When they could manage the effort, silently they pulled apart and cleaned up with the napkins she’d brought, and some of the water. Morgan gave a low growl of laughter because Tricks had turned her back on them while she finished off her chew bone. When they were dressed again—halfway, at least; she had on her shirt and underwear, and he had on his jeans—he pulled her to sit between his drawn-up legs and wrapped his arms around her. “Now,” he said. “We talk. I have something serious to tell you, about me being here.”
She thought about that a minute. “Will I like it?”
“Probably not. But if you and I are going to do this thing we’ve got going, then I’m going to be straight with you. You might kick my ass to the curb, but that’s a chance I have to take.”
Okay, so it definitely wasn’t a don’t-get-serious-because-I-have-one-foot-out-the-door talk. Bo leaned her head back against his shoulder, laid her arms on top of his where they wrapped around her stomach. Her mind raced, trying to think what could be so dicey about his situation here, which led her immediately to Axel. “Damn it!” she said irritably. “I knew I should have been more suspicious of Axel. He’s behind this, right?”
“Mostly right. I have my share of responsibility. The deal is this: what he told you was correct, as far as it goes—”
“But, because he’s Axel, he didn’t travel too far down the truth road, did he?” She felt like growling. Any time Axel was involved, her irritation level shot through the roof. She didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and so far her instincts had been dead on the money.
Morgan grunted. “He has other priorities, and they’re damn important priorities. Likely he chose to send me to you partly out of spite, because that’s Axel. But he had other criteria for choosing you, such as the relative isolation of the town, the small population that would make it easy to spot strangers, the relatively short distance to D.C. He was setting a trap.”
Bo absorbed that, rapidly sorting through and discarding scenarios. She wasn’t schooled in subterfuge, but she was intelligent and observant, and this additional information clicked in a way Axel’s original argument hadn’t. Oh, she’d been swayed—by Morgan’s condition, by the money Axel had offered, by the surface logic of what he’d said. The logic even went deeper than one layer because of the probability that their organization had been compromised from the inside. And yet . . . she should have been more suspicious.
She asked the most important question first: “Is it possible anyone in town could be in danger or hurt?” That had been one of her original concerns, and she’d been fool enough to believe Axel when he’d denied it. The town and the people in it were her responsibility; more than that, the people were her friends. If anything happened to any one of them—she didn’t know if she’d be able to get past that. On the one hand she appreciated that Morgan was telling her the truth, but on the other hand this was so potentially big that she didn’t know if she’d be able to handle it. How ironic that she’d been so worried he might leave, and now she might make him leave. But she would hear him out, and she wouldn’t make a hasty decision. There were a lot of things to consider, circumstances to weigh.
He sighed and rested his chin on top of her head. “My guess? Almost zero. But anything is possible. We don’t know who we’re dealing with. The idea was to hide me away in a place that was safe but not inaccessible, leak info that I’m recovering my memory, and trigger the bad actors into making another hack—but this time with a trigger on the information so we’d know who was doing the hack.”
“And if that fails, Hamrickville is small enough, isolated enough, that it would be easy for us to spot an outsider,” she finished. “There’s a flaw in that, though; the town is small, but it’s also big enough that I don’t know everyone, or even have a good idea who at least half the population is. It’s four thousand people; a stranger wouldn’t necessarily stand out.” People who lived in large cities seemed to think everyone in a small town knew everyone else, but that just wasn’t so.
“But there aren’t a lot of roads coming to Hamrickville, so intercepting someone would be more feasible than if you were on an interstate. Hamrickville was a secondary consideration, and a convenient one. Axel’s money was on catching the hacker and following the Judas twig all the way back to the Judas tree.”
“Except nothing has happened, despite his ‘leaks.’” Normally she loved for things to be calm; drama wasn’t in her wheelhouse. But in this instance, she thought her reaction should be more . . . forceful, more angry, yet going off half-cocked wasn’t her way. She was angry, yes—at Axel. He was a champion asshole. He hadn’t turned a hair at possibly endangering the townsfolk, or herself, come to that. His sole consideration was finding and eliminating the threat to the GO-Teams specifically and to Morgan as a . . . well, Morgan had said it perfectly himself: he was a secondary consideration. Maybe that was why she wasn’t throwing a total fit at Morgan, why she wasn’t screaming and telling him to go screw himself the next time he got a hard-on.
“Exactly. He hasn’t had a nibble. So we’re dead in the water because I still don’t have a fucking clue why I was targeted. If it helps, anything happening in town would be damn stupid on the part of whoever is behind this. If they slip past Axel’s trap, more than likely they’ll come to your house.”