“Mm. Y’ok?”

“I’m fine, Caleb,” Elsie whispered softly, running her hand over his impossibly fit chest with a little shiver of pleasure. “Go back to sleep, okay? I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You’re not going anywhere?”

“No,” she smiled, hearing the smile in her own voice and wondering if he could hear it as well. “I’m not going anywhere. Sleep now, okay? Just sleep.”

Elsie waited, holding her body perfectly still, until Caleb’s breathing slowed again. Pretty soon, he was breathing so deeply and slowly that she almost couldn’t tell that he was breathing at all. There was a moment of panic, something she knew couldn’t be unique to her, and then she saw his chest rise again and knew that everything was alright. At least for the moment, everything was alright. The only problem was her. She couldn’t keep still. The setting she now found herself in was the nicest she had ever set foot in in all of her life. The hotel was quaint, nothing opulent or anything like that, but it was the kind of place that just exuded class and knowledge of its own greatness. What she had done there, what she had done with Caleb, had been great, too. It had been more than great, actually. It had been the best sex she’d ever had in her entire freaking life, and she was still having a hard time wrapping her head around that. The way their bodies had moved together had been unreal, so out of this world that now, sitting up slowly so as not to wake him up again, Elsie had only her own delicious soreness to prove that the two of them had been tangled up together.

The trippiest thing was that she had been the one to initiate the whole thing. She’d come to Cinque Terre totally freaking out that he might try something with her, and in the end, it had been her to make a move. She’d never made the first move on a guy in all of her life, and a week in Cinque Terre had her coming onto the one and only Caleb Grant. She’d been like a woman possessed, and now that it was all over, it didn’t even feel real. She was always restless when it came to lounging in bed with someone. She had never really been the type to cuddle, but that feeling that this was not real was making her restlessness worse. It was so much worse…so once she was sure Caleb was deeply enough asleep to not be bothered by her movements, she got up out of the bed and padded softly away from him. She walked on her tiptoes, wincing and stopping quickly when the cool wooden boards creaked beneath her feet, but Caleb didn’t even move. He was completely dead to the world, which was a good thing for her. It suited her purposes perfectly.

Elsie’s ability to wait on figuring out who was hacking into Caleb’s information had reached its end. She had to know. It was a full-blown compulsion now, and there was nothing that could distract her from doing her digging. She wrapped herself in the first thing she found, a robe that belonged to Caleb and that smelled just like him when she put it on, and rooted around the room for his computer. The two of them staying in the same room had been a major point of contention between them upon their arrival, with Elsie demanding that she have her own room and Caleb insisting just as strenuously that it would ruin any chance they had of presenting an image of the perfect happy couple. She’d been supremely pissed off about him getting his way (mostly because it felt like he pretty much always got his way when things came down to doing something her way or doing something his way), but now she was glad the two of them were rooming together. Obviously, she was glad because it had made what happened between them more possible, more natural even, but she was glad for much more clinical reasons as well. The fact that they’d been in there together for the duration of their trip meant that she had a pretty good idea of where all of his things were, and that included the laptop. For the moment, that laptop was like Elsie’s holy grail. Everything had been crazy back in New York when Caleb had been batting down each and every excuse for staying home, but that didn’t mean she didn’t remember everything he’d said about the way the Grant Corporation ran all things related to the computer. From what he’d told her, she knew that every single thing she would need access to would be on his computer. Once she got into that, and something told her that he wouldn’t be the hardest person in the world to hack, she would be able to sift through all of the information she’d been hired to figure out but had for some reason not yet been shown. Provided that Caleb slept for a good long time, she was confident that she would be able to solve his problems. She wanted that for him; she wanted to give that to him. She didn’t care for thinking about how things would go afterwards; she didn’t want to go there. She only knew that she wanted to take away the thing that had been troubling him. She couldn’t lie to herself anymore; she couldn’t continue trying to convince herself that she didn’t have feelings for him because she did. It was those feelings, as much as her own pride in her work that made her want to succeed and to do it as quickly as possible.

“Okay, mamma, let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”

She’d been right about how easy it would be to get into his computer, so right she was tempted to wake him up and scold him for not taking more care with an instrument he’d allowed to hold such a place of importance in his life and business. She had no idea why people didn’t realize how dangerous a computer could be, even super-smart people like Caleb, who presumably had a whole host of the very best IT people at their beck and call. When Elsie realized that all it had taken was a little bit of research about Caleb and then about twenty minutes of trying different combinations of the letters and names that were likely to be the most important in his life, she almost lost it. That was when she really did have to fight back the temptation to march over to the bed and shove him straight out of it, to wake him up with some drama and lecture him about how keeping his computer so unprotected was akin to giving a loaded gun to a friend, asking him or her to put that gun to your temple, and playing a rousing old game of Russian roulette. She didn’t do that, of course, for a couple of reasons. First of all, she hadn't actually gotten permission to go snooping on his computer. When they were in New York, he had mentioned that if she came to Europe with him, he would let her go about her business, but she hadn’t brought it up again since they had arrived. The uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach, a feeling that had been building since she’s first decided that this was the time to get what she’d been hired to find, told her that what she was doing wasn’t exactly kosher. It wasn’t really within the bounds of what was right, and she knew it. Although that didn’t appear to be enough to get her to stop and rethink things, it was enough to ensure that she wouldn’t wake Caleb up.

“Not unless I find the answer,” she told herself quietly, her eyes glowing with the reflected light of Caleb’s computer screen. “I won’t wake him up unless I find out who the hell has been trying to mess with his life. No, not unless. Until. Until I figure out what we’re dealing with.”

