Chapter 16
CALEB
When Law and Carlie leave the reception to head to the airport for their honeymoon, I stand with Malia just off the path, arm around her shoulders, holding her close to me. She’s resting against my side, and I can’t help planting a soft kiss on top of her head.
Carlie catches my eye as she and Law stop on their way by. I let go of Malia to hug my sister goodbye.
“Knew it,” she whispers.
I just laugh. “Whatever.”
“Funny how you ended up with a CEO after all.” She leans back and looks over at Malia to wink.
“You knew that too?” I share a look with Malia.
“Mom told me,” Carlie says, shaking with laughter. “She was giddy.” She turns to Malia and leans in for a quick hug. “Let’s do a double date or something when Law and I get back.”
“I’d love to,” Malia says.
Law tugs Carlie away, although she also stops to hug my parents, Jenna, all of her kids, and Scarlett and Zoey, Chad’s girls, whom she nannies.
I can hear them asking how long she’s going to be gone before Ivy scoops up Zoey, the younger one, into her arms and whispers something in her ear.
Zoey immediately turns to Carlie and waves excitedly. “Love you, Carlie! We miss you!”
Carlie blows them kisses as she leaves.
“So.” I wrap my arms around Malia from behind. “We can finally get out of this overdone Valentine’s Day party.”
She snorts. “Best one I’ve ever been to.” She tips her head back against my shoulder. “But I won’t argue. Let’s grab some cheesecake and run.”
“Excellent idea.” I let her go to slide my hand down into hers to walk back into the restaurant. The DJ is still playing music, and the venue is rented for another couple hours, so the party will go on, but I’m ready to ditch and spend some time alone with Malia.
“Uncle Caleb!” My nephew Hudson’s voice stops us before we get out the door. I turn to see him, his brother Ian, and Ruby running up to us, Jenna trailing behind. “We made you and your girlfriend something.”
I meet Jenna’s gaze when Hudson uses the term girlfriend. She shrugs and grins. Malia is beaming. I’m taking all of Jenna’s kids for ice cream soon for helping me lock her in.
Ruby hands a big pink heart to Malia and then runs back to her mom. Jenna has written “Happy Valentine’s Day” on it, but there’s a kid’s drawing of two oddly shaped figures holding hands.
“Thank you, Ruby.” Malia blows her a kiss, and Ruby turns her face into Jenna’s skirts to hide.
Ian and Hudson both hand their hearts over to me. They’ve both written “Happy Valentine’s Day” themselves, and their hearts are both filled with wobbly drawings of hearts and stars.
“Wow, guys, these are amazing.” I give them both high fives. “Best Valentines I’ve gotten today.” I look over at Malia pointedly.
“We’ll see about that,” she says under her breath, and I laugh.
“Come on, boys,” Jenna says, beckoning to them. “Let’s go find your dad and get ready to leave.”
“Bye, Uncle Caleb!” Ian waves as he hurries over to his mom. “Bye, Caleb’s girlfriend!”
“Malia,” I hear Jenna tell him, laughter in her voice. “Her name is Malia.”
“They are all adorable,” Malia says, taking my hand again. “Can I keep them?”
“Definitely. They’ll probably end up liking you more than me anyway.”
“They would never. They’re too sweet.” She leans against my shoulder as we walk out. “Just like their uncle.”
“Taught them everything I know.” I squeeze her hands. “And also, I’ve been thinking about the mole.”
Malia’s face brightens. “With everything going on today? How?”
“I contain multitudes.”
She laughs. “What did you figure out?”
“I have a theory.”
I take Malia home first to change into more comfortable clothes, even though I can’t stop thinking about her wearing my sweats.
Which is why I grin when she comes downstairs in my Pumas hoodie she wore last night.
She’s paired it with some leggings instead of my too-big sweats, but I’m not complaining.
“I like it,” I say in a low voice. I use the hoodie ties to gently tug her toward me.
She smirks at me with an expression that sizzles through me. “I thought you might.” She leans up to give me a quick peck, but I put my arms around her and keep her close, kissing her for several minutes.
