Back in the saddle again...
Yay! Hubby's feeling better, so back to work he goes! And my day returns to normal (well, as normal as I can make it!) And you know what that means? Updates! Yippy! (I'm always happy to have a chance to write. Like oxygen to me, writing is!)
Anyway, thank you for all of your support during the last few days when I couldn't even give you new stuff to read (besides a mostly already-written chapter for the Inbetween, that is!) LOL! I appreciate it! You guys help so much to keep the fires of inspiration burning! I can't thank you enough!
So, without further ado... ;)
Our cross-country flight had been peppered with several bouts of rain, though Vanessa and I had barely noticed. For the majority of the flight, you could say we were occupied with other activities that precluded us from observing, let only caring about, weather patterns across the states and over the Atlantic.
Pepper had, of course, accompanied me as instructed, and I kind of felt bad for leaving her to herself in the cabin almost that whole time. But she assured me she had more than enough to occupy her time. So I left it at that, and retired to the master bedroom with a very eager, very touchy-feely Vanessa. I knew Pepper had caught several glimpses of her pawing at me like a horny teenager when we'd boarded the plane, and I know it annoyed her immensely to hear Vanessa and I cooing at each other and giggling in low murmurs in our seats but I pretended not to notice her roll her eyes at us as we left her presence for good once we'd made it to altitude for the duration.
Being with Vanessa is always amazing, don't get me wrong. But, once again, I'd found that when she and I were alone, I couldn't keep my focus on her and what we were doing in the present moment. The conversation Pepper and I had had earlier about her seeing this Nick guy kept replaying in my mind like a worn out recording. And, even more so, the triumphant look on her face about the date they would have had that night was eating at me. It was like she had enjoyed digging the proverbial knife in, or something. I can't blame her though. As much garbage as I've given her over the years about the guys she's seen, I guess she was owed a little time in the sun with the thought (however diluted it might have been) that she'd managed to find a good one. Poor kid. I can only imagine the disappointment she felt when lover boy declined to reschedule, like they all do, and she had to watch another shot at having a new man in her life slip through her fingers. That had to have hurt.
Still, she'd managed to recover quickly, I have to admit. It wasn't long after she'd stormed back upstairs that she'd returned to her chipper self. I'd even asked as we'd approached Stark Aviation later if she was okay. And she just flashed me a warm smile, her eyes sparkling again, and stated happily, "Never better!", earning a curious look from me. None the less, I told JARVIS to suspend the search for our dear Mr. Nick, the Investment Banker, for the time being. It seemed the quick little fling had reached its untimely end and Pepper had since moved on. Can't say I wasn't, at the least, satisfied with that, as you can imagine, but a small part of me (microscopic, actually) felt guilty. As I said before, I really do want Pepper to be happy and to have the kind of life she deserves. But it has to be with the right guy. And so far? Mr. Right Guy hasn't made an appearance. Thankfully. In my mind, this was just another crisis averted.
Vanessa had noticed I'd drifted off in thought. And, admittedly, it wasn't at the most opportune time. I'd been caught, scowling and working my jaw, my eyes glazed over, as we'd begun to make love. I'd braced myself over the top of her on the bed on the heel of my hand, cupping her behind with the other, as I positioned my body between her legs, and she'd busied herself with playfully flicking her tongue and kissing the skin along my next and chest, anxiously awaiting my obvious next move. But I'd stalled. She stopped what she was doing, and looked at me with slight annoyance. "Okay, where are you right now, love?" she asked expectantly.
I flicked my eyes back to her, and smiled at her sheepishly. "I'm here. I'm right here. Why?" I asked, trying to sound innocent.
But she just frowned. "No, there's...something else," she said suspiciously. She sat up on her elbows, and pursed her lips. "What's going on? Tell me," she demanded softly. She began to run her fingertips up and down my chest, teasingly. I smiled.
"I'm fine," I assured her again, grasping her hand and kissing the back of her fingers. "It's just been...a long day," I said.
