The Hero and the Hacktivist Read online

  The Hero and the Hacktivist

  Pippa Grant

  Contents

  Introduction

  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

  Epilogue

  CHARMING AS PUCK TEASER

  ROCKAWAY BRIDE TEASER

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Hero and The Hacktivist

  A SEAL / Best Friend’s Brother / Robin Hood in Cyberspace Romantic Comedy

  For anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of an unsolicited dick pic…

  He has the muscles of Adonis, an ego bigger than the sun, and a very clear desire to get back in my pants. Which would be fantastic if he weren’t a SEAL and I wasn’t a criminal.

  Although, I prefer the term avenger.

  I’m a hacktivist, cleaning up the cesspool of cyberspace one scam artist and troll at a time, and I sometimes bend a few rules to get justice done.

  He’s a military man with abs of glory, sworn to uphold the letter of the law no matter its shortcomings. And if he’d known who—or what—I was, I doubt he would’ve banged me at my best friend’s wedding reception.

  Or come back for more.

  Which is why he’s now the only thing standing between me and one very pissed off internet troll who’s figured out where I live.

  I’m pretty sure he’ll get me out of this alive—and quite satisfied, thank you very much—but I’m also pretty sure this mission will end with me in handcuffs.

  And not the good kind of handcuffs.

  The Hero and the Hacktivist is a romping fun romance between a SEAL and a twisted hacker by day, drummer by night, complete with epic klutziness, terrible leg warmers, and an even worse phone virus gone wrong. This romantic comedy stands alone with no cheating or cliffhangers and ends with a fabulously fun happily ever after.

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  Books by Pippa Grant

  Mister McHottie (Chase & Ambrosia)

  Stud in the Stacks (Parker & Knox)

  The Pilot and the Puck-Up (Zeus and Joey)

  Royally Pucked (Manning and Gracie)

  Beauty and the Beefcake (Ares and Felicity)

  Rockaway Bride (Willow and Dax)

  Hot Heir (Viktor and Peach)

  The Hero and the Hacktivist (Rhett and Eloise)

  Charming as Puck (Nick and Kami)

  Exes and Ho Ho Hos (Jake and Kaitlyn)

  And more…

  1

  Rhett Elliott (aka a badass hero suffering in silence)

  You want to know the worst thing about weddings?

  It’s not all the crying—happy, sad, whatever. It’s not the boring-ass ceremony. It’s not the rules—no kidnapping the groom for one last interrogation before he marries your sister, no setting off smoke grenades to interrupt the ceremony, no calling in your team to strip-search the guests just for fun.

  No, the worst thing about weddings is that my baby brother always fucking kicks my ass in Wedding Bingo at the reception.

  Exactly like he’s doing now.

  “Ahh, yeah, baby—that’s Knox’s niece puking up too much cake in the corner. And that’s a bingo,” Brooks crows. He tips the whisky bottle at me at our empty dinner table, where we’re watching all the dancing in the next room of the fancy reception house on Long Island. “Drink up, loser.”

  I knock the bottle away and rock my chair back to look around him at the kid behind the gift table. “She’s not puking, asshole. She’s playing with her shoes.”

  “Your commanders know your vision’s going, old man?”

  Fuck, he even beat me to the sight joke. I’ll look like an idiot if I come back asking him how he can see a baseball. Plus, he’s right. She’s puking.

  I punch him in the arm. Baseball season’s over. He doesn’t need that arm again for a few months. “Sucks you’re not in the playoffs, doesn’t it?”

  He grins. “Sucks you’re on recruitment duty, doesn’t it?”

  I punch him again, then I take the bottle and estimate a shot right off the top.

  Probably got closer to three.

  Not a problem. Would take sixteen to take me down. But there are a few single women of banging age here, so I better not lose one more round of bingo to Brooks.

  I hand him back the bottle and shove to my feet, because I know a thing or seven about puke. Need to determine where this one is on the puke scale. Considering the kid’s probably no more than four, or maybe seven—I don’t really know shit about kids—Brooks is probably right, and that’s most likely cake she’s tossing and not alcohol.

  I reach her side, study the mess, and give it a two on a fifty-point scale. This is amateur stuff. You want gross? Try cleaning up after a few Chair Force flying pansies after one of their weenie naming ceremonies. No, I don’t want to talk about how I got roped into that. Don’t really want to clean up this kid’s mess either, but I don’t know where her parents are, and I should at least make sure she’s not going to go all Exorcist here.

  Don’t tell me that shit’s not real. I’ve stared it down on missions before.

  “Hey. You done?” I ask her.

  She looks up at me, her big eyes waver, and she screams. “Mommy!”

  She scampers away, leaving regurgitated wedding cake all over the floor. Brooks snorts behind me. “Try smiling next time,” he tells me.

  “Fuck smiling. Get me a towel.”

