Read Online Privacy Code (Shatterproof) by Jordan Burke - Free Book Online Page B

think she was heading in the right direction this time and I didn’t like it at all.
    “Drugs,” she said. “He’s a drug dealer.”
    I felt the blood rush from my face. Great. W orking for the world’s largest and most powerful law enforcement agency, all the while getting mixed up with a drug dealer.
    “And,” Tara went on, “I don’t mean small-time, either. I was friends with this girl in high school whose father went to prison because he was part of some huge cocaine ring on the east coast. Like major dealer, not the guy selling it at a club or something.”
    Jesus Christ. Could that be it?
    Maybe I was being more than a little naïve, but Watts seemed too refined to be a drug dealer. The way he talked about food, literature, movies… I’d never personally known anyone who was deeply involved in drugs—either using or selling or both—but this just didn’t seem to fit him, either.
    “I don’t know,” I said, leaving it at that.
    “It’s just a theory. It could be, um, it could be anything, right? You don’t know that much about him at all.”
    I didn’t respond. It was true. Everything he told me could have been a lie, so even what I thought I knew could all be false anyway. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know who I’d been talking to for the last six months. I wanted to know who I’d taken a huge risk to meet the other night. I wanted to know who it was that had gotten so deep into my head that I was now even more curious—maybe obsessed ?—to know about.
    “So?” Tara said, lowering her voice and leaning over the belt toward me. “How big was it?”
    I shook my head, the hint of a smile creeping into the corner of my mouth. If she could make me smile under these circumstances, I’d definitely picked the right confidant.
     

 
     
    Chapter Twelve – Watts
     
     
    I was consumed by frustration. It was difficult not to let my mind drift and wonder what Catherine was feeling after the other night.
    Maybe nothing, as I hadn’t received an email from her. She’d never been one to wait for me to email first. But this time, I was starting to think that maybe she was.
    While I ate lunch at the counter in my bookshop, I checked my email, finding two new ones. Neither was from Catherine.
    One email was SPAM, the other was from the dating site, alerting me to the fact that I had received two new messages. I clicked the link, which took me directly to the site’s inbox.
    The first message contained only a smiley face icon and the words: “I think you and I could be a match!”
    I had received that one before. I t was a pre-written “icebreaker,” one of about a dozen or so, made available for those who were really lazy or tragically uncreative enough to come up with their own brief message.
    I decided not to even click on the profile of the woman who had sent it. All I could think about was the first message Catherine had sent to me on that site, the one about Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner. Not some meaningless, generic “icebreaker” at all. Far from it. How fitting it was, as Catherine was far from any woman I’d ever discussed anything with. No other woman was going to impress me like she had.
    I deleted the ice-breaker message and clicked on the next. It was from Heather. I had met her a few months ago, when my email relationship with Catherine was quite new. At the time, Heather fulfilled everything I was looking for. Attractive, available, and willing to live by the “one time” rule I demanded.
    I knew very little about her, but luckily she’d told me her last name so I was able to check her out beforehand. She was all over social media. Facebook, Twitter, a nd Instagram.
    She was a flight attendant, stationed in Baltimore, and she was on her way to being reassigned to Portland, Oregon, in the next two weeks. I knew she was safe to meet, and it went well.
    Which is why I was surprised that she was emailing me all these months later.
    “Hey, Andrew,”