She continued to look at me skeptically, but slowly softened, accepting my answer for the moment. She nodded. "Okay, darling. Whatever you say. But can I make a request?" she asked, giving me a polite smile.
I smiled, relieved she wasn't going to make me explain myself any further. "Anything," I purred, before ducking my head to lay soft kisses along her neck. She dropped her head back and moaned softly with pleasure, which only made me smile to myself more.
"Forget the day, and just enjoy our little getaway, hmmm?" she cooed. "What's gone on in LA needs to stay in LA for now. Wouldn't you agree?"
I raised my head, and she smiled at me expectantly. I nodded. "You're right," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm here. With you, now. I promise," I assured her.
She gave me a coy smile. "Well, Mr. Stark," she purred, walking two fingers up my chest flirtatiously. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to prove it. Put your money where your mouth is, as they say?" she teased.
"Oooo," I growled at the challenge, running my hand back down her side to her behind, and giving it a light smack before gripping it tightly. She giggled and cooed at my motions, hungrily crashing our mouths together in response. I immediately willed my mind to pull my thoughts away from Pepper and focus on the woman underneath me. A bird in the hand, a bird in the hand, I chanted in my head over and over as our soiree got into full swing.
XxXxXxXxXx
The sun was just setting that evening when a black SUV with darkly tinted windows had taken the exit off the highway and turned toward Malibu in the direction of the Stark Mansion, one of its passengers being Obadiah Stane. He'd just landed not an hour before at Stark Aviation, back from his trip to South Korea, and anxious to make the next move in his plan. Vanessa had let him know they were all well on their way to London, and the house would be all clear for him to get into the shop, unimpeded. Well, almost.
There was still the small matter of JARVIS. He was, after all and among many other things, the home security system and many precautionary measures had been put in place to prevent an intrusion of any kind during the times Tony wasn't home. At first glance, the mansion appeared to be locked up tighter than Fort Knox, but Obadiah had a couple aces up his sleeve.
Ah, Tony, Tony, Tony. That's the beauty of having someone from the good old days to work with, he thought to himself, as he watched a white van that had been following behind them make a right turn down the street just before the turnoff for Tony's private drive, and disappear out of sight. Why use a high tech solution to solve a low tech problem?
The van was marked Malibu Municipal Utility, though no work orders had been scheduled for that area at that particular time. It pulled up to the closest electrical transformer for the neighborhood on the street, and two men dressed in blue jumpsuits and white hard hats had quickly piled out of the cab to run to the back. They yanked open the van's double doors, grabbed some heavy hand tools, and then bolted to the transformer, quickly taking the back of the cover off. With a few swift internal motions, the whole neighborhood, including the street lights, faded to black. The men quickly packed up, replaced the cover, and sped away out of sight.
In the meantime, the black SUV carrying Obie and two other men had pulled up to the Stark Mansion. Obadiah climbed out of the backseat, hearing some static on a walkie-talkie he held in his hand. "It's done, boss," a man's voice said.
"Good. Well done," Obi replied, simultaneously watching the landscaping lighting around the front yard and ambient lighting in the house go dark. He motioned for the driver of the SUV and the passenger that had been in the front seat to proceed. The men nodded and ran to the front door, taking out some razors, and cutting away the seal from the double-paned window beside it. "Two minutes, gentlemen," Obi announced, pushing the button for the timer on his watch, and clipping the walkie-talkie to his waistband.
With the main power to the house now cut, two minutes was all the time they'd have to break the seals on each of the two panes of glass in the window, allowing Obadiah inside to quickly make his way to the shop door. There, he would stand at the ready, waiting for the two underground emergency backup generators to kick on, and JARVIS to reactivate the security system, hopefully without detecting that there had been a perimeter breach in the interim. If all went smoothly, he could then input the access code Vanessa had given him in to the keypad at the shop door, and get inside to extract the weapons files he was after from Tony's server.