  “Get your own towel. Oh, there’s a granny stealing the leftover champagne. Isn’t that another box in bingo?”

  Dammit, he’s right. I’m losing my touch.

  One of the staff dashes over with a towel. “I have this, Mister…”

  “Grumpypants,” Brooks supplies for me. “We call him Mister Grumpypants.”

  I punch him in the arm again.

  He snickers, then winks at someone across the room.

  There are like four single women here tonight, and he’s just caught the eye of one.

  Only thing worse than losing Wedding Bingo to my brother would be losing my shot at a hot hook-up.

  Although, Parker—that’s my sister, and don’t even think of saying she looks anything less than angelic in her dress today, but you can insult Knox, her new husband, as much as you want—basically threatened me with disembowelment if I slept with any of her bridesmaids.

  Not really necessary. Most of her bridesmaids are married or close enough, and I don’t fuck with married women. Which means I’ve been eyeing that Lila chick that Knox works for sometimes.

  She’s hot—the red-haired, green-eyed kind of hot—independent, career-oriented, and single
. Plus, she works in Manhattan, and I’ll be up in Harlem. Since she’s Knox’s boss, she doesn’t get invited out to Ma and Pa’s place on Long Island for dinner ever.

  It’s basically perfect.

  Unless she falls madly in love with me.

  But that would only suck for Knox, who’d have to hear about me all day long for weeks on end.

  It’s a risk I’m willing to take.

  I glance around the rapidly emptying dining room.

  “You’re out of luck if you’re looking for Lila,” Brooks tells me. “Saw her disappear with Jack ten minutes ago.”

  What the fuck?

  Since when am I the chopped liver in the Elliott brothers sandwich? I’m a fucking SEAL. I eat tuna cans for breakfast—metal and all. I can climb buildings faster than Spider-Man. I even got Zeus Berger—yeah, that Zeus Berger, the 350-pound solid muscle hockey brute that Parker’s friends with—in a headlock until he cried uncle last night after the rehearsal dinner.

  I’m not the fucking chopped liver.

  I’d beat the shit out of anyone who tried anything with my brothers, but they’re all annoying me today. All three of them.

  Four if you count Knox.

  Never thought I’d have a brother-in-law. He’s a good enough dude, I guess. So long as I don’t have to hear about his magic sexual unicorn blanket and so long as he doesn’t hurt my sister, he can live.

  I stalk to the open bar, scowl at the bartender, and he passes me a fresh bottle of tequila. Thirty seconds later, I’m passing through the sliding glass door onto the open patio behind the fancy-ass house. We’re getting the last sun rays of the warm part of autumn tonight. Tomorrow, everything gets cold, and it’ll be slushy and gray and miserable before you know it.

  Brooks doesn’t follow me, so I have the stiff-ass iron chair at the prissy little table all to myself. Got a clear view to watching Parker and Knox dancing, and I have to physically restrain myself from charging inside when I see his hand drift down to her ass.

  Ma would probably kill me if I hurt Knox. She wants grandbabies. It’s like her life goal. And she could probably get Zeus Berger in a headlock too, so I’m not going to piss her off.

  I swig my tequila off the bottle, fully aware of all the white sparkly lights and crinkly streamer crap strung up everywhere and the two other occupied tables out here, where guests are debating some shit about the Mets possibly trading Brooks and if Knox’s granny is really a secret romance author. I can still smell the roast beef from dinner mingling with the autumn breeze, and I know there’s nothing but night insects in the thin patch of trees behind me.

  All’s safe in this little part of the world. My sister is madly in love. Two of my three brothers are on their way to hook-ups.

  And I’m not getting any tonight.

  This is boring as shit.

  A flash of glittery color crossing the dance floor catches my eye, and I narrow my focus.

  The lone single bridesmaid.

  Eloise.

  She’s a nutcase. Squirrely, like she’s hiding something. Plays drums in Parker’s girl band. Heard from Brooks, who heard from Jack, who heard from Knox, that Eloise is some kind of heiress wasting her life playing computer games all the time.

  The heiress part, I wouldn’t get from looking at her. The computer game part, though, yeah. Dark spiky hair, more tattoos than me, pale skin, thin like she never eats, glasses that I’m not sure are actually prescription, short like she sat so much at a computer growing up that her body gave up trying to make her tall.

  Zeus and his identical twin brother, Ares, always give her a wide berth. She asked Brooks last night if he wanted to take off after the rehearsal and go get some tongue action. When he turned her down, she asked both Jack and Gavin if they wanted a two-for-one special.

  Fucking her would probably be like fucking a sugared-up elf from an alternate dimension where Santa was actually a motorcycle-riding badass with vigilante tendencies.

  Notice I’m not talking myself out of the idea of fucking her here.

  It’s been a while since I’ve let anything unpredictable into my life—when I’m not out on a mission—and truth is, I miss it.

