Page 14 of Magnum, Volume 1

“I’ve already put some on. I’m picky about…” I noted his brand was a mineral kind, and one of the better ones. “Well, I was going to give you my lecture on chemical versus mineral blockers, but it seems you’ve already heard the speech. You chose well.”

“Don’t like chemicals in general,” he said.

That struck me as odd. “Nickie says Bud doesn’t either. She has to be careful with fragrances around him, and they don’t buy prepacked foods. Just stuff straight from a farm, mostly. They even have a source to buy organic, grass-fed beef.”

He tilted his head. “Bud and I are a lot alike, it seems. I actually prefer to hunt my own meat, and you’ll find plenty of venison and turkey in my freezer. I have grass-fed beef too, though.”

He said his boat was nothing fancy, but it looked pretty nice to me. He showed me the life vests and asked, “How strong of a swimmer are you?”

“I can tread water forever. Not the fastest swimmer on the planet, but unless I get knocked out, I should be fine.”

He nodded, started the boat, released the ropes, and eased us away from the dock.

“You have a point about us not being able to research each other,” he said. “If I could research you, I’d start by watching some of your channel. What would I find if I did?”

I looked at him, deciding how I’d get the most information from him, and decided he needed to answer questions first. “Tell me where you went to school, and for what, then I’ll do the same.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, but said, “Georgia Tech. Partial scholarship. Graduated with a computer science degree, threads in cybersecurity and system architecture. You?”

Yeah, he’d absolutely been sandbagging his intelligence. Georgia Tech is damned hard to get into, and even harder to graduate from. I’d known he was leaning too hard on the boneheaded biker thing though, so this wasn’t a total recalibration.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know what I do for a living, but I don’t know what you did before you…” Before he’d gone to prison, because a felon likely couldn’t get a cybersecurity job, which explained why he was probably doing illegal shit for the bikers now. “Where were you working when you beat the shit out of the abusive asshole?”

He shook his head, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but he said, “One of the big financial institutions, head of network security. Not something felons can do.”

Fuck. I’d nailed that one, and it made the woman’s lies even worse.

A deal was a deal though, so I told him, “Syracuse University, Newhouse School of Public Communications.” I shrugged. “I was accepted into the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, but Arizona is too fucking hot.” I sighed. “I’m pretty sure Alabama is even hotter, and it’s possible I’ll just melt, and save the bad guys the trouble of killing me.”

“I’ll toss you in the water to cool you off if I see you melting. What made you want to be a journalist? And was it always investigative journalism?”

“My dad was a cop when I was little and made detective when I was in middle school. My mom produces a local news show, so I was in and out of the news station, the studios. They say some kids try to merge what their parents are, and I guess I’m one of those people — the investigation angle from my dad, the news part of it from my mom. What about you? What led you to cybersecurity?”

“My family is in security. Bodyguarding, mostly, though one of my sisters is a private detective, so I’m not the only one who found a security niche a little different than the rest of the family. I was taught martial arts nearly as soon as I could walk, and situational awareness was preached hard all my life, but…” he shrugged. “Seemed to me, cybersecurity was just as important as the physical kind.”

He pulled the boat into an inlet with an island near the center of it. “Answer my original question, with an added bonus of the most interesting news story you’ve done — or rather, what I’ll find most interesting based on what you know of me, and I’ll show you something cool.”

“I don’t know much about you,” I protested. “That’s the problem. I mean, I can go with the crude biker stereotype and tell you the backstory of how we caught a kinky scammer, or I can tell you how another story forced a state senator to resign after I showed him funneling tax dollars into a charity his wife ran so she could aim the money right back into their personal bank account.”

“The kinky scammer sounds interesting.”

Of course it did. “Okay, I knew this guy was scamming old people, but I needed proof before I could go public with it. Also, this seemed the kind of thing one of the big news organizations might pay big bucks for, but none of them want to pay me because I’m their competitor. Meanwhile, I’d found out he was a member of a BDSM club, which seemed a good way to get closer to him. I used my contacts to get an invitation to join, but once I was in, I watched him and decided he was way too hardcore of a sadist for me. So, another reason to bring Nickie in — Bud’s wife, long before she’d met him. She sells things to the big TV news guys because she’s mostly print and they don’t see her as a competitor. Anyway, we went to the club together, and she managed to get him interested in her. While he was working her over, I cloned his phone, and then found someone more interested in high protocol than pain play to keep me occupied while they finished.”

There. If he’s kinky, he’d know what questions to ask. If not, I’d know things with him wouldn’t be fun, so why bother. Maybe then I could focus better while we worked.

I kept going with the story. “We got enough off his phone to use other, more legal ways of proving he’d scammed at least three hundred million from about a dozen widows. Last I looked, asshole’s still in jail.”

“High protocol?” he asked. “That’s a pretty specific kink.”

The submissive in me was thrilled he knew what high protocol is, but the reporter was dismayed.

“You were going to show me something interesting,” I pointed out, because I couldn’t figure out how to ask him about his kinks without being too obvious, and I wasn’t prepared to talk about mine until I knew more about his.

“Baby herons,” he said with a smile, his gaze never leaving my face. “Twenty feet up in the sycamore tree, thirty yards to your left.”

The island was to my left, and once I saw one nest, I saw more. And more. It was an entire little rookery.

It took me a minute to find the nest with baby heron heads poking up, and I smiled when he handed me the binoculars. I hadn’t seen him bring them to the boat, but it was really good he did, because I got a great view of the babies.