Fox and Peter banged their heads together for most of the day, and Fox started to think this was going to turn into one of those tedious jobs that dragged on for weeks when suddenly they both spotted a discrepancy at the same time.

“Hey, do you—” they both said at once, then Fox laughed.

“Let me see,” he said as he wheeled over to Peter’s desk.

Yep. Peter had spotted the exact same thing as him.

“If they’re shipping coats to Minnesota,” Peter began.

“Why is this address in Texas?” Fox grinned and patted the back of Peter’s chair. “Nice. Who are they?”

Peter’s fingers skittered, and a map came up. “Some small insurance firm. Maybe insurers need a lot of coats,” he said dryly. “Over on Victory, just outside town. 9206. Hidden Creek Insurance. They put a lotta thought into that name, I bet they’re super trustworthy.”

Fox nodded to himself. A small company was harder to engineer his way into, but not impossible. “Just one branch?”

“You got it.”

“Shit.” He wheeled back to his own laptop and dragged up everything he could on the company, from their formation records to information about their CEO. Everything he could cram into his short-term memory could benefit him. Facebook feeds from employees, local news articles, the works.

It was a crash-course in the inner workings of a single, low-profile company, but it would have to do. All he had to do was talk his way in through the door.

The rest was smoke and mirrors.

* * *

He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt as he walked into the little building off one end of a strip mall. The air conditioning in here was a relief from the warmth outside, and he wondered how the hell Texans survived once summer came. Maybe they all just hid in their offices until the sun went down.

He smiled as he sailed past the reception desk, giving the middle-aged lady there a wave and a warm “Howdy!”

“Sir?” Her smile faltered as he didn’t stop. “Sir—”

Fox wheeled around and walked right up to her desk, doubling down on his smile as he offered his hand. “My apologies, ma’am.” He squeezed a little Texas into his accent, but not too much. He didn’t want to overdo it, and it wasn’t an accent he’d had much practice with. “Forgive my manners. I was running late, I didn’t mean to sail on through like that.”

She took his hand, and turned bright pink when he squeezed hers. “Oh, nonsense,” she chuckled. “But I’m afraid I’m gonna need to make you a tad bit later than you already are. You have to sign in to the visitor’s book, sir.”

“Of course. I’m such an airhead.” He laughed and released her so that he could grab a pen. “I have an appointment with Clive. Just boring IT stuff, I’m afraid.”

People responded well to being told that computers were boring. He could already see her nodding in sympathy, pitying the poor guy whose job it was to work with the damn machines.

“No problem. I can call him for you?” She offered it with a lilt in her voice.

“Nah. I know where he is. Just down the hallway, right?” He pointed to the only possible direction any offices could even be in, as the building was too small to be a maze.

“That’s right.” She took the book and squinted at his signature, then smiled up at him. “Have a wonderful day, Mr. Porter. If you need a thing, just let me know and I’ll get you seen to right away!”

“Oh, now there’s an offer!” He winked at her as he sashayed toward the corridor, and heard her giggle like a schoolgirl at his back.

If only he swung remotely her way she might have had a chance.

* * *

Fox ducked into the first empty office he could find and shut the door, then closed the shutters. He quickly scouted the room.

Trash can empty. No jacket or sweater. No car keys or phone. The office’s owner hadn’t been here all day, which meant they were unlikely to arrive this late in the day either. It should be a safe enough hideout for now.

His next challenge would be to get onto the network and hope that—as a small company—their security was reasonably lax. The quickest way onto the network was to charm a few users into handing over their passwords. All he had to hope was that Clive was the kind of guy to stay in his office and not randomly go speak to the receptionist. Once he had a variety of usernames and passwords that all worked, he could go back to the office and break into their network from the outside to avoid discovery.

What he didn’t have was time to wait around onsite ingratiating himself with the staff, so he’d have to convince later people that others had already given him what he wanted. Peer pressure was a huge advantage in a short amount of time.

Satisfied that he’d spent enough time “in his meeting with Clive,” Fox wandered out of the office and back to the open floor where people lower down the corporate food chain had to work. He pulled out a notepad and pen to up his game and picked out the most senior-looking member of staff he could see.

He approached the lady, who had dyed her hair bright pink, and leaned on her partition wall.

“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” he said, keeping his voice low. “But I adore your hair!”

She turned away from her nearest colleague and smiled up at Fox. “When you get to be my age, honey, you do what you darned well please.”

He let out a soft, conspiratorial laugh. “You don’t strike me as someone who’d wait.”

Her bright blue eyes gleamed with amusement. “All right. But you care even less about what other people think. I like your hair, too. It’s such a pretty shade of red.”

“All natural,” Fox assured her.