  Eloise has her purple skirt clenched in her fists while she marches across the dance floor. Her gaze catches mine through the glass, she licks her lips, and she adjusts her course to head straight toward me.

  There’s a familiar sensation tickling my dick. I like it.

  She wiggles her brows, and the piercing in her left brow catches in the light.

  I wonder if her nipples are pierced.

  Parker would kick my ass if she knew I was wondering that.

  But I don’t give two shits. My career’s in the crapper—no, I don’t want to talk about it—I’m losing at Wedding Bingo to Brooks, and my only sister just got married.

  I’m feeling.

  I don’t like feeling.

  I do like looking at boobs though, and Eloise has a nice set. They’re like apples. The big September Honeycrisp kind, not the mealy, poorly-named Red Delicious kind.

  I like apples. I like cantaloupes and watermelons too, but you don’t often get real fruit when you’re looking that big.

  But the point is, yeah, I’d tap that.

  Eloise struts all the way to the door, and—

  And she bounces backward.

  Because the door’s closed, and she tried to walk through the glass.

  I choke on my own spit trying not to laugh.

  She shakes her head, looks left, then right, grabs the door handle, and slides it open. “Fucking doors,” she mutters. She’s got this throaty voice like Mae West was reincarnated in her throat, and it’s making my joystick heavier on both the joy and the stick parts.

  “You showed it who’s boss,” I tell her.

  She flips me off.

  I grin and tip the tequila bottle toward her. “Drink?”

  “Screw that. Let’s go fuck.”

  The bottle goes back on the table and my chair almost tips, I stand up so fast. “Your place or mine?”

  Her blue eyes bulge behind her cat’s-eye glasses. “Seriously?”

  Fuck, didn’t she mean it? Mr. Winky in my pants droops as he starts to lose hope. “Are you a horny bridesmaid looking to get out of that dress or not?”

  “If I say yes, will you bang me in the bathroom?”

  2

  Eloise Jayne (aka an accidental heiress who gets laid a lot less than she pretends)

  This is unexpected.

  Normally my friends’ brothers all turn me down. Apparently I have a reputation.

  I get it. I have been known to dry-hump Sia’s twin brothers, who are like giant troll dolls, except on ice skates, with more muscles, less hair, and moderately higher attractiveness ratings. And they’re married to reasonably pretty women who don’t resemble troll dolls at all.

  So maybe that’s a bad analogy.

  Also, in my defense, when I hit on Willow’s stepbrothers—the three princes from that weird sheep country north of Scotland—I bought my own crown instead of raiding the palace’s jewel room, which I easily could’ve done, because seriously, their security was basically nonexistent for someone like me. Walking into breakfast wearing just fishnet stockings, sheepskin lingerie, and the crown was probably overkill that one and only time I got invited to the palace.

  Willow sort of flipped out.

  So did the king.

  My point is, usually all my friends’ brothers have been warned not to fuck me.

  And they usually don’t even need the warning.

  But Parker’s brother is leading me upstairs in this fancy-ass reception house, and speaking of asses, hello, Parker’s brother’s ass.

  I should probably try to remember what his name is. He’s third on the hotness scale—sorry, but the baseball player brother gets top billing because he wears baseball pants, though not to the wedding, dammit, and that other one, Jim? Joe? Jack.

  Right. Jack.

  He’s got this air of my
stery around him, which means he’s probably something like a grocery store clerk and just doesn’t like to talk about it, but it still gives him this mysterious air that’s really intriguing.

  But Baseball and Mystery brother and their other brother—the fourth on the hotness scale—turned me down, which means I’m settling for third best, and I don’t really mind, because first of all, everyone usually turns me down, and also, if I just imagine that pirate from that big movie franchise—no, not the dark-haired main character with all the rapscallion charm, I mean the first mate guy, because there’s something about older, rounder pirates that makes me think they’re probably really kinky—I’m already like halfway to orgasm. So long as his dick’s not a disappointment—the brother, not the pirate—we’re good, and for once, I’ll go home to my cats with an orgasm glow.

  Man-made orgasms aren’t easy to come by.

  Heh.

  Come by. You get me all book, folks.

  The Ass of Glory stops, and because I’m not paying attention, I run straight into his back. He’s in a stiff white button-down that smells like starch, tequila, and danger, and I take advantage of the accident to test if the Ass of Glory is as stuffed as my bra.

  It’s not.

  But it might be in some new-age plastic casing, because can a man’s ass actually be that solid? On a solid scale, it’s squarely between granite and one of those caramel chews that’s so old you can’t bite it without breaking a tooth.

  He looks over his shoulder and down at me, and it’s only mildly disconcerting that he has Parker’s eyes. Not that I’ve stared longingly into her eyes before. Just that one time, and only long enough to make her really uncomfortable.