Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
SYLVIE
With more regret than I would have expected, I slid out from under Eli’s arm, leaving my pajamas somewhere in the room.
I padded naked across the hall to my own shower.
I brushed my snarled but dry hair and twisted it up in a knot at the top of my head.
If I tried to wash it again, it would end up a dried-out mess, but the rest of me could definitely use a shower.
I’d barely gotten the temperature right when the door opened with a quick knock, and Eli was there—also naked, a red condom packet in his hand and his eyebrows raised in question.
I nudged open the door of the shower. “Morning,” I said with a grin. “Did I wake you up?”
“I was getting there. But then I thought about you and all this hot water, and how much more fun it would be to get you clean after I got you dirty again.”
“Tell me more,” I said, running my hands over his slick body as he stepped under the spray.
“I was thinking,” he said, stroking a hand down his erection before tearing open the condom, “that I wanted to try something.”
“Yeah?” I shifted out of the water, letting Eli’s back take the brunt of it.
“Exactly where I was going to put you,” he said, and, done with the condom, reached for my hands, lifting them to twine around his neck.
Before I could ask what he was up to, he bent, hooked his hands under my thighs, and lifted me until my back hit the tile.
“I was wondering how easy it would be to do this.”
Braced there, I reached between us to guide his cock exactly where I wanted it. “I don’t know how easy it is,” I managed to breathe, “but I approve.”
I wasn’t a lightweight, but that didn’t seem to be a problem for Eli. He held me, seemingly effortlessly, pushing into me in deep, long strokes, pounding my clit, filling me completely until I came, gasping for breath, my fingernails gouging his shoulders.
When we were done, he held me there, the water beating down on us.
“That’s the fucking way to wake up,” he murmured in my ear. “I’d take you over coffee any day.”
I never thought I’d take anything over coffee, but Eli was just that good.
He set me on my feet and dealt with the condom, then filled his hand with the shower gel I’d bought when I restocked.
His strong hands sliding the soap over my skin was almost enough to have me darting out of the shower to grab another condom. Almost.
Instead, when he was done, I took my turn, stroking every inch of his body, taking my time.
“Am I clean enough?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, working my way back up, nipping at his hip bone, sliding my breasts across his slippery chest. “Just trying to decide which part I like the best.”
“I thought you’d made that pretty clear,” he said, smirking down at his cock.
“That’s probably number one, but there’s so much to choose from,” I said, my hands skimming along his shoulders.
The truth was that his face was probably my favorite.
So expressive, so Eli—that full lower lip, those deep chocolate eyes.
I had the sudden feeling I was getting in way over my head.
I shook it off. This was just sex. I could keep it separate from Eli as a person, us being partners.
I didn’t need to complicate this, not when it was so good in the midst of everything else.
We finished our shower, made coffee, had yogurt and granola in the kitchen before we went down to the Sinclair Security offices.
In the elevator, Eli turned to me. “This thing—” He gestured between us.
I raised an eyebrow, pretty sure of what he was going to say, considering we were going from shower sex to his workplace. “No one needs to know,” I said, my voice low.
I didn’t have a problem with that. We needed all of our focus on finding Emily’s killer and getting my life back. Letting everyone at Sinclair Security know we were sleeping together would be nothing but a massive distraction.
Eli’s eyes flicked above, to a light that I guessed was also a security camera. “For now, yeah.”
I followed him down the hall after a wave at Alice on the phone at the front desk, and we found Emmett and Maddox working at a table in the middle of what Eli called “Hacker Central.”
At first, I was distracted by being in the center of Sinclair Security’s team of computer experts.
Eli had explained that while most of their job was performed at a keyboard, every single person here was fully capable of working in the field as well.
I’d been a touch surprised yesterday when he’d mentioned so much of their work was on the computer.
Hearing that they all were as badass as Eli was fascinating.
In my mind’s eye, in the field conjured up images of everyone clothed in black, scaling buildings and breaking into server rooms or whatever.
It was mostly quiet, the crisp clicks of mechanical keyboards and low murmurs occasionally interspersed by an exclamation or something shouted in jargon I couldn’t translate. Over half of the desks and offices were empty.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Lucas, the head of the division, took a chunk of the team with him for joint training with the Sinclair office in Las Vegas. It’s a lot louder around here when everyone is in-house.”
