Flirting With Disaster (21 page)

“Judah won’t let me talk to anyone at Google to give up the IP info on the emails yet, and their ssecurity is too good for me to steal it myself.”

“I’m so disappointed in you.”

He flashed her a smile that made her heart thump. “If I had more t-time, I could probably figure it out. That would be really fun. And I’ve got contacts there I can hit up for a favor, so it’s not a lost c-cause yet. But in the meantime, I was looking at apps that let you post to all your different ssocial media accounts from one place, and it gave me an idea for a way t-to try to datamine all the different ways fans interface with Pratt to create profiles.”

Every time he talked about computer stuff or the case, he lost most of the stutter. He sounded confident in the most adorably nerdy way.

“So say a teenager in Poughkeepsie c-comments on his blog and follows him on Facebook,” he continued, “and she’s on his mailing list through the website and posts in fan-club chat rooms about him. She’s going to have all different usernames associated with the different accounts, right? That makes it hard to even tell she’s one person. She doesn’t have to go out of her way to c-conceal her identity. It just happens by default. But even so, she’s using the same IP address on all the accounts, say, and her interactions are getting routed through the same server banks in East Asia by her ISP.” Sean glanced at her. “You following me?”

“I’m good.”

That made him smile. He was excited, talk of computers bringing him fully out of the dark mood he’d been in most of the day. His enthusiasm had the unfortunate side effect of making her whole body perk up and stand to attention.

“So the ideal thing would be a program that pulls it all together and says, ‘All this is the same girl. Here are her account names, here’s her IP and all the details on her system and browser, here’s how often she’s been visiting and p-posting and such.’ ”

“ ‘Here’s her name and address?’ ”

“Not necessarily, but I can get us c-close enough that figuring out her name and address wouldn’t be that hard. The trick is to narrow the size of the field down to something manageable.”

“So how do you do that? If you write this program, doesn’t it give you, like, a billion results, with all these profiles of people? How is that useful?”

“Well, that’s a moot point, because I can’t sit down and write a program fast enough to
give us that problem, anyway. But there’s ssome stuff I might be able to c-cobble together to do my bidding.”

The cocky way he said it made her suspicious. “Cobble together how?”

“I’m not going to tell you that part.”

“Is it legal?”

“More or less.”

“Would Caleb be mad if you told him exactly what you were going to do?”

“Probably. But I’m not planning to t-tell him.”

“So what’s the outcome if you manage to do this the way you want?”

“Hopefully I get ssomething that lets me ID a group of people and then actually starts searching out their other business online and looking for ssuspicious activity. My goal is to figure out what a normal level of interest in Judah Pratt is and look for people who are outliers. Or for p-people who stalk the websites late at night.”

“All the messages from the psycho came after midnight.”

“Exactly. I’m hoping we’ll end up with a set of profiles we can sort through to find our guy.”

“Or girl.”

“You think it’s a woman?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She’d assumed it was a woman all along, but she had no evidence to back that up. Caleb had warned her against making unfounded assumptions. Minus ten points for Agent Katie.

“This sounds good,” she said. “How long is it going to take you?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe before we go to Iowa City next weekend we’ll have some solid leads. It will help to have my own equipment. I’m gonna need your help, too, c-combing through the data. You know a lot more about Pratt than I do, and you’ll spot things I don’t see.”

“Just let me know when you need me.”

She didn’t mean it to be a come-on, but her voice emerged from her throat sort of husky and do-me, because Sean had her all revved up. Did it make her a complete pervert, that hearing Sean geek out about computer stuff was turning her on?

Probably.

Did she officially have a candy-apple-red girl crush on her partner?

Yes. Yes, she did.

Way to go, Smarticus. Very
La Femme Nikita
of you
.

“Clark?” Sean asked.

Something menacing had crept into his speech. The good kind of menacing, if she wasn’t mistaken. The drag-you-to-bed-by-one-arm kind. She couldn’t make out his expression, but she thought if she could see his eyes they’d be almost black.

She didn’t answer him. She needed a minute.

