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He would happily do this for the rest of his life.
But Jenna was already asleep.
Chapter 13
It was the sound of a keyboard that woke Mark. Light was leaking into the bus around the corners of the blackout blinds in place in the bedroom, and Jenna was no longer next to him.
Mark sat up, able to see her through the open door. She was sitting at the giant workstation, a cup of coffee beside her, and wearing only his shirt. The sight of her bare legs peeking out from under his T-shirt was enough to make him want to pull her out of that chair and drag her back to bed.
But the second thing he noticed was her focus. In the few days he’d been living at her house, he noticed she didn’t sleep much, but he’d also come to observe different versions of Jenna. And the woman rapidly typing on the keyboard, full of sharp, barely contained energy, was a very different version from the exhausted, devastated woman he’d held in his arms last night.
Something was up.
Finding his pants on the floor, he pulled them on before he walked out and leaned against the wall closer to her. “Good morning.”
She didn’t look up from the screen. “Morning.”
No. That wasn’t going to do at all. He bent down so he was right in front of her and kissed her. And not what he would normally consider a good morning kiss.
He took possession of her mouth and didn’t stop until both of them were breathing hard. When he pulled back, those brown eyes of hers were soft and a little unfocused.
“Good morning,” he said again.
He loved the gentle smile she gave him. “Good morning.”
He straightened. “How are you feeling?”
“As good as I can after yesterday’s fiasco, I suppose. I don’t know if I can fully let go of what happened, but I feel a little better.” She turned back to the screen. “When I woke up, I had a thought.”
“How long have you been up? And what was the thought?”
“Not long. And I was thinking about motivation. So far, we have four people with no discernible connection. I cross-referenced Brett with the other three robots.”
Mark walked over to pour a cup of coffee. “I assume he didn’t provide any magical connection.”
“No, nothing. No links to any of the others at all. Which didn’t surprise me. So instead, I started to really look at the places the robots were robbing.”
He took a sip. “A couple of jewelry stores, a pawn shop, and an art gallery.”
“Right. The thing is, nothing was really taken from any of them. Whether it was because law enforcement got there first, or that was never the plan, it seems strange, right?”
Mark nodded. “Yeah. Using something like chemical subjectification in order to rob relatively low-value targets seems like overkill.”
“Yeah, that was my thought too. Joaquin is too smart to be spending so much time and money for so little payoff. He’s creating these robots for more than smash and grabs all over the country.”
“Agreed. Did you figure anything out?”
“Only that I was looking at things wrong in terms of the robots’ connections,” Jenna said.
She clicked a few things on her keyboard, and all four victims, including Brett Cochran, popped up on one of the monitors. “I was looking for traditional connections—someone they all knew or an organization they were all a part of. That was a dead end.”
“But you found something else?”
“Yes. All four of them have some sort of computer expertise.”
She stood and pointed to the first and third victims. “This gal was a computer science major in college, and this guy was a programmer. I spotted that early on but discounted it because the second victim and Brett didn’t seem to have any computer-related ties. But I was wrong.”
“How so?”