And that was the second reason Elsie’s interests lay more with Caleb remaining asleep, as opposed to getting him up so she could lecture him. She needed time. Because she hadn’t gotten started yet. She hadn’t even begun to delve into the mystery of who was hacking into the Grant Corporation’s information and poking at the skeletons in Caleb’s closet in the meantime, which meant she really had no idea how long it was going to take for her to get what she needed. She had no clue how sophisticated her hacker might be, and she had to prepare herself for the worst. She was good, but she wasn’t the only one who had her brand of talents, and if she was being brutally honest with herself, she wasn’t the best there was out there either. She was good, but she wasn’t the best and if the hacker she found herself up against was some kind of Goliath prodigy type, she might very well be screwed. Even if she wasn’t screwed, it could take her a very long time to track whatever traces her culprit had left. She wanted to have as much of that time as she could get before Caleb woke up so that she could hand him his answer on a silver freaking platter. If she could get there, that was. If she could get it for him.

“Cut the shit, Morrow,” she hissed to herself, starting to talk to herself in earnest now the way she did on every project she got settled into. “You do this every time. You always freak out and tell yourself that you won’t be able to do it, and that hasn’t happened once. Not once. So cut the freaking shit.”

***

Three hours later, and Elsie knew for sure she had been right. She had given herself her usual pep talk, and as usual, she had been completely right. The only thing that was different between all of those other times when she’d been right and this one was that this time, she didn’t want to be right. She’d found the answer they were all looking for, and now that she had it, she wished that she could do away with it again. In the end, it hadn’t been that hard. The stone-cold part of her, the part that stayed practical no matter what circumstances she found herself in, was completely appalled by how negligent everyone had been when it came to the Grant Corporation’s security. It should never have been allowed for all of the company’s, well, everything, to go through the server on Caleb’s computer. She had known it when he’d first told her, and now that she had seen with her own eyes what it had led to, she felt that fact with even more certainty.

Then there was the matter of whatever passed for IT in the Grant Corporation. The fact that nobody had caught the myriad of ways in which the Grant Corporation had been at risk was astonishing to Elsie. It made her wonder how many other of Caleb’s employees had been accepting their paychecks and then quietly going about zero work at all. She wanted to talk to Caleb about that, too, if she got the chance. She wanted to tell him that it was time for him to do a major overhaul of his employees and make sure that the people who were there really deserved to be there. She would talk to him about that. She would talk to him about all of the things she’d found if only he would let her.

“What are you doing, Elsie?”

“Oh Jesus! Oh man, I think you almost gave me a heart attack.”

“I guess I did. I apologize about that. Wouldn’t want to hurt you or anything. That being said, I’d still like to know what you’re doing on my computer.”

His voice wasn’t angry, not yet, but Elsie found that she could hardly even look at Caleb because the feeling of her guilt was too great. She felt like she’d been caught in the middle of doing something dirty, and she didn’t want to have to take whatever punishment was coming to her. What she really wanted was for him to be sleepwalking or something, for him to just turn around and get back into bed without asking her any more questions, but that sure as hell wasn’t going to happen. He was standing above the place where she’d settled crosslegged on the ground, the place she’d hardly moved from in the last three hours. He was standing above her completely naked, which somehow made her feel even worse. It made her sense of having betrayed him even stronger, and she had to bite down hard on her lip to keep herself from crying, apologizing, or both. She hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, and she had to keep reminding herself of that as she attempted to stand.

Because she’d been sitting in the same position for such a long time, and because she hadn’t moved much at all in all of that time, almost her entire right leg was asleep, and when she tried to stand, she almost fell right over. It was Caleb’s strong arms that caught her and made sure she didn’t take a tumble, and she had to fight the temptation to bury herself into the feel of his body and just lie to him. God, it would have been so much easier to lie! She could have told him that the reason for her being upset was that she hadn’t found what they were looking for. She could have told him that she didn’t think she could find it, and once that was done, she could have done her best to take the business of resolving matters into her own hands. She could have done these things and would undoubtedly have gotten away with them, but she would have been lying to him and that was something she didn’t want to do. Something about her time in Cinque Terre had changed her, softened her up somehow. She’d opened herself up to Caleb in more ways than one, and she had no desire to undo that progress. Instead, she took a steadying breath, pulled away from him, and then looked him steadily in the eyes.

“I’m sorry, Caleb. I probably should’ve asked first.”

“Probably,” he answered in a mild voice she couldn’t decipher at all, “but that’s really neither here nor there at this point. What have you been up to? I can tell something’s on your mind.”

“You’d be right about that. I found something. I found something big. The biggest thing, really, and it’s something I know you aren’t going to like.”

“You’d better tell me what it is then. And maybe let me throw on a pair of pants.”

She waited while he turned on a little light by the side of the bed and sifted through his things to find something to put on. Her heart skipped an unhappy beat, and she asked herself again if this was something she really had to do. She had never asked herself a question like that about a job before, and she could hardly believe she was doing it now, but things weren’t anything close to normal with this job. Mostly because she’d allowed it to become more than a job, and once she had done that there was no way for her to go back.

“Alright, I’m semi-decent. Why don’t you just tell me? Tell me fast, okay? Like ripping off a Band-Aid.”

“Okay,” she said in a tremulous breath, then mentally kicked her own ass for sounding like such a weakling. “Here goes. I figured out who has been doing all of the damage to you and your company.”

“I thought it might be something along those lines. Who is it?”

“It’s someone close to you, Caleb. It’s someone really close.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“I just don’t want you to shoot the messenger, alright? Because people do that. People do that kind of thing all of the time, and we both know that’s true.”

“Elsie. You’re starting to ramble, and the ramblings aren’t making things better. I’ll ask you one more time. Who is it that’s been fucking with me and my company?”

“It’s your brother, Caleb. It’s Marlin. He’s the one who’s been causing you all of this trouble.”