The desire to kiss her overwhelmed him. With every cell in his body he wanted to pin her to the wall and sip the vitality from her lips and lick it from her skin. To plunge deep into her body and tap into her vibrant sparkle. Not to steal it from her, but to share it with her. To let it heal him from the inside out.
The apartment was suddenly too warm, too small. They didn’t have time for this distraction, and he couldn’t afford to let his feelings get in the way of the job they had to do.
He stepped out of her reach before he did something stupid, like haul her into his arms and confess his love.
By three a.m., Valerie had everything set up for several of her phishing attacks on people at Aggressor. She even had one ready to go for Cathy Hollowell on the off chance that the woman and her husband used the same personal computer. Duncan might not keep anything on his home drive, but people got careless and arrogant all the time. It was worth a shot.
Valerie would send the emails later in the morning during typical business hours to arouse less suspicion.
Listening to a running loop of Santigold and the Renegades through her earbuds while she worked, the tasks had kept her busy enough to ignore her confusion over Scott. She’d wanted to be creeped out—or at least pissed off—by the pictures of her on his camera, but the images had been more artistic than stalkerish. She couldn’t explain it, but the mood of the photos had been decidedly…admiring.
Not only that, he’d somehow taken her from pretty—enough to occasionally turn heads or distract a guard with her cleavage—to almost beautiful. And, God, his words. She shivered at the memory of those words.You’rethatwoman, and she’s incredible.
For one breath-stealing moment she’d had the sense of something important and wonderful hovering between them, but then she’d ruined it, like a speck of glitter in the air that turns out to be dust lit by the sun.
She’d spoiled the moment with her obviously unwanted observations about the similarities between photographers and snipers. Hadn’t she thought herself clever? And, more importantly, like she finally had some profound insight into what made Scott tick.
Stupid.
Could she honestly be shocked he wasn’t happy about being psychoanalyzed? No wonder he’d backed away.
She let out a long sigh.
Her computerdingedsoftly through her headphones and she stopped absently combing hacker forums for news to check the alert.
Yes!For whatever reason, Eli had connected to the Aggressor corporate network in the middle of the night.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she fired the commands to launch a malware program through Eli’s connection that would give her a backdoor into Aggressor. She was proud of the scripts she had written and excited to see them out in the real world. Also nervous, since this could be the most important hack of her life.
Scott mumbled something from behind her. She removed the earbuds and looked over her shoulder at him.
He roused from the sofa and rubbed his eyes, checking his watch as he stood. “What’s going on?”
“Eli logged in,” she said with a grin.
Blinking, his demeanor went from soft and groggy to upright and alert in an instant. “Oorah. Now what?”
“I used the connection to upload a virus to the Aggressor server. He got us past the firewall, and my scripts will set up an administrative username and password that resides in the compiler.”
Scott squinted.
She waved a hand. “Sorry. Basically, they shouldn’t even notice it’s there, and it’ll be nearly impossible to get rid of without wiping their systems.”
“What about antivirus software?”
“That only works on known code. All of my scripts are clean as virgin snow. I rewrote my old functions from scratch and didn’t borrow from anyone else. So even if the Aggressor admins added the phrases from my old work to their antivirus database, it won’t help them.”
“Smart.” He tilted his head side to side, his neck popping loudly in the quiet.
She scrunched her nose at the ghastly sound.
“Sorry. Bad habit.” He strode into the kitchen and opened the pantry, staring idly at the boxes and cans Tara had left behind for them. “How long until you’re in?”
“I’m in now.”
He whipped his head toward her, eyebrows reaching for his hairline. “That fast?”
She laughed. “Faster than a speeding bullet.”
