Flutter: The Nash Brothers, Book Three Read online

  Flutter

  The Nash Brothers, Book Three

  Carrie Aarons

  Copyright © 2019 by Carrie Aarons

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Editing done by Proofing Style.

  Cover designed by Okay Creations.

  For anyone who has been burned by love, yet gives it one, two or three more tries.

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek of Fleeting, Book One in the Nash Brothers series

  Read the other Nash Brothers!

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  About the Author

  Also by Carrie Aarons

  Prologue

  Penelope

  The young, virile man slams my back against the wall opposite the hotel room door and lunges for my mouth.

  Meeting him lash for lash with my tongue, I moan against his teeth as my fingers rip the buttons from their loopholes on his crisp white tuxedo shirt. They scatter, echoing through the room as they’re lost somewhere in the wake of our foreplay. It’s a rental, but he can afford to pay the replacement cost.

  He returns the favor with a growl and a smile, tugging the zipper of my bridesmaid dress so hard that it catches on the fabric and shreds it. Oh well, as usual, I would have never worn this thing again … no offense to Presley.

  Tearing my lips from his, I give him my best death glare. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll cut your balls off.”

  It’s bad enough I am about to screw the brains out of a man six years younger than I am. It’s another thing entirely that the man is Forrest Nash.

  For years, I’ve despised this man-child. Everything about him, from his pompous, know-it-all attitude to the way his hair always seems to look sex-tousled. It’s not fair for a human to possess so much intelligence and attractiveness. The scales need to be tipped … the gods couldn’t have given him both.

  Especially because Forrest is almost as obnoxious as I am. We fight like cats and dogs, but I usually get the last word in.

  But … oh hell, I can’t argue, much less think, when he’s doing that with his tongue.

  1

  Forrest

  It’s a bitch and a half getting to the Muller County Police Headquarters, which is why I typically never do it.

  For one, you have to take a highway to get there. And while I may compute my way through cyberspace on a daily basis, my small-town ass doesn’t want to merge into traffic going eighty in a sixty-five. While I talk a big game about being above everyone in my hometown of Fawn Hill, I’m just as annoyed when I have to drive over the town line. Or maybe I’m just lazy.

  Sitting in front of a screen all day will do that to a man.

  But why move? I have the world at my fingertips. In a few key strokes, I can hack into a Chinese banking system, or gamble using cryptocurrency with some amateur coder in Berlin. I’m the most intelligent computer whiz my town, this state, and maybe even the country has seen in decades … just ask me and I’ll tell you.

  “Shit, who let your bragging ass in here?” Detective Mack Robbins rolls his eyes sarcastically as I saunter into the station.

  I fist bump him as I sit on the corner of his desk. “Your captain. Told me you failed to get another case closed, so he had to bring in the big guns to solve it.”

  “Man, shut up with all that.” Mack’s deep chocolate skin crinkles around his eyes as he smiles. “The captain just knows I don’t have time to sit and diddle on my keyboard. I’m out saving lives in the real world.”

  It’s our age-old argument, one we only half-joke about each time I get dragged down to headquarters. The station is an hour from my house, so there must be a good reason Captain Kline called me down because he also knows how much I hate coming in. If it can be said in an email, send me an email.

  “Says the guy who had help from said diddler on his last three cases.” I raise an eyebrow, cocky in my delivery.

  Mack laughs me off, patting my shoulder. “When are you going to stay after one of your cleanup jobs and go out for beers with me and the guys?”

  Looking around the bullpen of desks, I notice it’s relatively empty. I guess it is Monday morning, and the captain called me down here at the ass-crack of dawn for some godforsaken reason.

  My work with the county police started about four years ago when they caught me hacking into another one of their poorly protected systems after my twin brother, Fletcher, was arrested for a drunk driving charge. I hadn’t been trying to get him off, I’d simply been trying to look into the arrest record to see how we could get the best possible defense for him. My oldest brother, Keaton, had been livid when he found out. Not only was I breaking the law, but I was trying to protect my twin from the consequences that he clearly deserved. It was just what I did, though, protect Fletcher.

  Instead of punishing me, though, the police offered me a job. It hadn’t been the first time I’d broken their firewalls, and at first, the gig was part-time consulting on their computer security systems. I’d taken it because the money was good and I loved puzzles. Configuring a network of impenetrable, well to anyone besides me, databases sounded like a neat week of work.

