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She sipped the wine with a sigh of pleasure. “Ah, nice,” she said. “You saved mine, too, so we’re even. You can forget about it right now, okay?”
“No,” I said. “It was one of the most memorable experiences in my entire life.”
“Getting rolled in an elevator? Dude. Please. You need to get out more.”
I choked on my Prosecco, and clapped a napkin over my face, lowering it only when I trusted my face to behave. “I was talking about that combat synch, with you.”
Her eyes slid away, but I was certain her gorgeous lips twitched.
“Yeah, that was pretty special,” she agreed.
“How did you learn to fight like that?” I asked. “Were you in the military?”
“I’d like to know why those guys were trying to kill you.”
“Not kill me,” I said. “Kidnap me.” But the less I talked about my problems, the better, in case she really was on somebody’s payroll, and infiltrating any life. “Why did you think they were after you?” I asked. “Do you have enemies?”
Her face hardened. “If I had dragged you to my home by force, and sequestered you in my kitchen, you might be justified in demanding explanations from me. As it is? Not so much.”
Ooh, burn. The woman had a valid point. Time for some distraction.
“Come this way,” I said, gesturing toward the sun room. “Lunch awaits.”
The sunroom was a glassed-in section of the terrace, for when I wanted to eat outside but didn’t want the mountain breeze to blow the candles out. It was filled with plants, had a big wooden table, set for two at the end. Angela’s antipasti spread looked extremely appetizing.
Kat stared out at the view for a couple of minutes. “It’s incredible,” she said finally. “You must feel like the king of the world up here.”
“Yeah, I like the way this place makes me feel. But it’s not a power thing. It’s more a safety thing, like being high up in a watchtower. Being able to see them coming.” I thought about Shane, and added, “Theoretically, anyhow. These days, there’s no place to be safe.”
“That’s bleak, coming from a guy who made his fortune in cybersecurity.”
I poured us both more Prosecco. “I guess it is,” I said. “You’re as suspicious and paranoid as me, if not more so. But you’re safe up here, in my watchtower.”
She nibbled an olive, frowning. “I don’t feel safe,” she said. “I feel like a cat up a tree.”
I passed her the cheese plate. “Somepecorino sardo, ormozzarella di bufala?”
She let out a sharp laugh. “See, Masters? This was the part where you were supposed to say, ‘oh, no, Kat! You’re not trapped! Not at all!’ But you don’t say it.”
I put the cheese platter down, with a slow sigh. “It’s complicated,” I said.
“Well, your complications are not my business,” she said. “I want to be taken back to the city after lunch. If you don’t agree, I’m going to make life extremely difficult and unpleasant for you. I won’t enjoy it, but it’s a matter of principle.”
I considered and abandoned a bunch of different entry points into the case I had to make to her. “Let me explain,” I said. “I’ll give you the short version.”
“I don’t care how long it is, as long as it is true, complete, and convincing.”
Angela bustled in, with a platter ofpenne alla vodka, and I had a couple of free minutes to decide what I could tell her that would not compromise my family’s security, while still being true. In the meantime, we loaded our plates with creamy, pink-tinted pasta, and anointed it with grated pecorino cheese, and lots of it.
“You know I design software,” I said, as we dug in.
“I’d have to live at the bottom of the ocean not to be familiar with MasterTech products,” she said, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. “God, that tastes good.”
“That’s gratifying,” I said. “Anyhow, over the past several years, I’ve been developing a security-penetrating algorithm that has some very extreme capabilities. I started realizing along the way that it was too potentially dangerous to ever be a commercial product. Then, I concluded it was too dangerous to be used at all, ever. Too much potential for abuse. But my brother, Shane—”
“The one who also has an apartment here?”
“Yes. Shane, who ran his own executive protection and security company, urgently needed to use it, to do some job somewhere, to protect his client, to prevent a war, I wasn’t sure of the details. But I trusted my brother. So I let him use it.”