She laughed and nodded. “Always the way, honey. Is there something I can do for you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” He entered her cubicle and crouched down by her desk, keeping his voice low. “I’m the new IT guy. My name’s Rob. Rob Porter. Pleased to meet you.”

“Rob,” she cooed. “I’m Marissa.”

“Now that’s a beautiful name!” He grinned. “I look forward to working with you, Marissa. For now, though, Clive’s sent me out on a mission. I think ideally he just wants me to introduce myself to everyone, but he’s also asked me to come back to him with little facts about y’all to prove I actually talked to you. I wonder, do you have any cats? A dog? Something I can write down and tell him you told me?”

“Oh, he’s got some weird ideas, that Clive does!” Marissa chuckled. “It’s clever. I like it. Well, yes. I have two cats. Marmalade and Ginger. They’re brothers, you see.”

“Mm-hmm.” Fox nodded seriously as he scribbled down the cat’s names.

It was important that everyone else saw Marissa answering his questions. A few more of these and he could switch on to another cubicle where people hadn’t quite overheard anything and start asking for passwords.

Office workers were weird.

* * *

Now and then he reached a user who—very sensibly—was wary of handing their password over and refused to do it, but they happily talked about their pets or children instead, which distracted them from calling their real IT guy on the phone and bringing him out here.

“I’d rather not say it out loud,” admitted the payroll lady he was currently crouched beside.

“I understand,” he whispered to her with a wink. “Here, you can write it down.” He flipped his notebook to a fresh page and offered her his pen.

“Thank you.”

He idly looked away as she wrote in the book, as though avoiding looking at her ATM PIN. It made no sense of course; she was writing it in his book, but it had the desired effect. She handed book and pen back to him within seconds.

“Thank you kindly,” he whispered. “I’ll let you get on.”

“You’re welcome,” she smiled.

He rose from his crouch like a meerkat and caught a flash of darkness at reception. It was big, bulky, like the moon blocking out the sun.

Fox turned his head from it to make it less obvious that he was watching but his eyes remained focused, and as the door closed behind the newcomer the sunlight faded a little.

The vast creature in the black suit was Axel Ford.

His breath faltered. All he could hear was the clamor of his heartbeat whooshing in his ears. It couldn’t be Ford. For some unknown reason he was utterly certain it just wasn’t possible, like he’d decided that because he wasn’t ever going to see the guy again it just wasn’t feasible for him to be anywhere near Fox.

Then he saw Ford do The Thing.

“Are you okay there, Rob?”

“Sure,” he said with a fixed grin even as he tried to figure out who had asked it of him. “Excuse me a moment.”

Ford had pulled some kind of identification from his jacket and was showing it to the receptionist. It was a Thing everyone with some kind of official capacity did in exactly the same way, with exactly the same look on their faces.

The receptionist pointed toward the offices Fox had hidden in earlier and Ford began to stride toward them like a storm. Fox had to zigzag his way across the maze of cubicles to reach him before whatever the hell Ford was here for kicked off. The last thing Fox needed was for his months of investigation to get flushed away by another agency spooking his suspects. The trick was to get there every bit as fast as Ford did without drawing attention or looking like he was in a hurry.

He almost didn’t make it.

Fox fell into step behind Ford just as Ford whooshed into the corridor, and Fox took him by the elbow.

“Captain Ford,” he hissed. “We need to talk. Please come with me.”

Ford halted and spun to face him, eyebrows raised.

It felt like he’d been winded. The air left him in a rush and his head spun like crazy. His skin tingled as flashes of his morning intruded on his here and now, and he felt the thrum of blood as it rushed to his cock.

It was Ford.

Everything about him was the same, from his broad shoulders and chest straining to get out of his clothes, to the piercing blue eyes and chiseled jaw. His hair was a fraction longer these days, and he had the faintest of crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes, but damn it, everything else was the same.

He was literally the man from Fox’s dreams.

Ford blinked. His eyebrows came down, then furrowed together. “Walker, isn’t it?”

“Not here.” Fox said it so weakly that he wasn’t sure whether Ford could have heard it. “C’mon.” He snatched his hand back from Ford’s personal space and beckoned with it, then dove into the office he’d borrowed earlier. Once Ford’s bulk was through the doorway, he quietly closed it, then turned the bolt and locked them in.

Ford loomed over him. His aftershave was musk and spice, subtle yet warm. The suit he wore was black as night, and his white shirt crisp and clean. He couldn’t have looked more like a federal agent if he’d tried.

“You’re older than I remember,” Ford said at last, his eyes creasing with amusement.

You’re every bit as hot as I remember, Fox wanted to say. But he was working and it was pretty clear Ford was, too, so he cleared his throat and tried a different tack. “Yeah. Time’s like that. So hey, uh. How about you show me yours, and I’ll show you mine, and we can take it from there?”

He bit his tongue.

The auto-sass had taken over.