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“Where are you looking?” Luke pushed back from his laptop and came around to stand behind me.
“Here.” I pointed at the project timeline and forced myself to ignore how close he stood. That with the dip of his head, he could kiss my neck.
“Hmm.” He leaned in, resting his hands on the table and bracketing my arms. “Make the change. Let Ben know.” Ben was our project manager.
“Will do.” I waited for Luke to pull away.
He didn’t.
Did he expect me to work while he watched?
“I wish I’d been there on the plane.” Luke’s voice shifted, taking on a low, gravelly vibe.
Not what I was expecting. “So you could have stopped us?”
“No.” He snorted. “I would have helped.”
My mind blanked. Coated in a bucket of white, there was nothing there. “You’re not jealous?” Was I missing something about this competition?
He rested his head against the back of my mine. “I would have watched. I would have helped.” His words hummed through and around me. “If there was a lock on the conference-room door, I’d bend you over the table right now, and find out if you’re as tight as I imagine.”
God, there was no way I could ignore the desire spilling through me. Could we wedge a chair under the door handle? “And now we’ll never get any work done again.” It wasn’t the most awkward thing I could have said, but it made the list.
“Sure we will. Same way we always have.”
“You’ve got a lot more faith in us than I do,” I teased. I needed this conversation to take a lighter turn.
“I’ve got absolute faith in you.” Luke still had that deep, soul-seducing tone as he pulled away and returned to his seat.
I was wrong to think Chase was the intense one. Luke was going to consume me from the inside out.
Someone knocked on the conference room door, and Mike stepped into the room. “Do you guys have a minute?”
Sure. As soon as I dislodged my heart from my stomach. What if he’d done that two minutes earlier? Did I look guilty?
“What’s up?” Luke sounded much calmer than I felt. I needed to learn that trick.
Mike pulled up a chair at the far end of the conference table. “We just got an email.” He looked at me. “Are you all right? You look flushed.”
Fuck. “I’m fine.” I gave him a weak smile. “Long night. Distracted today. Email from whom?”
“Zane. Says he tracked down where the original upload came from. It was one of our remote build machines.”
Zane was head of cyber security. The fact that he was handling this personally, rather than giving it to someone on his team, was another reminder of how critical the event was. I shoved the flirting from a moment earlier into a box, and opened my email. There wasn’t much more information there than Mike provided. “So we still don’t have anything.”
“We do.” Mike winced. “We have several other indicators that point to Billie. Logins. Change management.”
That didn’t seem right. “Zane doesn’t mention those.”
“We’ve been... uh... lax with security.” The hesitation in Mike’s tone hung heavy in the room. “With the tight deadlines. The crunch. Some things slip.”
Nope. Still didn’t buy it. His story had holes.
“You’re sharing login information?” Luke sounded as skeptical as I felt.
Mike shook his head like a bobble in an earthquake. “No. Of course not. Not passwords or anything. But someone is on the machine, and they let another dev hop on to look at shared work. And Billie... She’s been off lately.” He looked at Luke. “Hitting on a couple of the guys. Making everyone uncomfortable with certain jokes.”
Mike’s biggest excuse seemed to be we don’t like following protocol, and if that bit everyone in the ass, I was going to be pissed. But his story felt more off the longer he talked. I knew Billie. She’d been with the company for a couple of years, and she was top notch. She was also reserved and mostly kept to herself. I had a hard time seeing her as being on the giving end of sexual harassment, intentional or not.