“I’ve been thinking about last night,” he said. “What you told me.” His hand found her knee again. “Two years.”

“Yeah,” she whispered.

Want me
, she thought.
Want me, and I’ll
so
make it worth your while
.

“It’s a long t-time.”

“It’s an eternity.”

“When we get to Camelot, I’m going to disappear into my house, and I’m going to be working around the clock and forgetting to eat and shave and shower, because that’s what I do when I’m deep into something like this.” His hand moved slowly up her thigh. His voice had gotten deeper, with gravel in it. “But then I’m going to finish, and I’m going to call you up.”

“I’ll bring you a pizza.”

It was an inanity, but with Sean’s hand at the junction of her legs, she counted it as a miracle that she could speak at all.

“I can’t do anything long-term,” he said.

“You mentioned that.”

“But if you want to—if you want m-me, I mean. If you still want me. I’m attracted to you. You must know that.”

“I had an inkling, but …”

“But what?”

“Well, you have to admit, you’ve been sending some mixed signals.”

He put pressure on the seam of her jeans with his knuckle and said, “Let me c-clear them up.”

“Ohh … kay.”

“I want you. I’ve wanted you for months.”

“You have?”

“I went to bed last night, and I c-closed my eyes, and all I could think about was how I’d had a chance to get you naked and I’d fucked it up.”

Katie had to pull herself together. She had to. “Really?”

“I saw myself peeling off that shirt you were wearing and touching you. Kissing you. Pushing you back on the c-couch and sinking inside you, and I have to tell you, now I c-can’t think about anything else. I want you. I want inside you.”

He glanced at her, as if to make sure what he’d said hadn’t shocked her. It had, though. It sent such a jolt of pleasure through her, she thought she might pass out.

“I wanted you in my room last night, and I want you right now, in the back of the c-car, and I want you in a bed, for hours, until neither one of us can move.”

She needed to formulate some kind of reply. Anything. But the only sound her mouth could make with his hand on her crotch and that gravelly, filthy, overwhelming speech ringing in her ears was a helpless little moan.

It didn’t matter. Sean got the idea. He put on his turn signal and started looking for somewhere to pull over.

Sean needed to kiss her. That was all he was going to do until she had a chance to think about what he’d told her, but
fuck
, he needed to do it.

He scanned the shoulder for a place to put the truck. Privacy wasn’t an issue—the snow was coming down thick and fast, it was late, and hardly anybody else was on the road—but placement was. It had been snowing on and off for a couple of days, and plowed mounds of snow filled a lot of the territory at the side of the road.

There was hasty, and then there was just plain dumb. He was trying to stay on the right side of the line, but his pulse was racing, and it was hard to concentrate on anything but anticipating what her mouth would feel like. How she would taste.

Such a bad idea. He no longer cared. He would deal with the fallout tomorrow.

Katie raised her hips so his hand wedged tighter between her thighs. “I think … I think we need to … set some parameters.”

“I just want to k-kiss you.”

“You can’t park on the interstate.”

“Sure I c-can. It’s an emergency.”

“No, I mean, you’re not supposed to …”

She said something then, something featuring the words “illegal” and “blizzard” and “not safe,” but he was busy throwing the car in park, flipping on the hazards, unbuckling her seat belt, and dragging her across the space between the seats.

When he had her in his lap, her knees on either side of his hips, he cupped her neck in one hand and gave her one last chance to back out. “Is this okay?”

In the dim interior of the truck, her face seemed fragile, her eyes huge. She looked vulnerable and alive and real in a way Sean couldn’t quite understand. It was as if everyone else moved through his world in black-and-white, and Katie came at him in Technicolor. He wanted to know what it felt like to take a piece of her and pull it inside himself. He wanted to kiss her so bad, he ached with it.

She nodded.

With gentle pressure, he pulled her closer until their lips were just a few inches apart. The private scent of her settled around him, faded remnants of her lemony perfume, laundry detergent, shampoo. The more intimate smell of Katie’s body at the end of a long day. His dick roused to it with a throb that made him wince. “This is wuh-what you want?”