“You want to play here or at my house?” I ask against her lips.
“I don’t have any comfortable clothes you could fit into,” she says, then laughs.
“Well, I do have your sweats, but you can’t have this hoodie back.
” She doesn’t even look apologetic as she shrugs one shoulder.
She takes my hand. “Come here and look at my setup. But we’ll probably want to go to your house.
” She leads me up the stairs, which open onto a landing surrounded by three doors.
One is open, and I can see into a large bedroom I suspect is hers, but the landing is what she wants me to see.
Malia has a big-screen TV, like me, mounted on one wall, and like me, she’s also got a computer desk with a couple screens set up. But the only seating in the room is a big, plush gaming chair.
“Honestly,” I say, “I used to have something like this when I lived in Dallas, but when I moved back here, Jett and Devin, and then Law, started coming over to play with me and they whined about sitting on the floor.”
“They play video games with you?” Malia says, tilting her head at me in surprise. “Like what? Call of Duty?” She scrunches her eyebrows. “You really don’t strike me as a Call of Duty guy.”
I chuckle. “I’m not, but you might be even more surprised by what we do usually play.”
Her eyes brighten. “Oh! What is it? Mario Kart? Wait. Wait. Animal Crossing?”
I pull her into a hug, laughing. “FootballPro.”
She leans back, looking at me sternly. “Please tell me you beat the actual football pros at that game.”
“Soundly,” I promise. “It’s really all about strategy, and those big muscles mean nothing when you take them off the field. Although Jett is really good. He’s got the head of a coach. For real.”
“I can see it.” She holds a hand out to her room and the lone chair.
“So yeah, we have to go to your house. Better seating—like, much comfier. Plus, I’m very eager to find out about this theory of yours about the mole.
” She does grab her Xbox to bring over, though, so she can log into Shadow Heroes as her own character.
When we’re settled—read: snuggled—on the couch in my game room, I tell her what I suspect about our teammate, Matt.
Her mouth drops open. “Really? What did I miss?” It doesn’t surprise me that team leader Malia would consider it a failure that I figured this out before her.
“Well, my guess is that you weren’t in the back-end data snooping around.” I give her a fake grimace.
Malia snorts. “You hacked Shadow Heroes?”
“Hacked is such a negative term. And besides, I was only snooping around my own account … mostly.”
“Wait.” She sits up and turns to fully face me, putting a hand on my arm. “Tell me what you did for the Bennets.”
I shake my head and laugh. “If I did, I’d have to kill you.”
She scoffs. “Caleb Gallagher.”
Hmmm, Professional Malia has come back, and she’s very sexy. “Do you remember when Ellie’s little sister Libby disappeared last year?”
Malia nods. “Yeah, of course.”
“I did some … stuff to help track her. Most of it with permission.”
She leans toward me and bites her lip. “Most?” she questions, but the look in her eyes says she likes what she’s hearing.
I just smirk.
She scoots herself into my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck and leaning in even closer. “Caleb Gallagher,” she repeats. Her tone is just as demanding, but it’s lower and a half-whisper. “I would like details.”
I can’t help the smile growing on my lips. Ellie Bennet and her family were grateful for what I did. Her father even paid for my legal counsel on retainer in case Grayson Hollis wanted to press charges for anything I did to help find Libby.
But Malia will appreciate the skill and the technique.
So, like any guy who wants to prove to his girlfriend how cool he is, I give her the details—how I hacked Grayson’s phone to get their location, the way I slipped past the Winscott hotel security to find the guest list, and the algorithm I set up to scan for Libby’s face online, though it was Ava’s search that actually found something.
(She is very good at social media stalking. I give the girl her due credit.)
“Mmm-hmm, you’ve got to stop talking dirty to me,” Malia says when I’m done.
I laugh and kiss her, enjoying the feel of her in my arms. When Malia told me earlier that she chose me, I kind of dismissed it, but she’s right. How long would I have gone in the friend zone if I hadn’t been forced out of it? How long before I would have asked her out?
“So, we were talking about Matt possibly being a traitor,” she says when we manage to stop kissing for a few seconds.
