Knocking rattled the door, and a woman’s voice called out, “Yoo-hoo!”
“And there she is.” Colleen walked toward the door.
Tristan rubbed his face, composing himself. Seriously, dammit.
Mary Varvara Bell’s threats rang in Tristan’s head about things getting dangerous for him and his informant, whom she’d confirmed that she knew was Colleen Frost.
His whole body vibrated with paranoid rage, from his scalp to his jaw grinding his teeth together and the cords of his neck to the muscles in his feet. Everything tensed because he needed to leap up to protect Colleen. Even his tongue was rigid and shoved against the roof of his mouth.
When Colleen opened the door, the woman who’d dropped her off at the airport stood in the doorway. The breeze picked up her long, flowing hair that fell to her waist or farther. She wore a short, sequined skirt and a tank top, which seemed a little overdressed for a Wednesday morning.
However, Jian had assured Tristan on many occasions that Tristan had no sense of fashion or decorum, so maybe he was reading too much into it.
Anjali glanced at Tristan and didn’t seem surprised to see him, and then she told Colleen, “It’s down in my car. Help me carry that monstrosity? And thank you very much for lending me the monstrosity. It came in very handy for debugging code for class and moderating Sherwood Forest forums. With you busy, it’s been hard to keep tabs on all the Killer Whales, and that suspicious character TwistyTrader hasn’t poked his head up at all since last weekend. I checked his logs. He has not been silent this long since he joined the boards two years ago. I think he is sulking about you putting him on moderation.”
“Oh, yeah, well, he’s probably just busy,” Colleen said. “Or people need social media breaks sometimes. That’s probably what happened to him.”
Wait, so Colleen’s buddy Anjali was a moderator at the infamous stock market forum, too?
And he noted, she didn’t like TwistyTrader.
Tristan said, “Colleen talked me into joining that forum a few days ago. I’m what you call a minnow, I guess.”
Anjali raised one groomed eyebrow at him. “If you just joined, you’re a sea slug, a bottom-dweller, for the first month and ten posts.”
Oops. He’d forgotten about the newbie level. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. Sea slug. Who are you there?”
Colleen laughed at him. “Tristan, this is PikachuMod.”
“No kidding!” Tristan said, laughing. “You’re PikachuMod. Jeez, the Killer Whale guys are terrified of you. Everyone says the Pikachu has huge teeth, meaning that you bite. You’re feared.”
Anjali’s skepticism turned into a tight smile. “As it should be.” She turned back to Colleen. “People are still asking about you. I’ve assured them that you’re fine, but there’s a conspiracy theory going around that you were kidnapped and trafficked.”
“Well, tell them I haven’t been kidnapped. Do they need proof of life?” Colleen held up her phone.
“No pictures right now,” Tristan said. A decent coder could strip information from image files, and any picture of Colleen could give away their location right then and for the rest of her life.
Damn, that was so vulnerable.
Colleen eyed him but then turned back to Anjali. “Yeah, I have a lethal case of bedhead right now. No filter in the world can help me that much.”
“They would say it was Photoshopped anyway. They are definitely all wound up in their crazy theories. But you should make an appearance. There’s a whole thread dedicated to ‘Where in the World is QueenMod Moderator?’ Aliens have been mentioned.”
Colleen told her, “Okay. I’ll get on. We’ve just been tied up.” She snorted and glanced at Tristan, and he forced a smile onto his face in return. “But, we don’t really need the monitor. I don’t know how long we’re even going to be in town, and you said you were using it.”
But they needed the monitor.
Mary Varvara Bell was threatening Colleen, and Tristan was laser-focused on stopping Bell and her organization from hurting her. His wealth, his programs, his friends, his boat, and all the people in the world paled beside his gut-wrenched craving to protect Colleen from whatever Bell was going to throw at her.
Tristan would do anything. He would leap in front of a bullet or a car. He’d rip an assassin into chunks with his bare hands. To protect Colleen, he would unleash his most despicable Hounds of Hell programs at Mary Varvara Bell and the very architecture of the internet if he had to.
He might destroy a lot in the process.
All of civilization?
Probably not.
Maybe some.
But Tristan would damn well protect her.
Even if saving her ate up all his valuable time before Mary Varvara Bell’s deadline.
Tristan stood. “We need the monitor.”
“We do?” Colleen asked.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Desperately.”
Colleen shrugged and turned back to Anjali. “I’ll help you carry it up.”
“No,” Tristan said. “I’ll get it. Stay here and lock the door while we’re gone.”
Anjali led him to her car, which was the angular sedan Colleen had emerged from at the airport, and opened the trunk for him. “So, what is going on with you and my friend?”
19
Engaged
Tristan
Tristan wrestled the wide, curved monitor out of the back of Anjali’s car. One corner wedged itself under the lip of the boot, and he had to slide it back and forth until he could maneuver it loose. “We had some business problems in Los Angeles. We came here to regroup before we carry on.”
“I don’t mean your business, or whatever it is you’re doing. I mean, what’s going on with you and Colleen?”
The boot of the car relinquished its hold on the monitor, and Tristan set it on its side in preparation to pick it up. “I don’t understand the question. She’s my coding consultant, and we need the monitor so we can write the code.”
Anjali pressed her generous lips together for a moment, an internal argument she was trying to contain waging in her head. She failed. “You walked into her place of business and got her fired. You paid her a stupid amount of money to fly to California with you, and then you came back. She has been traveling with you for several days. You should not be leading her around like this unless you have a reason.”
Tristan felt his lips part as his mouth almost fell open. “Are you asking me what my intentions are?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t her older brothers supposed to be the ones who shove a shotgun in my back and drag me to the church?”
“Colleen’s older brothers are jerks. I am her family now. And yes, I am asking you what your intentions are with my best friend, Colleen.”
Tristan made sure the monitor wouldn’t fall over and turned to look down at the small woman who was hilariously interrogating him about her friend. “I’ve only known her for four days.” Internet time not included.
“Time is a construct. When the person is right, you know. My parents met three times before they agreed to be married, and they are still very happily married. I don’t think you should get to know a person too well before marrying them. It leaves no happy surprises for married life.”