Page 12 of Magnum, Volume 1

But lying didn’t feel right, either. We needed to build some trust if we were going to work together, and the keylogger probably didn’t help that.

“I don’t think you’re the type to use the same passwords everywhere,” I told her, “which means I’ll only know the passwords you use for these sites, and no others.”

She furrowed her brows but typed in her login ID and password — and it looked like we were in her personal cloud. Not a commercial service.

I leaned in closer, and the air in the windowless room compressed around us. The air-conditioning hummed a steady, cool rhythm while her scent hit me full force. She was all woman, but focused and sharp. No adrenaline, no arousal. Her hair smelled of rosemary and peppermint, her skin gave off the barest hint of patchouli, but there was nothing else. No fake scents, which is rare for a human.

And for some damned reason, it felt important to explain the keylogger.

“If you end up dead, we’ll need access to how to find the fuckers. This isn’t about me being a nosy bastard.”

Her fingers paused a few seconds, but then flew over the keys again, opening a large document that seemed to be her master document.

“If you don’t keep me alive, I’ll come back and haunt your ass. Also, just fucking ask me in the future, don’t sneak.” She clicked a link inside the master document. “Okay, here is where I started — crypto logs.”

She took us through her process fast, and it was easy to follow where she’d gone, but then…

“Wait. Go back.”

I leaned in closer, my left hand on the armrest of her chair, and I pointed to what looked like an anomaly. “Follow that one.”

She did, and then sat back and stared.

“Fuck. How the hell did you know that would take us here?”

“Didn’t know where it would take us, just that there was something under it. I think in patterns.” I couldn’t tell her I’m not entirely human, so I did the best I could. “Think of the way the ripples move on a lake. If you see an anomaly, it probably means the water is shallower there, or it’s deeper and the current is moving faster under the surface. Same with numbers.”

“He thinks in patterns,” Skippy said. “Lets him catch stuff most miss.” He sighed. “This ring clearly has an intelligent numbers guy. Not feeling great about this, because Magnum’s discovery means someone within the organization is likely embezzling funds the other partners don’t know about, and Madame Governor would have the skills to do that, since she started out as an attorney specializing in financial fraud litigation.”

“Let’s keep following and see where else it goes,” I said, and my eyes went to her rack instead of the screen for a few seconds. Even under a completely normal tan T-shirt with zero cleavage visible, her tits intrigued me. Also, I could see the blood flowing through a vein near the curve of her sexy collarbone, at the base of her throat.

I made myself focus on the monitor she sent this search to. It was on her left, and I was on her right, which meant I leaned in closer, and the heat radiating off her skin was impossible to ignore in the cool room.

“Shit. Exempted company in the Cook Islands,” she said, but I saw another thread and pointed for her to follow it.

“Layered through a trust in Vanuatu,” I noted.

She sat back. “The governor vacations in Fiji. A lot.”

She brought up a map showing Fiji, between the Cook Islands and Vanuatu, but when she reached for the mouse to do it, she had to lean forward. Her shoulder brushed against my ribs, and a jolt of lightning shot straight through me and made my balls tighten and my dick pulse.

It took a few seconds for me to redirect blood back to my brain. I should move away from her, but she was right. It wouldn’t take a lot for them to go in person to two of the places people conveniently hide funds. Take a boat from the island they are officially at to islands they’ve never registered as landing on to set up accounts without an online paper trail back to them.

And suddenly, Storm wasn’t as stone-cold calm as she pretended to be. Her breathing was shallow and her scent had a hint of adrenaline.

She pulled up dates on the accounts, and it took me a few seconds to figure out how she’d done it, which meant it was another couple of seconds before I realized the accounts had been set up within four days of each other. She dug into passport records using high-level google dorking search terms, ran into a dead end, and then pulled up a site I didn’t recognize, entered credentials, and twenty seconds later we were looking at logs of them arriving and leaving Fiji as a couple before and after the dates. She took screenshots and saved them in a folder on her cloud.

“If we get someone high up, we can use this to get them to talk, maybe,” she noted.

Storm didn’t just understand the numbers, she understood the psychology of how to get people to talk, which I imagined was a valuable skill for an investigative reporter, and I leaned away from her a little when I realized how easily she’d gotten me to spill my time in prison.

Chapter 6

Storm

Magnum needed to back the fuck off, but there was no way for me to tell him to. We were working, dammit. And okay, maybe he wasn’t out of line. People sometimes touch when one person has control of the keyboard and mouse, and the other person is just as engaged. My body’s reactions were my problem, not his. Also, telling him to back off would just let him know he was affecting me, and he was way too cocky already.

I switched back to the monitor we’d been on before Magnum had sent us off on this quite lucrative tangent, and picked up the thread showing them my early research.