“Yeah, let me show you.” We resituate ourselves on the couch.
I’m sitting deep in the corner so that Malia can stay in my lap, and she turns around, leaning back against my chest. I walk her through how I noticed another player accessing our game at really odd times—middle of the night, very early mornings, random afternoons when most people are at work.
“See how there’re a lot of times when the person logs in but then gets right back out?
Those were times another member of our team was on.
But here are other times, when no one else was on, when they stayed on for longer.
I couldn’t track what they were doing, but I also couldn’t figure out how a random player was getting access to our mission. ”
“Ahhh.” Malia nods. “So it had to be someone on the team, using an anonymous account.”
“Exactly. Either that or someone hacked us and got our passwords and data. I decided to check the first option out first and traced the player’s IP back to the same place Matt plays from most of the time.”
She puts her hand up on the side of my face and pats it gently. “You are such a genius.”
“Meh.” I kiss the top of her head.
“So what are we going to do?” she asks. “Matt will deny it to the rest of the team, and we don’t technically have proof since all of this comes from you snooping in the back end.”
“Oh, kitten, there’s more.”
Malia fully turns to look at me. “Kitten?” she says with an arch of her eyebrow.
“Yeah, it didn’t work, but it sounded good in my head.”
She snorts with laughter and turns back to the screen. “What’s your plan?”
“I created a fake set of files and switched them without a trace. We’re going to tell the rest of the team that we have to send the files over, even though we haven’t found the mole, because our time is up.
Matt will obviously go in to retrieve it once we’ve delivered it to the drop, and when he opens it, it will make the word Traitor appear above his character’s head and follow him around. ”
Malia’s shoulders shake. “You did not.”
“It seemed fun.”
Malia starts messaging our team, seeing who can get on to do the drop, telling them that our British contact reached out and said they have to take delivery by tonight. Matt is the first to tell us he’s up for the mission.
An hour later, our team is gathered. Macie, the woman whose character is our gadget expert, is the first to notice that Malia and I are in the same place.
“Yeah, we’ve been playing together since we live near each other. It’s fun,” Malia says with a wink in my direction.
“Fun,” Macie repeats suggestively. Neither Malia nor I reply.
The delivery goes well. I suggest we break for dinner and then meet back together in an hour to confirm our contact has received the drop and make plans for our next steps.
We probably won’t get new mission tasks from the game until it confirms that our British contact has our files, but Malia and I are hoping that Matt will take the opportunity to scoop up the Trojan horse we left for him.
“LetsEat or Vincenzo’s?” I ask, standing and then offering Malia a hand to pull her up.
“Vincenzo’s, of course.” She holds my hand as we leave the game room for the kitchen.
Malia working beside me in my kitchen in bare feet and my hoodie is a circumstance that makes me stop, press her against the kitchen counter, and kiss her soundly for a while.
And it happens multiple times. It’s actually a wonder we get the pizza into the oven and finished before our hour-long dinner break is up.
Matt is suspiciously absent when we reconvene, but what no one else on our team knew is that Malia and I placed a spy cam at the drop site before we went to prep our dinner.
When we replay the footage for the team, sure enough, it shows Matt’s character coming into frame and grabbing the package.
A second later a big, bold, red “Traitor” appears above his head, and then he quickly logs out and disappears.
We spend a little while explaining to the team—leaving out my behind-the-scenes work and calling it an anonymous tip to Malia—how we suspected Matt. Then we leave our safehouse, kick Matt off the team, find a new location, and set up a plan to deliver the actual file tomorrow night.
Malia is yawning every few seconds by the time we’re done. “I don’t want to leave,” she says, leaning against me. “But I’m exhausted.”
“It’s been a big day.” I wrap my arm around her for a few more minutes of cuddling. “A wedding, turning our fake relationship into a real one, catching a traitor …”
“All good things,” she says around another yawn. As selfish as I want to be and keep her here, I have to be a good boyfriend and drive her home.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, though,” she says as we kiss goodbye just inside her doorway.
“Of course.” I pull her close in a tight hug. “You already promised me every day.”