Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

He liked her more for the admission. For the fear. It showed she had common sense, was intelligent enough to know what she was letting herself in for. But he didn’t want it overwhelming her. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Sam. The unsub has no idea you’re working with us, or that we’re watching.”

“Unsub?”

“Unknown subject. He’d have no reason to target you at all.”

“Unless I piss him off.”

“You won’t,” he insisted. “All you have to do is act interested in what he has to say. We want him to keep coming back to your site. If he thinks you’re listening, he might do it, if only to try to prove he’s smarter than you. If we’re lucky, since he doesn’t know we’ve pegged him as our guy, he’ll post from work or from his house and then we’ll have him.”

It made sense; the plan was a good one. Still, Alec hated the thought of this woman exchanging even written words with a man who had killed so many.

“Thank you,” she murmured. It wasn’t until he felt her fingers tighten that he realized she was thanking him for warming her hand.

He pulled away, reaching for the controls to turn up the heat another notch. Though, honestly, he felt like opening a window and getting a solid faceful of cold air so he’d stop noticing things like the way she said his name. Not to mention how smooth her skin was or the way her hair smelled sweet, like something tropical, in the close confines of the car.

Wrapping both hands on the wheel, he shifted in his seat and put up a mental wall. A big one covered with Do Not Climb signs. No climbing on the witness, jackass .

His annoyance at his own reaction to her made him reach for something to keep that wall in place despite her warmth and her smell and the hitch in her voice when she’d asked how deep she was getting. “I still can’t believe you didn’t trust me with your CPU,” he snapped.

“Huh?”

He hadn’t wanted to drag her to D.C., and had tried to get her to let him take it. They needed to go through her old cache of e-mails, to see if the Professor had ever reached out to her before, perhaps under a different name. Figuring she could use a laptop to post to her message board from home, he’d planned to tell her what to say by phone.

But she wouldn’t let her damned computer out of her sight. “If you had let me take it, you wouldn’t be sitting here freezing your fingers off in a government car with a heater that blows cold air. Don’t you own gloves?”

“You know how socks disappear in the dryer when you’re doing laundry?”

Startled by the subject change, he nodded.

“Well, gloves disappear from my coat pockets. One at a time. I’m the black hole of death for winter gloves. I have a dozen of them, none that match.”

It was almost cute that she was being intentionally flip, wanting to avoid the real issue. But considering she was already too damn beautiful, he didn’t need her to be cute as well. “Which wouldn’t matter if you’d just let me take the computer.”

“We talked about this at my apartment…”

“Our techs know what they’re doing. They could have examined it and gotten it back to you within twenty-four hours.”

“Big Brother equipped? No way. Besides, how am I supposed to work?”

He ignored the spying accusation. “You have to have a laptop. A backup computer.”

“In an apartment too small to do jumping jacks in? Why would I need one?”

“Well, with what you do…”

“I had a laptop,” she admitted grudgingly. “It had a run-in with a golf club.”

Startled, he glanced at her. “Excuse me?”

“Watch the road. I locked down the hard drive so it might survive a fender-bender. But I’m not sure I would if it comes flying into the back of my head.”

He hid his amusement. And the indignation over the insult to his driving. “Golf club?”

“Long story.”

Damn, she was stubborn. “No backup, huh? What do you do if it breaks down?”

“I have a local computer repair shop on speed dial, and the owner makes house calls. That thing is all I’ve got, and my life is in it. So forget about taking it out of my sight.”

Her words sounded a little too vehement. He suspected they were true, especially judging by what he’d seen of Sam Dalton’s life.

What the hell was he thinking, dragging this woman, who lived like a self-protective hermit, into the middle of a serial-murder investigation? “Look,” he said, realizing there was another option. Maybe not the best one, given how smart the Professor was, but it was at least a possibility. “You can still get out of this altogether. Take a vacation. You give us your passwords, fly to the Caribbean for a week or two, and we’ll take it from there.” They could study her wording, make the messages sound like they were coming from Sam the Spaminator.

“Sorry, no way.” She glanced out the window, not meeting his gaze, and her voice lowered. “I’ve had a man speak for me. I won’t let it happen again.”

He suddenly suspected she was talking about her ex-husband. Though he sympathized, sensing the divorce had been a bad one, he couldn’t let it go, really liking the idea of getting her out of town altogether. “So what if you’re sitting there typing? We’re going to be telling you what to say, aren’t we?”

“Maybe. But I still maintain some kind of control. I have a say, a choice.”

Again, that hint of emotion told him he had hit a nerve. Unable to help it, he murmured, “And it wasn’t always that way?”

She eyed him warily, but finally admitted, “No, it wasn’t.”

His curiosity got the better of him. “So why the Mrs.?”

“What?”

He’d done it now; there was no backing out. “When we met yesterday, why did you insist I call you Mrs. Dalton? You mentioned an ex. So did your loud friend who called.”

She groaned audibly.

“Sorry,” he said, remembering exactly what else her loud friend had said. “Forget I said anything.”

“Will you forget you heard it?”

“Done. But back to the point: Your ex-Mr. doesn’t sound like much of a prize.”

“Shh. Nobody’s told him that yet,” she said, rubbing a hand over her eyes.

“How long?”

“A year.”

“Married a year, or divorced a year?”

“Married four, divorced one. I guess I haven’t gotten used to being a Ms. or a Miss. Besides, though I’m not what anybody would consider a celebrity, I am in the public eye. I’d rather people not know my marital status or anything personal about me, which is why I try to keep any of that stuff off my Web site or my bio.”

He didn’t tell her how easily he could have found out her personal info if he’d been ass enough to do more than professional research on her.

“I know, I know,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “I’m not a teacher who doesn’t understand the subject matter. Someone who wants to know all there is to know about me could probably find it. I put up the basic walls, but there’s still a trail out there for anybody who cares to look.” She glanced out the window again. “Including my divorce decree.”

Her tone ended that line of conversation, and Alec respected her wishes. Driving in silence, he maneuvered through the late-morning traffic. They’d finally exited the downtown area and had a clear shot to the highway. Baltimore and D.C. weren’t separated by much land, but when you factored in all the cars, they might as well have been on different continents.

“So where’s your partner?” she eventually asked.

“Back at the office working on the IP addresses from Darwin ’s comments.”

“If it were that easy, you would have caught him after he killed that help-wanted victim he pushed into the machine, wouldn’t you?”