Deadly Little Secrets Page 0,57

presence was distracting, it was also invigorating. Conversation with her sharpened his mind as well as his senses. He’d decided after she left the estate earlier in the day that he was going to pursue her. He hadn’t done that in years, much to Dav’s irritation. With Ana, he’d decided to make an exception. Something about her tugged at him, pulled at his intellect as well as his libido.

She said something else that caught his attention, tapping a search parameter. He frowned over her notes, over the ideas.

“Wait,” he interrupted her. “That doesn’t make sense.” He flipped open the leather notepad he kept in his pocket, began a timeline. “If your runs on the data started here,” he began drawing out the line, marking delineations of things as they occurred. “Why did you get a reaction now?”

“Hmmm, not sure,” she murmured, leaning close to him so she could see what he had written. She took his pen, made another mark. “I ran a basic three-prong query on Moroni here, just to see what popped in Google and Mackie,” she said.

He knew she wasn’t doing it deliberately, but the warmth of her body distracted him. He thought of Ana’s soft body against his, their heated exchange of kisses.

God, he hadn’t felt that hot for a woman in, well, ever. He watched her. Her brow furrowed as she scanned through the annotations in her file. She wouldn’t let him read any of it—that would give him too much power, be too intrusive, which he understood—but she was sharing, matching her skills with his. It felt good. Too good in some ways. The power of it was seductive. He’d already decided he was going to pursue her. He had to be careful though, to keep his own heart intact. The combination of intellect and sensuality, even her tears, had drawn him, inexorably, to her.

“What about this?” he rattled off a series of search options, and had the interesting experience of seeing her eyes light up, feeling her body quiver with repressed excitement over the concept. He let his eyes drift shut, imagining her next to him, under him, quivering in the same way, but for different reasons.

The intensity was almost shocking. He forced himself to pull back from it, make sure he gave it plenty of thought before he leapt in. She’d been hurt, but his own pain was still fresh, despite the years since his parents’ deaths. He never forgot that relationships, obsessions, had led to that loss. The woman responsible had vowed to finish the job, eradicate everything his father had loved, including Gates and his sister.

Passion took many dangerous turns, and turning toward Ana would never be simple.

“If we did this, it might get us something,” Ana said, bringing him abruptly back to the discussion. She pointed to a series of obscure search terms she’d scribbled on a blank sheet. They surprised him. Her mind was fast and flexible. Again, he felt the undeniable surge of deep attraction to her.

Fortunately for him, she was oblivious to his wandering thoughts, as she continued. “We might trace calls from the various galleries. I’d have to get a lot of permissions,” she mused. He could all but see the wheels turning in her mind. “If we took the search terms, though, and factored in each of the victim’s numbers, provided they’d let us use them,” she grinned wryly, and he answered it with his own smile. “We could do a multi-factor overlayment process, with multiple keywords.” She was getting enthusiastic, now. “If we did that,” she scribbled down a list of terms and rates, processes and multitasking data runs. “Then this,” she jotted two more items. “There. That would do it, don’t you think?”

Focusing on the pages, he tracked her logic.

She was brilliant. No doubt in his mind, seeing what she’d written. And damn him if that wasn’t as sexy, as attractive, as her long, lean body, dark hair, and hazel eyes. As she talked, he saw the sheer creativity with which her mind worked.

“That’s way out of the box,” he said, continuing to read. He could feel the excitement buzzing in his blood. This was the kind of thing he loved as well, and it was revving him up that she shared it.

“You think it won’t work?”

“I didn’t say that, but here,” he flipped her pad around, drew five lines, and intersected two of the data runs she’d outlined. “If we have these two searches in parallel, with cross-checks, we could eliminate,