  When I’d completed the project in an eighth of the time that the department gave me, Captain Kline offered me a handshake and a contract. As much as I skirted the law, only virtually that is, being the county’s only Computer Forensics Investigator had its advantages.

  I did my job exceptionally well and had solved a bunch of both digital and IRL crimes for the department over the years. But, every officer here knew that the only master I served was myself. Being on retainer with the police didn’t mean I stopped my dark web activity or ceased hacking into places I wasn’t supposed to go. That’s why most everyone, aside from Mack and a few others, here was skeptical of me.

  Not that their attitude toward me bothered me in the least, I’d have to care about other people’s opinions for that to sting. But, it did make for awkward conversation over beers, and why do
that when I could enjoy a cold one in the solitude of my living room?

  “Nash! My office.” Captain Kline stomps through the bullpen, very much resembling a rhinoceros.

  “Saved by the captain. See ya later, Mack. Don’t get too salty when I solve whatever this is.” I throw him a wink and stroll in the direction of Kline, whistling like a real bastard.

  A couple of the other officers look up at the noise, and I watch their annoyed grimaces follow me into their boss’s office.

  “Captain, can’t say I’m glad to see you at this hour of the morning.” My voice is full of sarcasm.

  Captain Kline, a bulbous man in his early fifties with a buzz cut and all the friendliness of a cactus, shoots me a glare. “I’m not in the mood for your arrogant charm this morning, Nash. I have a case that only you can help with, and I called you in here so early as to avoid much detection. This needs to stay between us … it’s a … well, you just can’t go blabbing about it.”

  “Do I ever talk about my police work?” I give him the honest eyebrow.

  Kline folds his arms over his chest. “Remember the time you posted on Facebook about the thief stealing mechanical equipment from the state fair and posting it on Craigslist?”

  I cringe. “That was one time …”

  The captain looks at me like we both know it wasn’t. But sometimes, I had my own methods. Kline was wrong, also … I’d posted on Reddit with incorrect information about the state fair burglaries knowing that the real thief would want to take credit. The guy ended up setting the record straight on the forum, and I traced his IP address to give the police the arrest.

  One of my other talents in this job was reading people, especially online. I could tell what would set a criminal off, and just how to dig into them to make them do something stupid in the virtual world.

  Kline smacks a meaty palm on his desk. “Enough of this bullshit. I need you on this and I need your discretion. There have been some … thefts. Monetary ones. Small incremental robberies that no one noticed until recently, and they seemed to have come from breaches in a system.”

  I nod, logging all of this information in my memory. Notepads weren’t necessary, I didn’t have to log things on my phone. I’m not sure when I noticed I had a photographic memory, or that I could retain a lot of information much longer than my brothers could. We’d go out to eat and Keaton, Bowen, and Fletcher could barely remember what they wanted to order when the waiter came, while I could recite the entire menu as my mom was tucking me into bed.

  Genius, they called me. I wasn’t going to argue with what was probably true, not that I was ever diligent enough to get tested.

  “And where was it, what systems?”

  Captain Kline rubs his hands over his face, clearly distressed at this part. “All of them. I received the first report, from the athletics director at the high school in Fawn Hill. He noticed that, slowly but surely, small disbursements of the athletics budget had been siphoned in the past year. Dollars some weeks, more in others, but the theft totals up to about five thousand dollars. And it’s not just the school. Nollers Stamping Plant made a call to Mack to report seven thousand five hundred dollars had gone missing in minute amounts in the last year, as well as two more county businesses who have come to me.”

  “Let me guess, they’re all on the same network or run the same security programs on their computers.”

  It’s no coincidence that four businesses, or public places that have budgets and financials, were digitally burglarized in the last year and no one caught the small amounts siphoned out until now. They all had to be running the same kind of program on a system somewhere … that’s how the hacker was getting in.

  Kline nods. “Clearly I don’t speak your language, but it has to be something like that. And these are only the ones who have noticed. All in all, the suspect has made out with about thirty grand in other people’s money, which in these parts is a good sum. Who knows how many other places are being unknowingly skimmed from? That’s what I need you to figure out. Pinpoint the program he’s sneaking in through, identify if any of the thousands of businesses in the county use it as well, and trace this guy. We have to stop him … I have a feeling this asshole is making off with a lot of hard-working people’s money.”

