Page 48 of One Secret

I shake my head.

'Just travel-tired.'

Looking for an alternative topic of conversation (and fast!), I change my position. Instead of facing him, I move to Cyrus's side and brace an arm on the back of his chair. His laptop is open and the screen split into four quadrants. Two of them bear grainy little squares of live footage from around the hotel. Another is a graph sparking up and down as if recording some kind of sound, and the last is a standard email inbox, empty barring a few messages marked as "Read" and pinned to the top of the screen.

'What have you been up to?'

Cyrys shrugs casually, winces, and then rolls out his neck. He's clearly been planted in that chair for hours.

'Just some monitoring.'

'Is that the hotel's CCTV?'

My hand is barely an inch from the nape of Cyrus's neck so it feels perfectly natural to just reach out and rub a firm thumb up into his hairline, then down along his trapezoid.

'Mmm,' Cyrus sighs under my touch before answering my question. 'Yeah, they don't know I'm in the system.'

He leans back in his chair. His chin dips to expose the back of his neck. I rub the heel of my palm into the base of his muscle and start working at a heavy knot I can feel beneath the surface.

'You some kind of hacking whiz now?' I'm a tad surprised that someone as reticent over text would have the tech-savvy for something this advanced.

Cyrus is purring like a giant cat under my touch. He snorts at my question.

'Hardly. Nat did it for me.'

I keep my hands studiously working over his skin.

'Nat?'

'Hmm... tech support, eagle eye... I've worked with her for a few years.'

Her.

A foreign impulse stirs in the deepest extremities of my chest. Just an ugly tightening where my ribs join my spine.

'"Nat" as in "Natalie"?'

Cyrus's shoulders tense beneath my touch. There's a lilting amusement to his voice and, unable to see his face, I wonder if he's smiling.

'Jealous?' he asks.

Ugh. I want to bite the tip off of my tongue in punishment for its open whimsy. Embarrassment is a hot surge rising up the sides of my neck.

'Just playing my role,' I try to argue. 'Shouldn't a girlfriend be jealous?'

The tension disappears and Cyrus's shoulders deflate. He rolls his neck again and I can't resist reaching up to brush over his hair. He keeps it ultra-short. A buzz cut any soldier would be proud of. The strands are too short to run my fingers through but they bend and flex beneath my palm with a ticklish friction.

It's a while before Cyrus speaks again.

'I think she's female,' he says.

Wrapping my arms around his neck, I rest my chin on Cyrus's shoulder and then tilt to look him in the eye.

'You "think?"' I repeat.

'I only know her as Nat. Only ever communicated by voice. Which could be going through a modulator.'

'Sounds like a real trusting relationship.'

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