Page 307 of Lodestar

“I don’t know.”

“You’re running out of time. Do something!”

“Iamdoing something.”A couple moments later, the first woman rasped,“I’ll have to wade through this and see if I can make anything work.”

“Just find something usable on there. I doubt he’ll live past tonight so whatever you can find on there is the last of what he’ll be able to come up with.”

“Bitch,” Conor snarled under his breath.

“You recognize the voices?”

“Not the first one, but the second is my handler—Riggs. She knew I was in danger.”

I squeezed his shoulder in commiseration but admitted, “She was just doing her job, Conor. I’ve been in her shoes. It sucks but we don’t get a say in any of that.”

He didn’t answer, but those fingers of his got to working again.

I stood behind him, trying to be supportive even though I was entirely in the dark, then his computer screen changed and a file folder popped up.

My brows lifted at the number of files on there, absentmindedly taking note of how they were arranged in an odd manner.

“This is your storage system?” I asked.

He hummed. “I tried to stop thinking in binary and channeled quantum mechanics instead. I turned files into layers and—” He turned to me. “I can explain another day. My mind isn’t on this problem, but the one we’re trying to fix right now.”

I hummed back, not wanting to disrupt his train of thought, but at least that made sense as to why the file folder was arranged so unusually. It went deeper than files being layers…

As I watched him work, actuallywatchedhim, not from a distance, not through a webcam, in the flesh and within touching distance, I could feel my heart start to race.

It was in direct response to his intelligence.

Damn, I was in over my head here.

It wasn’t in me tomakeshit. I destroyed it. I waded in and rammed through it. Conor was the opposite. It was probably why he felt he’d improved since coming to know me—what he built, I tried to destroy, and he had to get better at building or faster at repairing around me.

But that his mind veered down these channels, that he’d created something so clever and with such little fanfare, impressed me like nothing else could.

And my wholebeingresponded to it.

I could feel my pulse start to throb in different areas of my body that shouldn’t be reacting right now, not when we had other things to do. But I just knew—I needed him in me.

I needed all that genius inside me.

Filling me.

With no ado, I unfastened my pants and started shoving them down my legs. Toeing out of my boots, I gently nudgedthem aside then dragged my skinny jeans off so I was standing there in a jacket and tank.

When I dragged his chair away from the desk mid-keystroke, he groused, “Hey! I’m bus?—”

I knew his mind wasnoton topic when his eyes flared at the sight of me. I moved around him, put one knee on either side of his on the seat, then straddled him. His gaze dropped down to my pussy, then he reached forward and grabbed the hem of my tank once I’d shrugged out of my jacket.

Within seconds, I was bare and he was not.

Within seconds, I faced a brutal truth—I’d often been naked around dressed men. But this was Conor. And I refused to bring those bastards into this.

So, like I’d classified myself as being earlier, I rammed through those thoughts and instead, I urged myself to find pleasure in his expression, in his eyes, in the curve of his lips, in the feel of his hands.

He was a kid in a candy store.

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