  If I knew anything about the half-cocked digital business practices of the professionals operating in this county, I’d say more than two dozen of them could be getting stolen from and never realize it.

  The checklist in my head starts to form, and the adrenaline rush of having a new cyber puzzle to solve gets my veins firing. “All right, well, let me go on a deep dive when I get home. I’ll need access to all of their—”

  I was about to say organizations, but we both knew that I didn’t need permission to hack into something I wanted to see. Kline cut me off before I could say it anyway.

  “No, I’d start at the scene of the first crime. Fawn Hill High School.”

  2

  Penelope

  “Matthew Liam, if you’re not down here in point three seconds, you lose your Xbox for a month!”

  I scream up the stairs, my voice taking on a terrifying bellow. School mornings are usually chaos, as is expected with three boys under the age of ten, but this is just one of those days where everything is falling apart.

  My four-year-old, Ames, peed on his sheets last night and I’d had to do a quick job of stripping his bed, pep talking him through a shower and then aiding him in his get-ready progress as he was still my baby. Travis Jr, my oldest at the teetering on puberty age of nine, refused to wake up for an alarm, much less a bulldozer. And Matthew, the seven-year-old and quintessential middle child, has been sitting on his bed in his underwear playing baseball cards for the last half hour.

  I feel murderous, and I haven’t even gotten to swipe on mascara yet. Not that today is different from any other moment of my life; when you’re a widow by the age of twenty-eight and left to raise three strong-willed males, there isn’t much hope for order. As much as I try to remain the drill sergeant, though, these rascals melt my heart and though it’s insanity, I wouldn’t trade motherhood for the world.

  Matthew comes racing down the stairs, nearly tripping over the five pairs of shoes left scattered under the banister, but at least he’s dressed.

  “Okay, eat breakfast while Mommy gets dressed. Trav, if Ames needs help cutting his waffle, do it, please? And no milk, Matty, you know you’re not supposed to. There is almond milk in the fridge if you want some.”

  My middle boy liked the taste of regular cow’s milk but was horribly lactose intolerant. I didn’t need a poop explosion calling me out of work, and he didn’t need the embarrassment in front of his second grade class.

  “I love you, Mama.” Ames gives me his toothy grin, chocolate chip waffles already staining his baby teeth.

  Rolling my eyes but melting into the swoon my last baby always manages to produce, I sprint up the stairs two at a time to throw on my work clothes. Not that I had to don heels and a dress, as the high school nurse my attire was pretty relaxed. But I did have to put on a bra and pick a shirt that the teenage boys couldn’t completely look down. I’m convinced those menaces came into my office just to try to check out my cleavage.

  Not that I blame them that much, I have great boobs. Just not for eyes that young.

  That makes my entire stomach flip, thinking about the last set of too-young eyes to glance at my bare breasts. Aquamarine pools, and they’d done that cocky, charming thing their owner seemed to have a patent on.

  Forrest Nash. That arrogant bastard.

  Just thinking about him, and the things he had done to my body, made my blood boil. He was a pompous jerk who made me simultaneously feel like a cougar, something I despised, and made my vagina sing like a Greek muse from that Disney movie Hercules. It was maddening that someone I disliked so much knew how to play my tune so well.

  The fleeting emotion of anger subsides, followed by an enormous dollop of grief. This is how it always
went when I thought about the most boastful of the two youngest Nash brothers. My mind spiraled into a hellish hole of longing lust, annoyance at that desire, and then crushing grief that I’d betrayed my husband.

  But, that wasn’t true. I hadn’t cheated on Travis. Because … he was dead.

  Had been for almost three years now. A casualty of war, the army had told me when they came to my door in their damn car in those damn uniforms. Said he’d made a sacrifice for the greater good. Now, years later, I don’t see it that way. I loved that man so damn much; it kills me every day that he isn’t here to watch his boys grow up. Ames doesn’t even remember him, a fact that makes me have to bite my tongue so harshly to keep from crying every time my little boy cocks his head at a picture of his father.

  “Mommy!” Someone hollers up the stairs. “We’re going to be late!”

  Shit. In my maelstrom of self-pity, I hadn’t even picked out a pair of pants. Grabbing the first thing my hands land on, I pull out a pair of trusty black jeggings that both slimmed me but appeared professional. And they skirted on the verge of yoga pants, which was just an added bonus.