“If you leave again? You tell me. Understood?”
West cleared his throat. “Yep. Got it.”
“Good. Now, get the hell out of my sight.”
West led me around the angry man and we passed by a couple of people whose names I couldn’t recall. We didn’t stop moving until we got to my bedroom, and the two of us slipped inside before he closed the door behind him.
And even though we were confined to my bedroom, he didn’t make me nervous.
“You didn’t have to take the blame for that,” he said as he turned to face me.
I snickered. “You’re welcome.”
“Thank you,” he said, “seriously. But you still didn’t have to do it. I had the situation under control.”
“He looked like he was about to break your jaw, West. I knew he wouldn't swing on me, though.”
“Not in a million years, he wouldn’t.”
That brought me a bit of comfort. “Would he have actually slugged you, though?”
He grinned. “Not unless he wanted to be laid out on the floor.”
I giggled, the sound tugging a smile across his face.
He has a nice smile.
“So,” West said as he walked over to a chair in the corner and sat down, “I didn’t get to hear much about your life since we were so rudely interrupted by Stone’s phone call. Care to finish up our conversation?”
I laughed as I went and laid down in bed. “What do you want to know?”
He peeked over at me. “What’s with all the shit you brought to the warehouse with you? Do you need that many outfit changes or something?”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course, you’d think it's clothes. But it’s actually different computer parts and drives.”
“Something for work?”
I didn’t want to talk about my work, especially with a crew of gray-area misfits. I mean, hell, I hadn’t even told Lexi the truth about my job. She thought I fucking hacked for security companies in order to find vulnerabilities in their systems, for crying out loud!
And I was pretty sure this crew wouldn’t take kindly to the fact that I was a contractor for the FBI. Specifically for an agent who caught me hacking their federal system when I was in high school.
“Something like that, yeah,” I said mindlessly.
West groaned as he stretched his legs out. “What kind of RAM do you run on your set-up for work?”
His one question opened up a slew of other ones that started a geekfest extravaganza of tech talk that I hadn’t had with someone in fucking years. I turned onto my good side and propped myself up, ignoring the dull ache of my entire body while West and I geeked out about computer parts and talked about the setups we had built ourselves. It was nice to talk to someone else about stuff I was passionate about, and the more we talked, the closer West scooted his chair toward the bed.
Until he was close enough that his body heat reached out for me.
“Have you ever been caught hacking anyone’s systems?” he asked.
Dodge the question.“Not really.”
“Not really? What does that mean?”
I groaned. “I mean, I almost got caught this one time. I was bored in class and decided to hack my professor’s laptop. I ended up scrolling through his porn stash at the time, but what I didn’t realize was that the mirror image up on the projector screen was a live broadcast.”
His eyes widened. “Holy fucking shit. You showed his porn to your entire class!?”
