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Right, sparkle. This wasn’t some Twilight fucking fanfic. I looked down at the box I’d been opening and frowned. I cracked the cardboard flaps open then glanced at her again. The smile flirting around her lips just widened.
"You know what,” I said with a shake of my head. “Of all the ways I would like you to have found out about my dick…”
“…and your nipples,” she supplied helpfully and it was hard not to grin at her enthusiasm or her pure enjoyment.
“Yes, and my nipples,” I agreed, grudgingly, and my face ached at the grin pulling it wide when she laughed. “Why is that funny?” I had to know.
She lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s just—nipple piercings sound painful. The idea of piercing my nipples is—” She gave the most delicate of shudders and I turned away from the box to face her fully.
“I bet your nipples would look gorgeous with or without some steel in them.” Not that I hadn’t imagined them. She had these pretty, pale pink lips. Her nipples were probably the same soft shade, and I had to wonder if they would deepen to red when I sucked on them. Running my tongue behind my teeth, I found my dick rising to the occasion even as my hangover beat feet.
“Not going to find out,” she said, though the tilt of her head suggested she was thinking about it.
“If you decide you want to—or if you want to get your clit pierced—I know a guy.”
Her eyes widened a fraction and the aloof goddess became this very earthy, if quirky girl who was almost slack-jawed at the suggestion. All at once, her youth hit me like a sucker punch. I’d have pegged her to be around my age—but I was twenty-seven and she looked to be closer to twenty than thirty.
Right now, I’d say even younger, except there was too much knowledge in those eyes. And I’d never forget the way she looked striding in, like the Goddess of Death, to save me.
“Maybe you can tell me about it someday, my little pincushion, but not today.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed with a chuckle, ready to dodge this topic for a bit. “But if you ever want to know what it feels like…”
What the hell was I doing?
“To get pierced?”
I pulled out a casing to keep my hands busy. The top she wore had slid off one shoulder and added another layer of sensuality to her already comfortable appearance. From her bare feet, with their paler than pink—eggshell I’d bet—polish on her perfect little toes to her loose pajama bottoms that hugged her legs and left very little to the imagination to her bared midriff from the top she wore that seemed more form than functional, she was everything I’d ever been attracted to on the surface.
The sweet and the demure, but beneath all of that, was a darkness I could crave and that would be terrible for me. It was like knowing that even though the first taste would doom me, I desperately wanted to explore every nuance of her.
“To feel what my piercings can do for you,” I said and my voice dipped. The playful look on her smiling face lacked even the element of coyness in an artless way. That made me even hungrier if it were possible. “Just let me know.” I set the casing down on the desk next to her and turned back to the box.
Now my dick was so hard I had to adjust him against my leg, before he jumped free of my pants.
“Maybe I will,” she murmured, then gave the softest of sighs. “But, business first.”
“Of course,” I agreed and latched onto that lifeline. If she could keep this professional, then dammit, so could I. Even if it would serve Rick right for me to lay her back on that desk and eat her out until she was screaming my name.
That was an image I could get behind.
Sure, that was what I wanted to get behind. I gave myself a mental shake. “Business,” I repeated her earlier word. “This is about Dion’s servers.” I’d wondered if she knew what she had when she took them, or if she’d done it as a matter of habit to clean up after herself.
“Precisely.” She kicked her legs like a kid would as I moved back and forth, unpacking and then reassembling one of my towers. I had three more, and then I’d have to put together a case to host those servers so I could start working on their encryption. Dion was an arrogant, out of control, lowlife, selling out his clients and everyone else for the right price—but he hadn’t been stupid. Even if I knew what type of encryption he used, it could take days to get through. Having the servers physically made a big difference.
“There’s a lot of data on there,” she said. “I want to be able to access all of it.”
“Okay, that could take weeks,” I advised her as I checked that the motherboard was seated correctly. “We’re better off if you give me some terms to fish for so I can isolate and peel the data that way. Otherwise, we’re basically scooping with a colander and I have no idea what will sift through and what will be left behind.”
“Explain.” Though she phrased the order like a request, her attention was laser focused on me and the playful flirt from earlier was completely absent.
“Data isn’t stored in adjacent spaces on a hard drive.” I pointed to my box. “I have equipment in there and then in each of these other boxes. I need pieces from each one to put together this tower then the next and the next. They weren’t broken up and all stored in one box per tower.”
“But most machines will have a search table that identifies where the different pieces of data are stored and then you can access them by using that map.”
Fuck, that was sexy. “Precisely. I can’t interpret the data table without an idea of what pieces of data I’m looking for.”
“Start with Thackery and Vienna Drew.”
