Page 299 of Lodestar

“I did, but there was no need to open it.” He grunted. “If my checking Eagle’s Claw was a front, then maybe the coders were working on remote access…” Silence, then: “No. I’d have known. It’s more likely that Riggs broke into my apartment when she knew I was in Langley. Temper collected me from my building. Ordinarily, Riggs would have been the one escorting me wherever I needed to go.”

“Your doorman must have let her in. That wouldn’t have triggered your alarms, would it?”

“They can enter in an emergency, but I should have seen it on the logs. After everything that happened, I was exhausted and I was starting to freak out about you because of Temper. Maybe I didn’t check, but I’m sure that I did.” He sighed. “I literally went home to pack my bags and headed to the airport. I didn’t give a fuck about anything other than getting to you.”

The heartburn was back.

Apparently, admitting that I loved him didn’t stop that affliction.

I cleared my throat. “You found me.”

“I did. I could ask Denny, but if I do…”

“You’ll have to kill him.”

He grunted. “Yeah. I’d prefer to get him fired. He just had a kid.”

I almost smiled. “That kind heart of yours will bite us in the ass if we’re not careful.”

“So long as you do the biting, I can deal.”

“Of course, you can,” I said with an eye roll.

“I’ll check the logs once I’m done talking to you.”

“Fine. What we know for certain is that your software’s rogue. Do you have a kill switch, or is that too much to ask?”

“The storage houses a weakness. The kill switch targets that. If they copied the program from my hard drive, which we can assume they did, then it’ll render it unusable. Because half the battle is storing so many files and being able to scan it for keywords.”

My brow puckered. “Are you trying to tell me that you don’t use a cloud for that?”

“No. I kept running through terabytes of storage too quickly and the SD cards were useless too.”

“So you invented something?”

“Yup. I’ll show you when you get back if you want?”

“I’d prefer to see your dick.”

A soft chuckle sounded in my ear. “I mean, that can also be arranged.”

“Make it happen,” I growled, turned on beyond reason. “Why the fuck haven’t you started mass-producing this solution? You do know how many resources cloud storage drains?”

“I’m still tweaking it.”

How was I supposed to function when he wasthisclever?

“We’ll tweak it together so we can roll it out faster. I’d like for Katina to live in a world that isn’t four degrees hotter than it is now.”

“Hey?”

“What?”

“Check your upper jacket pocket and I’ll see you later, okay? I’m at my penthouse, don’t forget.”

I didn’t have a chance to answer, but I dug deep into my jacket pocket and…

I sighed. “Damn you, Conor O’Donnelly.”

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