AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When he didn’t say anything else, Diya prompted him, her tone not at all patient with the eccentricities of the man. “Peter!”
“Huh?” He looked up from his work, confusion etched on his face.
Diya buried a sigh and rolled her eyes as Yoshi coughed nervously into his hand.
“What about Samantha Page from Connecticut?”
“Oh. It’s probably nothing, but there were rumors a while back that she was BillieBurke, the white hat hacker behind the take down of Mendelow, Alonzo, and a few others.”
Diya stared at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What does that even mean?”
Now it was Peter’s turn to roll his eyes.
“BillieBurke is the hacker name of a white hat hacker. It’s a play on Glinda the Good Witch?”
He stopped and looked at them as though they should know what he was talking about. Diya simply stared.
“Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz. Billie Burke was the actress who played her. You know what? Skip that part. What matters is who she is. There are white hats and black hats. Good hackers and bad hackers. I,” he said with no small amount of pride, “am a black hat. I hack for profit or to fuck with other people when I feel like it. White hats hack for the pleasure of it and to do good for others. They help the government shore up their defenses, and in general try to help undo a lot of the shit we black hats do. Even when they’re hacking for their own pleasure, they don’t actually profit from it or cause harm.
“They’re like the do-gooders of the hacker world. And if these rumors are right, Samantha Page is the best of the best of them. Many hackers’ identities are well known, despite the fact that they use an online name or two. But no one’s ever been able to prove who BillieBurke is. BillieBurke worked with the FBI to take down Mendelow after he hacked into the FDA’s computer system and she’s supposedly worked with them on other things since then. They say she’s taken down criminals no one can build a case on just by hacking into their systems and taking out all their money, screwing with them any way she can. She’s the kind of chick who finds a major security breach in a company’s software and goes and shows them how to fix it, out of the goodness of her heart. It’s disgusting.”
“And there are rumors this Samantha Page is that hacker?” Diya asked.
Peter shrugged. “I don’t buy it. There are very few people who actually believe it, but whatever. Don’t get me wrong, Samantha’s a decent programmer and even a semigood hacker. She’s behind the multiplayer game Tangled Legacy. Makes a shit ton on that, I’m sure.
“When the rumors started, someone hacked her and found out she goes by the name blu33y3dphr3nd—leet speak for blue-eyed friend. She’s got a couple of cool hacks to her credit and Tangled Legacy is sweet as shit, but she’s no BillieBurke. She just isn’t that good. First of all, nobody uses a leet speak name anymore. It’s lame. And BillieBurke is far from lame. I don’t buy it.”
Diya narrowed her eyes in thought. “Or she’s smart enough to make herself look like she’s not that good, like she’s this blue-eyed person instead, when in reality she’s scamming you all. Find out,” Diya said to Peter. “Do whatever you need to track this hacker and see if it leads back to Samantha Page.”
Peter sputtered. “It can’t be done. If it could be done, someone would have done it by now. No one can track BillieBurke.”
“I thought you could do anything,” Diya said, with a raised brow, instantly recognizing the set of his shoulders that said he wouldn’t let her challenge go unanswered.
Peter squinted his eyes her way and uttered a short “fine,” before turning to his computer.
“And you,” Diya said, turning back to Yoshi, “stay on Logan and Samantha. Also find out all you can on her, everything there is to know from what brand of underwear she prefers to how she takes her coffee. Everything.”
* * *
“You kissed me.”
Logan looked up at the sound of Sam’s voice.
Hell.The woman was gunning for bear this morning.
She’d twisted her hair up in some complicated thing at the back of her head, neck unprotected, just begging him to reach out and trace it with his tongue. She wore a high-heeled-boots-and-miniskirt combo that sent his fantasies off in cock-hardening directions. Crap like that really made it difficult to work. Scratch that. It made it difficult to breathe, never mind work.
Her talking about the kiss wasn’t helping. “I did,” he said, purposefully making his voice even.
Kissing her had been a mistake. At first, he’d told himself it was only for the benefit of anyone listening in on the devices, but that was a load of crap and he knew it. What would it matter to her eavesdropper if she had a boyfriend or not? If he’d been at her place as a friend or as a lover? It wouldn’t.
No, the kiss had been solely for himself. Solely because he couldn’t help himself any longer.
And then, once it started, he couldn’t stop. She melted into him and moaned and before he knew it, he’d pulled her in close, lining his cock between her legs just right. And it was so freaking right. So ever-loving effing right.
“But then you left.”
Her comment drew him back to the present and once again he had to fight to steady his breathing. Yeah. Leaving hadn’t been easy either. He’d had to draw on every ounce of control he had to walk out that door instead of hauling her upstairs to her bed.