She dropped her head and brushed her mouth over his, and it was the only thing that mattered. Her warmth. Her breath against his mouth. The exploratory slide of her tongue along his bottom lip. The nip of her teeth as he held himself still and let her investigate, because it seemed important that this time Katie be allowed to take the lead. He’d stolen their first kiss. Let her have this one.

She took it with a confidence and enthusiasm he hadn’t prepared for, and his hands slipped away from where he’d told them to stay and began to memorize the territory of her body. The dip at her waist. The toned muscles of her upper arms and the delicate shape of her shoulder blades. Her hips. Her ass.

Sean angled his head and anchored his fingers in her silky hair. He took control, turning the kiss into a seduction because he wanted more of her. He wanted all of her, and this mating of their mouths wasn’t going to be enough. He needed to get lost in it, to let go of everything and be with Katie—inside Katie, on top of Katie, touching Katie for an hour. Just an hour.

She could have his control for an hour.

Gripping her hips tight, he pressed up against her heat as she put her hands on his face, smoothed her thumbs over his cheekbones, and kissed him back with a fervor that told him she wanted this as badly as he did.

They sank into it, making out like teenagers who had no idea what came next. Kissing for timeless minutes that melted the icy casing of his self-control until he couldn’t remember who he was supposed to be with Katie and didn’t care. His shameless hands roamed all over her, raking down her torso, up her thighs. Discovering the shape and weight of her breasts. She pushed into his erection, moaned and purred and set him alight.

“You are so fucking hot,” he said, his mouth against her neck as his fingers found their way to the hook of her bra and released her breasts into his palms. She made a hitching little sound in the back of her throat that completely slayed him.

“And those noises—” He rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, and she gasped. “K-keep doing that, sweetheart, and I’m going to make this so worth your while.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh … Wait, what’s ‘this’?”

“ ‘This’ is what we’re about to do in the back,” he mumbled, shoving her shirt up and out of his way so he could lower his mouth to her breast. “For a very long time.”

“See, but we’re not,” she said, cradling the back of his head and pulling him closer. “I’m—Oh, man. Oh, Sean, don’t stop doing that, because—” And then he licked her nipple and she ground against him and stopped protesting. He was too busy smelling and tasting her, too enthralled with the texture of her nipples against his tongue and the heat between her legs to worry about anything at all.

When he sucked, Katie began to grind more insistently against him, and there was way too much denim between them, way too many layers of fabric keeping him from sinking inside her. Her jeans were a tight, stretchy Fort Knox, their removal presenting a serious challenge to his sex-addled brain.

“The backseats fold down,” he said, his thumbs settling over her hipbones as he pulled her tighter, closer. As close as he could get her, but not nearly close enough.

“I’m not—Mmm … oh! Oh, for fuck’s sake, I am, aren’t I?”

“I hope so. You’ve got to say ‘yes’ first.”

He forced himself to take his hands to neutral territory, knowing that if he pushed her into sex and she regretted it later, he’d find it difficult to live with himself.

She lifted her head. The sight of her flushed cheeks and swollen lips rolled right over his resolve. Sean kissed her again. Again. Thrusting up against her, dangling over a cliff.

“C-clark?”

“Hmm?”

“Say yes.”

She only moaned. He redoubled his efforts, sliding his hands down to splay over her taut stomach. It was when he started looking for the button on her jeans that he saw the pulsing amber light, and even then it took him the span of seven or eight seconds to figure out what was about to happen. Seven or eight seconds for the rumbling noise of the plow to become deafening as it shoved a couple feet of wet snow around them and completely blocked in the SUV.

Both of them stared out the window at the place where the plow had been.

“I told you you can’t pull over on the highway in a snowstorm,” she said. “You might get plowed in.”

“Thanks.”

She gave his shoulder a playful shove and smiled, her profile bathed in the blue light of the dashboard. “Little late to be thanking me. You should’ve listened before.”

“I had other things on my mind.”

“That’s not your mind.”

“It is when I’m around you,” he said with a grin.