What Are You Afraid Of? (The Agency #2)(30)

Instead, he’d settled on the ground and turned his back to her.

End of conversation.

By seven the next morning they were both up and dressed. Griff had run to the nearby diner for coffee and doughnuts while she showered and put on the same clothes. At some point she was going to have to hit a store. Or a laundromat.

In the meantime, she was on her second cup of coffee and her third doughnut as she paced the floor while Griff silently worked his magic on his computer. At last he glanced up from the bed, his expression impossible to read.

“There’s nothing.”

She frowned, trying not to notice how very fine he looked in his flannel shirt and faded jeans. His dark hair was rumpled and his jaw was dark with his unshaved whiskers.

Deliciously male.

“There has to be something,” she insisted.

He glanced up from the laptop. “The only tickets available would mean flying from Kansas City to Detroit to Atlanta to Baltimore. Over ten hours with layovers. That’s always assuming there’s no delays, which would be a miracle.” He glanced toward the window where the snow was beginning to flutter from the gray sky. Big, puffy flakes that looked pretty until they were coating the runway. “It will be faster to drive.”

“You’re kidding?”

He shrugged. “It’s the holiday season.”

She couldn’t argue. Finding plane tickets this close to Christmas was like mining for gold.

She blew out a frustrated sigh. “Fine. I’ll drive.”

His eyes narrowed. “We’ll drive.”

“Griff.” Her protest was cut short by a sharp ding, ding, ding. She blinked, her gaze lowering to the computer he had perched on his knees. “What was that?”

His slender fingers were already flying over the keyboard. Like a piano virtuoso. If it was her, she’d already have busted the keys. She tended to treat a computer like it was an old-fashioned typewriter, smashing her fingers against the letters as if she could somehow transfer her emotions to the words on the screen.

Maybe it had something to do with being a journalist.

“Someone just tried to hack into one of your accounts,” he said.

She felt a stab of surprise. “How do you know?”

“I’m using one of the programs I designed to alert us if anyone attempts to trace you in cyberspace,” he said. “I filtered out the random searches. You’re a celebrity, so your name gets a lot of traffic.”

She ignored his reference to being a celebrity, moving to settle on the bed next to him.

“So what triggered the alarm?”

“It looks like a search on your credit card,” he said, his gaze on the computer screen as files flashed by at a speed that made her dizzy.

“Identity theft?” she demanded, already searching her mind for what she had to do to cancel her card.

What a pain.

“No.” He lifted his head, his expression tense. “I think the stalker is using your credit card to follow your movements.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. She’d used her card to buy her plane tickets. And then again to rent the car that brought her to this hotel.

“That’s how he knew I was coming to Kansas City?”

Griff nodded. “It’s the easiest explanation.”

She grunted at his offhand words. Hacking into someone’s credit card account was easy? Clearly, he didn’t understand the real world. Most people could barely get online to check their own account, let alone break into someone else’s.

“Which means he has to have some expertise with computers,” she pointed out.

“Or hired someone who does,” he said, returning his attention to the computer. “Damn,” he muttered.

“What’s wrong?”

“Whoever did it managed to block me from tracing them.”

A nasty fear battled with the doughnuts and coffee in the pit of her stomach.

“So we can’t figure out who tried to hack my account?”

“Not without some effort. And time we don’t have.” She could feel him stiffen, his breath hissing loudly through his clenched teeth, as if he’d been struck by a sudden thought. “Wait.”

She studied his grim profile. “Griff ?”

He scowled at the screen. “When the flowers were sent to you, the order should have alerted me.”

She leaned closer, pressed against his shoulder as he closed out the open files and started a fresh search for new ones.

“That’s quite a program,” she said, not entirely comfortable with the knowledge he could keep track of her with the press of a button.

“Creating software to siphon intel from cyberspace is like creating a net to catch a specific fish,” he said, his tone distracted. “Too tightly meshed and it scoops up everything, including the trash, and buries anything of interest. Too loose and the intel slips away.”

Her discomfort spread from a personal level to a more universal unease.

She wasn’t a crazy conspiracy theorist, but she wasn’t na?ve. She knew that the technology Griff created could be abused by people with too much authority and not enough integrity to accept a personal right to privacy.

“How big can you make the net?”

“As big as it needs to be.”

“That’s a lot of intel.”