Portia stalked across the room. “The project?”
He almost nodded, then thought better of it and chose his words carefully. “I can’t work with this equipment.”
“It’s a top-of-the-line computer. It won’t officially be released until the end of the year.” Her expression practically dared him to argue further.
Was it? He hadn’t even looked at the computer. He did now and whistled. It was gorgeous. “Very nice. How’d you manage to score this?” He couldn’t wait to test it out.
He didn’t expect an answer, but she said, “I do have friends.”
His jaw dropped.
Her icy gaze narrowed. “Don’t try to tell me the computer is the problem.”
“Oh, no. It isn’t.” He was sincere. “I wasn’t talking about the computer. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.” Another truth. “That’s the problem—I can’t.”
“Spell it out for me.”
Arms crossed over her chest and dressed in her usual style despite the somber black, she was the picture of icy impatience. Even when the Jack had been impatient in their meetings, the fire in her gaze, her movements, drew him closer. Portia made him want to back away.
“I can’t reach it.” He sat back down, demonstrated. “You’re hobbling me if you expect me to work on this system.”
She circled the small desk. Her gaze was cool, assessing.
He shivered.
“This was the best my assistant could do at short notice.”
Ash doubted that. “Probably the easiest,” he muttered under his breath.
She circled him again and he felt like a shark’s next meal.
“It does look like a problem,” she conceded when she’d finished her second loop.
The silence stretched between them until Ash broke it. “I can give you a list of what I need.”
That glare again.
“A list of possible solutions,” he amended.
“Show me.” She gestured at his workstation.
Ash stifled a sigh. He’d hoped that she would let him use her computer. He wasn’t completely sure he could create a back door to her system, but he’d planned to try. Portia Tremainehadto have secrets. There was no way someone that high in the company—a Tremaine!—didn’t.
But in all his time at the company, all the time working with Leopold Brunswick to uncover Tremaine secrets, he’d found nothing on her. Which didn’t seem possible. How could anyone raised by Phillip Tremaine have clean hands?
He scootched as close to the desk as he could get, angling his knees under to reach the keyboard. Ash made sure the chair creaked with each movement.
The computer walked him through setting up the biometric scanner and multiple passwords. “This machine is amazing.” He didn’t get a reply. Hadn’t expected one, either. He glanced back to see how closely she was watching him.
Boredom and impatience looked back at him.
Taking a chance, he created an unregistered profile. It wasn’t foolproof but it should prevent the majority of the Tremaine tracking software from watching his every move. Under the guise of setting up the profile, he pulled up the command line interface and reviewed the software that had been installed on this machine. He wouldn’t put it past Portia to install in-house software to monitor his work.
After five years, he knew most of the programs Tremaine IT relied on—the ones he used and the ones he wasn’t supposed to know about. Ash found two of them on the list as he scrolled through. Knowing they were there, he kept his initial keystrokes relatively normal. Nothing IT hadn’t seen from him in the past.
He’d try the more complicated moves when she wasn’t standing over his shoulder and he had the chance to circumvent the tracking software. Feeling her watchful presence, Ash realized that he knew absolutely nothing about Portia’s computer skills.
She didn’t know what he was doing—did she? What if she did? What if she’d understood every move he’d made?
