, What if it turns out he was only pretending to like me?

      “I’m sworn to protect the vice president with my life,” he said. “So, yeah, I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep him safe, including joining a dating service to get close to a woman who hacks through trilevel security like it’s nothing.”

      Maria tugged on her arm. “Let’s go. You’re not saying another word until you’ve got a lawyer and this guy’s got a warrant or a subpoena or whatever Secret Service agents need.”

      But Gabby stood her ground, shaking her head. “I don’t need a lawyer.” She lowered her voice, willing Ty to believe her when she said, “I teach computer science at the Edmunds School. That’s a school for the visually impaired, in case your background research on me missed that little tidbit. I visit a ton of Web sites, and yes, sometimes I hack into the more challenging ones, just to prove I can. But that’s it. I’m not connected to anyone named Shea or Sullivan, and I have nothing against Vice President Davis. I swear it on my sister’s life.” She didn’t know where that had come from, but although she hadn’t seen Amy in over a decade, it was a binding vow. The love remained even though her family had cut her off.

      Tears gathered now, welling from the pain in her soul. “As for hacking into encrypted Web sites, you can be sure I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t be Web surfing anymore. You never know what kind of jerk you’ll meet.”

      A tear spilled over and tracked down her cheek when she realized that even though she’d tried to end the relationship rather than meet him in person, some small, unrealistic part of her had hoped for something more when he’d e-mailed earlier, begging for a meeting.

      Her voice shook when she said, “Please go.”

      Ty cursed under his breath and said, “Listen, Gabby—”

      But she didn’t want to hear his lame excuses, didn’t want his pity as the swirling emotions coalesced into a hard, hot ball in her chest and the tears surfaced.

      Not wanting him to see her cry, she turned and fled into the darkness.

      Ignoring Ty’s startled shout, Gabby ran along memorized paths. It was five long steps to the iron gate, twenty across the next courtyard over, then a sharp right-hand turn into the narrow alley between the Robinsons’ two-family and Gino Vinzetti’s house.

      The sounds, smells and shapes of the neighborhood were familiar, grounding her in the realities of her life.

      Then footsteps sounded behind her and Ty shouted, “Gabby, wait!”

      Sobbing with anger and embarrassment, she hooked a left down Hanover Street, keeping one hand on the rough building faces and using the other to sweep her cane back and forth just in case. She tripped once and nearly fell, but regained her balance and kept going all the way to her apartment, which took up the ground floor of a three-family nestled between a seafood restaurant and a pastry shop.

      She was grateful that none of the neighbors were home to see her tears and the way her hands shook when she unlatched the wrought iron gate that led to her side entrance. Hopefully, Ty wouldn’t know where she’d gone. She could trust Maria not to tell him.

      But he was a federal agent. No doubt he’d known her home address all along.

      She blew out a teary breath and let herself inside. She leaned the cane against the door frame, knowing every inch of the apartment without its help, and headed down the entry hall toward the living room, with its soft, embracing couch and familiar, homey smells of cinnamon-scented candles and chocolate chips.

      Wanting nothing more than to throw herself onto the couch and scream, she hurried across the room.

      Halfway there, she tripped and fell.

      Gabby cried out as she slammed her hip into the corner of her coffee table and crashed to the floor. A wave of pain washed through her, radiating from her right hip and elbow.

      Dazed, she waited a moment for her head to clear, and then struggled to her hands and knees and felt around. Within moments her fingertips connected with the familiar outline of an antique doorstop cast in the shape of a sailing ship.

      A prickle of fear shimmied in her stomach.

      The ship was one of a half-dozen iron doorstops she had carefully placed around the apartment. Perhaps they were a strange collector’s item for a legally blind person, but she knew where each one was, just as she knew the placement of every wall, every piece of furniture and all the other odds and ends in her space. Everything in her world had its place.

      This ship belonged beside the kitchen door, not in the middle of the living room.

      Heart pounding, Gabby searched the room by touching each object with trembling fingers. The sofa and coffee table were exactly where they belonged, and nothing else seemed wrong until she levered herself to her feet and felt for the desk. Out-of-place papers crunched underfoot, and there was a blank space where her computer should have been.

      “Oh, God.” Her throat closed on panic, on denial. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Please no.” Her specially outfitted computer, her lifeline to the rest of the world, was gone. Worse, she realized, as she felt frantically along the tabletop, the jumble of half-assembled electronic components was missing, too. She’d been working on a new prototype, a device that could reproduce Web site graphics in three dimensions, allowing blind people to “see” them.

      Someone wanted the design, she thought, her mind leaping ahead to seemingly impossible possibilities. Someone who knew what I was working on, who—

      She spun when she heard the noise. It might have been a quiet cough, or the shift of a shoe on her kitchen tile, she wasn’t sure, but she suddenly knew she wasn’t alone in the apartment. “Ty?”

      “Not exactly,” an unfamiliar masculine voice said from the kitchen. She heard footsteps, sensed him move to block the front hallway. “And you can’t see me, can you? That’ll make this easier than I thought.”

      The next thing she knew, he was coming straight for her.

      Chapter Two

      Dear TyJ:

      You know how you said the other day that honesty is very important to you? Well then, I’d better be honest with you. I’m not exactly the hotshot computer jockey I made it sound like in my profile, or even in some of our earlier private messages. I teach programming at a small college in the northeast, which is about as exciting as it sounds. As in ‘not.’ So trust me, the bodyguard gig has me beat by a mile in the ‘cool jobs’ department, even if you do spend most of your time standing around waiting for something to happen.

      [Sent by CyberGabby; April 3, 11:32:32 p.m.]

      10:21 p.m., August 2 7 Hours and 17 Minutes until Dawn

      Ty stumbled to a halt in the middle of the dark, deserted street and let his flashlight sag, hopelessly lost in the mazelike passageways, courtyards and narrow streets of the North End.

      Gabby had outdistanced him easily, moving ghostlike in the darkness. Without backup and an earpiece or, hell, even a functional handheld,

Скачать книгу