Page 21 of A Rhapsody of Ravens and Revenge

“We don’t want to stay out too long,” he said. “The weather is going to turn bad before too long.”

“How do you know?” she asked, looking at the sky. “It looks clear and sunny to me.”

“Because the wind shifted and the waves changed,” he said. “I grew up on the water. My dad was a shrimper in the South Carolina Lowcountry. I could pilot a boat long before I got a driver’s license, and I could read the signs of upcoming weather before I started school.”

“So how come you’re a hacker instead of a shrimper?” she asked, curiosity written across her face.

It was the first time she’d ever asked about his childhood. When they’d been kids she’d just accepted him for who he was. She’d never commented on his drawl or that his manners weren’t refined and his clothes didn’t have designer labels. And he’d never bothered to offer up the information. As far as he was concerned that part of his life was over, and if he tried hard enough, he could pretend it never happened at all.

Cal shrugged and swam closer to the waterfall and to her, close enough he could feel the splashes on his face.

“My dad liked to drink,” he said. “He had big fists, and he liked dangerous waters and rough bars. He was killed in a knife fight when I was seven. He was drunk and picked a fight with the wrong man. My mother was relieved I think. I guess I was too.”

Her mouth opened in an O of surprise, but she stayed silent, watching him out of those eyes that had always been too big and too wise for her face.

“We’d been poor when my dad was alive,” he said, remembering back to the two-room cabin they’d lived in along the marsh. “After he died we were really poor. Mom went out to find work. Sometimes she came home, and sometimes she didn’t. That left me to my own devices. I’d always done well in school, even skipped the first grade, and the first time they put a computer in my hands I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. When I wasn’t in school I was at the library using the ones there. It was then I realized that I could do everything I needed to do to make life easier with just the stroke of a few keys. I made it my mission to get my own setup.”

He wasn’t sure why he was telling her all this. He’d just opened his mouth and the words started pouring out. It had been a long time since he’d thought of those early days—the days before Robert Lockwood had tracked him down and taken him into custody.

His smile was grim. “That’s when I started to take a turn toward the dark side. I was a ten-year-old kid with no supervision. I was big for my age, and I knew how to fight to get what I wanted. I also knew how to steal and keep out of sight from the law. I made friends with grifters and thieves. I hacked into my first bank before my eleventh birthday. I was never a stupid kid. I kept going to school. I knew that if I stopped I’d be wanted for truancy. I had no idea where my mother was at that point, so I made one up.

“I set up different accounts, siphoning money from different places so it would take longer to track down. And then I hired this woman, Mary Louise Cobb, to pretend she was my mother. They wouldn’t exactly let a ten-year-old rent an apartment by himself, so she and I made a deal. She got a nice kickback and she left me to my own devices and never asked questions. It was a setup that worked well until your father broke down my door.”

“Wow,” she said. “I can’t imagine having that kind of ingenuity at ten.”

“Survival skills kick in when you need them,” he said.

“Whatever happened to your mother?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “She never came looking for me. I was just a mouth to feed, and she was having a hard enough time filling her own. It worked out for the best, at least until I was fourteen. Your dad gave me a chance to walk the straight and narrow or go to prison. It seemed like the best option at the time.”

She looked at him strangely, and he wondered what she was thinking. But she didn’t ask any more questions. Instead she said, “We should probably go back to the house.”

Chapter Eight

Cal was driving her crazy. And he was doing it on purpose. Jerk.

Something had shifted between them. They’d been in a battle for years, equally matched in the hardheadedness department, and it was as if they’d both come to an unspoken resolve. She’d spent years trying to replace her love of him with anger, but she was tired. It was hard work to keep that level of hatred in your heart. Especially since she’d loved him for as long as she could remember.

Seeing him again, wanting him again, loving him again…she just didn’t have the strength to go through it all. He’d rejected her. That’s what it really came down to. It hadn’t been a rejection of her looks or her affections, he’d rejected her at the core of who she was.

She’d spent years fantasizing about his reaction when he found out what she was capable of. That she was his equal in every way. She thought it would open his eyes and make him really see her. That she was no longer the little girl who followed him around like a puppy. But a woman who could match him in every way. She’d been sorely disappointed that the reality hadn’t lived up to the fantasy. But it was her own fault. She recognized now the girl who’d been starved for attention from the men in her life. To be able to prove that she was just as capable and just as worthy of the love, time and attention that her father gave to his agents. She’d gone about it the wrong way, and there was nothing she could do to change the past.

She was done being held under Cal’s thumb. If she had to confess her sins to her father she would. But being around Cal again had opened something up inside of her. Even his kiss had been like a veil being removed from her eyes. And she was done living half a life. She was done not being who she was meant to be.

Cal had set up shop in the kitchen. His computers were lined up like soldiers on the big breakfast table and he sat at the keyboard like a king, his fingers moving from one to the other as naturally as some people might breathe.

She knew what it felt like. Knew the rush of power that one tiny command could bring. And there he sat, looking better than he had any right to and just as dangerous. His hair was tousled and a little long around the collar and ears. After they’d come back from the beach he’d changed into a pair of loose-fitting lounge pants and a white T-shirt that hugged his biceps and chest like a second skin. His forearms were strong, the muscles there prominent, and she wanted to get a closer look at the tattoos that ran from shoulder to wrist.

Cal was built like a boxer, with well-defined muscles and an athletic build that made women take a second look whenever he walked into a room.

She was losing her mind. She felt like a teenage girl with a serious case of infatuation, and all she could think about was kissing him again. She went to the fridge to grab a cold bottle of water, looking for a distraction.

She’d always considered herself abnormal, an anomaly in the relationship department. It was always supposed to be Cal for her. She knew it as well as she knew to breathe. No one else had ever captured her attention like he had. She’d never gone through the teenage girl stage where she’d felt the flutter of butterflies any time a boy looked in her direction. There was a soul connection between them, even if he didn’t realize it because he couldn’t see her as anything more than the child she’d been.

After he’d broken her heart she’d thrown herself into schoolwork, going through two master’s programs as if they’d been elementary school. It hadn’t been enough to keep her busy so she’d decided to go on and get her PhD, thinking Cal would come back around once he saw she’d grown up. That he would give her the chance to redeem all the wrongs that had been done.

But it hadn’t happened. Her father had let it slip about Cal’s marriage, almost as an afterthought. He’d been frustrated because Cal put in for vacation leave last minute so he could take a couple of weeks for a honeymoon, and it had left him shorthanded.

---