and smiled. One less thing for Felicity to do. She shot the whole thing off to Felicity in the HER room — Hope you’re resting. Here’s the analysis plus the data sets.
Thanks. The answer came immediately.
Hope sighed. Shouldn’t you be resting? Shouldn’t your husband just confiscate your keyboard?
He did. I’m on my cell under the covers.
Hope smiled. Rest now or I’m telling.
Argh! Not you, too!
Go.
Going.
The connection was broken.
Hope looked at Luke. He seemed to be sunk deeply into sleep, nothing moving except a slight rise and fall of his broad chest.
Everything about his body was just so unfamiliar, a new kind of male. This wasn’t how most of the men she knew were put together. Maybe there was something to the theory that symmetry was beauty. All the men she knew had something ungainly about them. Kyle — poor unfortunate Kyle — had had extremely short legs, slightly bowed, as if he’d spent his entire life on horseback. Both men on either side of her cubicle at the hedge fund had been awkwardly put together. Larry’s left eye had a permanent squint and Ben walked with one shoulder down, as if weighed down by an invisible but heavy bag.
Not Luke. He seemed to have been put together by another, finer hand. Long lean muscles, broad shoulders, big elegant hands. Everything perfect and perfectly symmetrical. Though he could stand to put on some weight. That story he’d told her was horrifying. Enough to make anyone lose weight.
She was glad she’d heard the story firsthand and not from Felicity. Hope appreciated Felicity’s discretion. She didn’t like gossip. If someone wanted you to know about their problems, they’d tell you. As Luke had done.
She herself was fiercely private, unused to sharing her troubles. Right now all her troubles were right out there for Felicity and her company, including Luke, who apparently wasn’t quite with the company yet, to see. And presumably for everyone working at Black Inc to see.
It was horrible.
Nothing to be done about it, though. She couldn’t go back and erase what had happened. As always in life, the only way was forward.
She closed her eyes for a moment trying to center herself. And by that she meant trying to be less aware of Luke, who was sitting completely still beside her. He could have been in a coma. So why was her attention focused on him, as if he were this huge black hole? He seemed to exert his own gravity, big body so still next to hers, so close she could feel his body heat.
It was so unfair that her senses were filled with him. She could almost feel the molecules of his big body mingling with hers. She could smell him. Some kind of soap and leather. Even closing her eyes, she could tell he was there, right next to her, because he created a sort of disturbance in the Force.
She’d had crushes before, tepid things in comparison, like a mild case of the flu, mostly for men who were far away. A few actors, the vice president of her company who was French and who she saw twice a year during enlarged board meetings, a great science fiction writer who’d once signed a book of hers.
Certainly never to a man who was right here. Right next to her, so close. She brushed his hand every time she moved.
This was so distracting, for a woman who never got distracted, ever. Her focus was legendary, at least wherever she’d worked. In the university computer lab, at the NSA, at her hedge fund. A nerd’s nerd.
Not right now. The nerd’s nerd was at this very moment filled to the brim with raging hormones, for a man who was beside her strictly for professional reasons and who would probably be annoyed if he knew just how attracted she was.
Focus on the job at hand, she told herself sternly. Something she rarely had to say to herself. If anything, her problem was breaking the focus. She’d find herself climbing out of eighteen-hour work stints, groggy and disoriented, not knowing whether it was day or night outside.
The. Job. It had always been enough, had always filled her life.
She finished another small task that had been on Felicity’s to-do list, then concentrated on what Felicity had been able to find out.
A lot, actually. Felicity was not only very good, she was tricky. Able to see under and around, probably because her parents had been Russian spies under Witness Protection. Felicity, too, had grown up