He watched the timer on his watch as it fast approached the one minute mark. "One minute, gentlemen," Obi said anxiously, as he watched the numbers on his watch tick up from fifty-nine seconds to a full minute.
"We're in," one of the men said almost immediately, carefully peeling away the second pane of glass. Obie quickly made his way inside, and the two men worked hurriedly to replace the glass panes in their respectful places and seal them tightly once more in the last remaining minute.
In the meantime, Obie moved swiftly across the darkened living room and jogged softly down the stairs to the shop door. He checked his watch once more. One minute fifty-five, One minute fifty-six...
"Come on, come on," he huffed.
"That's it. We're done," he heard in a hushed whisper from the radio at his hip.
He pushed the button on the side. "Copy," he said softly. The last remaining seconds ticked by like an eternity as he stood in the darkness at the bottom of the staircase, and the sound of his heartbeat thundered in his ears. This could be it for me, he thought. This single moment could easily flush my entire life down the drain. If JARVIS detected anything with that window to be out of place, he'd be caught, red-handed and trapped like a rat in the house of the man he hated most in the world.
One minute fifty-nine...Two minutes...
Suddenly, he felt a low rumbling under his feet as the two great engines of the underground generators fired to life and the lights in the house flickered back on. He held his breath, waiting to hear JARVIS issue a red alert.
But there was nothing.
And Obie mouthed a silent phew in relief. He quickly refocused and held up his hand to the motion-detecting holographic keypad beside the shop's glass door. The numbers soon appeared and he punched in Tony's code. He heard the hiss of the retracting door locks and then he yanked the door open, marching inside and over to Tony's main computer.
"Mr. Stane. You are not authorized in this area," JARVIS warned. But Obie ignored his warning, and reached into his pants pocket, producing a small USB drive and jamming into the processor's tower. A zip file quickly opened titled slumber protocol and he extracted it to the computer's hard drive. Rapidly, the file loaded itself into the system and Obi watched with a smirk.
"That's what you think," he replied with a low growl.
JARVIS tried to counter by issuing an alert and starting a full-blown lockdown, but his attempt failed. He tried again and again, but each attempt proved futile. Instead, Obi had the pleasure of watching each of JARVIS's files being collected in a newly created file, icon'ed with an illustration of a sleeping infant, which made him chuckle darkly. "Nighty, night, little JARVY," he purred sinisterly. "When you wake up, this will all be over, and you won't remember a thing."
Months ago, Obadiah had received the slumber protocol as an act of good faith by Vanessa. It was a program she'd acquired from a Russian computer hacker that had used it to gain access to opposing governments' classified files. It was designed to quietly put network security protocols to sleep, allowing him to access encrypted files without hindrance. And, once he'd retrieved what he'd come for, he would back out of the systems undetected, and "reawaken" the operating system, resetting it to a time before he'd intruded, so he could slip away without anyone knowing he'd been there.
Obie didn't know how Vanessa knew this person, and, frankly, he didn't want to know. All he needed was for this to work. JARVIS would be put to sleep long enough for the weapons files on Tony's server to be retrieved, copied to the USB drive, and then JARVIS would be set to wake back up at time when he and his men were long gone. The program would reset the security footage and JARVIS's memory and backup to a time long before Obie even arrived on the property, and then it would self-destruct within the hard drive, leaving no trace of its existence.
Obie sat down slowly in Tony's desk chair, and interlaced his fingers, and resting his hands on the top of his bald head. He plunked his feet up onto Tony's desk, crossing his ankles, and watched the program go to work. Then he began to whistle loudly and with exaggerated flourishes, hearing the shrill notes echo loudly off the concrete floor and marble walls, as the program worked swiftly to retrieve each of the files he'd come to steal. All he had to do now was let it do its job, and then he'd be able to walk right out the front door with everything he needed. And, the best part is the stupid sap won't even have a clue I was here, he thought happily.