Eli pulled out a chair for me at the table in the middle of the room and sat beside me.
Maddox and Emmett were both working in an oversized cubicle behind us.
They’d shoved a laptop in front of me filled with lines of—not code, they said, but logs of communications.
Not the communications themselves, but just a record of bytes going back and forth.
It didn’t mean much to me, but Maddox had explained that it didn’t need to.
I was looking for numbers. Numbers that indicated one IP address had connected to another.
“Are you telling me you guys couldn’t just write a program to search for this or something?”
They shared a glance, then Maddox said, “Could. Did.” He pointed at my screen. “That’s the result.”
“You couldn’t get the program to narrow it down more?” I asked.
“We’re looking for more than the numbers,” Eli said.
“We’re looking for patterns. It’s not just that you want to find this and this,” he said, pointing to two different ranges of numbers scribbled on a notepad beside me.
“But if you find them, we want to look at how often they’re showing up, and when, and the relationship.
Too easy to miss the details with a search query.
In the long run, it’s more efficient to use human eyes for this. ”
I wasn’t sure I bought that. Not completely.
But Eli was sitting beside me doing the same job, so if it was a waste of time, I couldn’t imagine they’d be wasting his as well as mine.
Considering all they weren’t telling me about Sinclair Security’s interest in Emily Shaw’s death, I wouldn’t have put it past them to divert me with useless work—but not Eli.
He actually knew what he was doing. So, from that perspective, his time was too valuable to waste.
I’d made it through one log file they’d given me and another, highlighting where I’d found the numbers, when I pushed the laptop away.
“This is really boring,” I said, looking over at Eli.
His eyes looked glazed from the monotony of scrolling, making notes, and scrolling some more.
“Sometimes it is,” he said, “but this, I agree, is more boring than anything I’ve done in a while.
This is all we’ve got.” He sent his files to Maddox, snagging my laptop to do the same.
“Did you make any progress with the letter I brought back from the post office?”
Emmett and Maddox exchanged another long look.
“Haven’t looked. Other stuff,” Emmett said cryptically, I thought.
He held up a black square. I didn’t know what it was—it could have been a hard drive. I wasn’t sure, but Eli’s eyes sparked. Clearly, he knew what it was.
“You think whatever that was, it’s in here?” Eli asked, reaching for it.
Maddox shrugged one shoulder, raised an eyebrow, and rubbed his palm over the top of his shaved head. “Maybe. I doubt it’ll be easy to find unless what he scribbled on that page is a file name.”
Eli’s eyes narrowed on Maddox, and it felt to me like something went unspoken between them that led to Maddox turning away.
“See what you can do with it,” Maddox said. “In the meantime, Emmett and I will see what we can shake loose.”
Maddox looked to me, the intent in his dark eyes bringing me to attention.
For a while, I’d felt like a sidekick, not really relevant to the conversation.
It made sense, since I didn’t understand half of what they were talking about.
It was unnerving to be the sudden recipient of Maddox’s full focus.
“We’re still working on figuring out who got to your bank accounts,” he said. “We haven’t forgotten.”
I gave him a faint smile. “I didn’t think you had,” I said.
He nodded and turned back to whatever he was working on with Emmett.
“What’s that?” I asked Eli, looking at the hard drive in his hand.
He plugged it into his laptop. “A shit ton of files, one of which might match what was in that envelope I found in the post office.”
“Okay, what do we do?”
I watched as he navigated to the file browser on his laptop, clicked, then clicked again, and opened a folder filled with endless file names, all of which appeared to be in some kind of code.
“Fuck me,” I whispered under my breath.
He double-clicked one; it opened. He scanned and closed it.
“How will you know?” I asked.
“I think we’re looking for something related to a missing person, based on what we saw. I don’t know. I just have to look, dig around.”
“But how are we going to split that up?”
Eli sat back and rolled his shoulders, his eyes on me, studying my face. I felt like he could see how tired I was, frustrated by the boredom and lack of progress. Frustrated by what they wouldn’t—or couldn’t—tell me.