“Jesus, he really did take a shining to her!” Lucian pushed back from the table, shaking his head. “What the hell did she do to him?”
I shrugged, daring to reach down and run my fingers between Abs’ ears. The purring intensified.
What indeed?
“Well, I’d better get up top. It seems I have a security guard to fire.”
My head snapped up. “Why?”
Lucian glowered down at me. “A strange woman snuck into your room last night, and no one was any the wiser until you stumbled upon her. She could have been a spy for a rival tech firm … she could have been there to attack you.”
I grunted. “I highly doubt that?—”
Lucian knocked on the table. “Bax, you’re now a very wealthy man with a high profile. You have access to data that is valuable enough to some people that they might not think twice about harming you, blackmailing you … hacking into your personal computer.”
I sat back in my chair, numb. Abernathy purred obliviously in my lap. Had she been a plant? I didn’t think so, but I’d possibly been blinded by my curiosity about her.
Lucian nodded, as if I’d given him express permission to terminate the security guard, and strode off in the direction of the stairs.
I gingerly lifted Abernathy into my arms, careful to keep the pair of panties in physical contact with him, and carried him into thebedroom. On the bed, he happily curled up with the underwear clutched between his paws. He really was odd, even for a cat.
I headed straight for my computer.
I would ensure that Irina Rusnac hadn’t hacked my computer. And I would do enough digging to satisfy myself that she was the woman I thought her to be.
Irina Rusnac was not the woman I thought her to be. But I was almost positive she wasn’t trying to steal trade secrets from Tickle.
Almostpositive.
I had to pause to ask myself, would a not-quite-twenty-two-year-old sports science graduate whose student visa had expired a few weeks ago be desperate enough to try and hack into my computer? And what would she get out of that? Information to blackmail me? To what end? I had no power to keep her in Australia if that was her goal.
Was money her aim? Based on the earning projections I’d done on her account, she was earning quite a comfortable living from Tickle. Additionally, she had no cause to expect access to me or my computer when she started her account. There was no reason to conclude she joined the creator program solely to get close to me.
I’d also discovered she was a decorated swimmer. At Sydney University, she’d racked up handfuls of medals and broken several club records. The student paper ran articles bemoaning that, once she returned to Romania, she’d likely face her former teammates at the next Olympics.
But she hadn’t returned … at least not yet.
Nothing was adding up, and that alone had me certain she’d been honest: she’d only ducked into a private spot to remove her panties, then got distracted by Abernathy glomming onto her like a furry limpet.
I popped two pieces of gum into my mouth and drummed my fingers against the desk.
There was something about her—a puzzle that needed solving. And maybe getting to the bottom of it would also ease Lucian’s concerns about her being in my room for nefarious purposes. I realised,as I was pondering this, that theywereLucian’s concerns—they weren’t mine.
Still, the simple fact that she was in Australia on a now-expired student visa was enough to pique my interest and my need for things to fit into tidy little boxes. I couldn’t put Irina Rusnac in a box.
Yes, that was why I couldn’t get her out of my head. I simply needed to figure out what her story was and I’d stop fixating. Once I could safely discount her having some sort of plot against me, I could get her off my mind.
I clicked through to her Tickle profile once more, and I did something that I had so far felt too morally superior to attempt. I started trawling through her subscriber-only posts.
The first one I came across was her, naked from the waist up, reclined on her bed, arms relaxed above her head. She gazed directly at the camera—directly at the viewer … directly at me.
The flowing, musical language that fell from her lips in sultry, breathy syllables, was familiar to me. I recalled, when learning Italian for my high school exams, that Romanian and Italian shared a lexical similarity somewhere close to eighty percent, which meant that I could parse it and understand at least some of what she was saying. And the rest? Well, I could run it through a translator.
“So … it seems a lot of you like my accent,” she breathed. “And you’re wondering if it’s real … well, is this real enough for you?”
She giggled provocatively, breasts bouncing. I found myself leaning closer, resting an elbow on the desk, eyes fixed on her face. Not on her other parts, as much as they were screaming for my attention. Her face was so achingly beautiful.
“This is fun! I could say anything I like to you right now, and none of you will have a clue what I’m talking about! I wonder …?”
