“Suit yourself. See you later, Carla.”
She sighed and returned her attention to work. Far from being hungry, her stomach clenched like a sailor’s knot. She wanted to succeed in this assignment — correction, had to succeed — but with Jackson AWOL she really had no idea if she was on the right track or not. His absence distracted her like ants at a picnic, but she refused to let it jeopardize her purpose. She’d prove her usefulness and get herself one step closer to Paris.
Hours later, the click of a door provided the first interruption of the night. She glanced up from the monitor to the clock on the wall, shocked to realize it was nearly midnight.
“You’re still here?”
She didn’t have to see the face to recognize the voice. She tamped down her smile and turned around, ignoring the cloud of butterflies swirling about her tummy.
Jackson strolled across the room and took a seat beside her. His jaw was shadowed with stubble. Stray locks from his unruly dark hair draped across his forehead. He wore a white sleeveless T-shirt, areas of which clung to his chest, damp with sweat from the relentless humidity.
“I saw the light as I walked past on my way home,” he said. “Thought maybe someone had forgotten to turn it off. I didn’t expect anyone to still be here.”
“Time flies when you’re having fun.”
His eyes flicked over to the monitor. A hint of his woodsy scent drifted toward her, and she wrestled against the urge to close her eyes and breathe him in. “Quinn says you’re getting us into the twenty-first century.”
“I hope you don’t mind. I mean, I know you don’t like this consultant stuff. I just thought—”
“It’s good, Carla.” He cut her off but his voice was soft. “I like it.”
He rolled his chair over to get a better look at the monitor. With him so close she could feel the hot surge of body heat rolling off his skin, like shimmering waves rising from a desert road. She dropped her hands in her lap, striving for calm. She needed to be as indifferent to his presence as he seemed to be to hers.
His slim, strong fingers skated across the computer’s touchpad as he reviewed her work, saying nothing for several minutes. At last he sat back and looked over at her. “Tell me about this.”
“Okay. Well, for starters, what do you know about cloud computing?”
“Heard of it, but not much beyond that.”
“Essentially it’s a way to store and manage your data via remote servers, like the Internet, rather than on a local server or personal computer.”
He cocked his head, gaze focused and intense. A thrill shot through her, pleased she had his attention. “What’s the advantage?”
“You can access your data from all different kinds of places without having to use a specific computer or computing device tied to a local network like you do now. With the cloud, all your data is stored remotely. It’s secure, easy to set up, and can also save you money.” She returned her attention to the monitor. “Let me show you.”
Again he shifted closer to her, but she stayed focused on the project, managing to ignore her jacked up heartbeat even as she spied a trickle of sweat tracking its way along his collarbone.
“Right now you have to be in this room, sitting at these monitors, in order to access your data.” “It’s worked fine so far.”
“I know. But let’s say you need to go on a business trip to meet with clients.”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Okay, okay. You don’t go on business trips.” “Or meet with clients.”
She expelled a breath of frustration. “Could you work with me for just a minute?”
His lips twitched with a faint smile and she nearly gasped aloud as she realized he was teasing her. “All right,” he agreed, maintaining a straight face. “I’ll go along.”
“Thank you.”
“So I’m on this hypothetical business trip to meet with…clients, did you say?”
“Or vendors, if that’s what they are in your world.”
“Suppliers.”
“Fine. You’re on a trip to southern Florida, let’s say, because your supplier of live mice to feed your snakes wants to introduce you to a new breed of mice that might…um…you know, be more nutritious for your snakes.”
This time he could not contain a chuckle. “I can’t wait to hear how you’re going to tie a new supply of mice with having my data in the cloud.”
“Then you, Mr. Jackson, should prepare to be impressed.” She shot him a smug grin and pulled up the home screen for his data.
“Anything you need to access starts here. These buttons across the top give you menu options for what you want to see.” She clicked on one and opened up breeding history statistics on all of his cobras. “I started with this because it’s the most organized of the databases on your local server. By switching over to the cloud, you could now access this on your hypothetical trip to inspect those new mice. You look at the breeding history of your female cobras and make a decision about which mice will be right for which snakes because you have all your data right where you are.”
She risked a glance at him to see if she was making sense. He said nothing, brows furrowed as he scrolled through the screens. Her hopes of impressing him jumped off a cliff.
“Is anything wrong?”
He looked at the monitor for a few minutes more then sat back in his chair, studying her through narrowed eyes.
“For the first time ever someone from the business world has done something for me that makes sense.” She couldn’t hold back the elated smile dancing on her lips. “Happy to be of service.”
“You said this works on all devices?”
“Wherever you have Internet access.”
“So I could pull up the data on a tablet. Or smart phone.”
“Sure. If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep, you feel like checking on the cobras, just fire up your tablet and pull up the data. Saves you from stumbling through the dark to the data room.”
He shifted away from her in his chair and she wondered if she’d touched a nerve about the pathway being so poorly lit. “I’m sorry, Jackson. I didn’t mean to harp on the lights. I was just making a joke. A bad one, obviously.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that at all.”
“Oh. Well, what?”
At first he grunted, his typical “no response” response, sitting back in his chair as if weighing whether or not to answer her at all. Then at last he said, “I have frequent insomnia. I wake up a lot in the middle of the night.”
She nodded but kept silent. He seemed to have more to say.
He shook his head, a combination of disbelief and wonder etched on his face. “You couldn’t have known that.”
“No.”
“It’s just an odd coincidence you picked that example.”
“I…” She hadn’t been told about his insomnia, but for some reason a part of her had felt as if she’d known. She chanced a direct response. “I get the feeling you think about what you do all the time. This place is beyond just your work; it’s your life. And if that’s true, it means your thoughts about everything here interfere with your sleep. You’d be the kind of person who wakes up a lot. Assuming you can even get to sleep in the first place.”
A wry grin touched the corner of his mouth. “You read me right. Sounds like you can relate.”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, I can. I get so caught up in what I’m doing, or nervous about something…” She finished with a shrug. “Sleep becomes impossible.” The conversation stilled and ticks from the wall clock filled the silence. Ironically enough, given their discussion, for the first time that evening she began feeling tired. She noticed Jackson looking up at the clock. He rose from his chair.
“Even for a couple of night owls, we should probably hit the hay.”
“All right.” She began shutting down. “I can show you more later. There’s still a lot to do, assuming you’re okay with me finishing it?”
“It’s more than okay. It’s—”
She looked up at him, wondering why he’d stopped, but the guarded expression on his face yielded no clue. He stood inches away from her, his lithe, powerful physique seeming almost to hover, like a shadow cast from the sun. He watched her with heated intensity and suddenly the mundane task of closing down programs became a challenge as she tapped at the keyboard with trembling fingers. She willed herself to look away from him, focus back on the work. Above her, Jackson’s breathing changed, becoming shallower and more pronounced. Finally the programs finished closing. She stood up, facing Jackson, and the atmosphere shifted.
Without warning, a spark of desire lit and unfurled, encircling them like a cat weaving through its owner’s legs.