“What do you mean?”
“We set up a lot of alerts and traps to catch the hacker, should he or she come after the mayor, but we could do a little more hunting of our own. Spring has got to have a lot of haters out there.”
“Like the protesters.”
“Yeah, and the person he’s running against for mayor.” Quinn’s face scrunched up a bit as he dropped into his swivel chair and turned to face Shane. “Who the hell is he running against?”
“Not one for local politics?”
Quinn rolled his eyes. “Don’t get me started.”
“Maria Lopez is Spring’s opponent. And I have already begun investigating her and her campaign staff. Nothing has turned up so far.”
“I’ve designed some search algorithms for Rowe in the past that scan social media postings for certain keywords. It’ll take me a little time to modify, but I can do the same for Spring. There’s a good chance that this hacker has been following him for a while. Could have been building toward this moment. I could use the threatening note as a baseline for the algorithm, then run it against social media postings. See if we get any interesting hits.”
“Wow. Yeah, that would be great,” Shane said stunned. Quick mind? Quinn was a fucking genius. This had to give them an edge on the hacker. “Just tell me what I can do to help.”
Quinn shot him a shaky grin and cleared his throat. “Not much, really. I have to write the search code and gather the data. Not much you can do.”
“Then I’ll just stay the hell out of your way and try to come up with new angles for your search.”
Nodding once, Quinn turned back to his computer and Shane did the same, but it didn’t take him long to notice that there was none of the usual clatter of frantic typing that he’d gotten accustomed to hearing when Quinn worked. He looked up to find Quinn sitting perfectly still, his back ramrod straight in his chair. He was just about to ask what was wrong when he heard Quinn take a deep breath before spinning back around to face him.
“I was also thinking about what you said last night. That it was just some fun, and I will admit that I might have acted a little hastily in leaving last night, but I needed some time to think everything through.”
Shane just smiled encouragingly at Quinn as he chanced a glance up. He sat back in his chair, his hands folded on his stomach. This was even better than he’d hoped. After the kiss, he’d had zero plans to walk away from Quinn. It was like liquid fire had blazed its way through his veins and he had no desire to let that go without exploring it a bit further. He just thought he’d have to wear Quinn down a little more, convince him that it could be even better. He had not expected Quinn to come to him.
And so fast.
“I know that last night you were thinking we could have a kind of one-off bit of fun with no strings and no stressful emotional crap. Just sex once. But I was thinking that maybe we should consider a slightly longer arrangement. First, I think the kiss was a good sample of how well we mesh together physically. We have good chemistry and I think that’s going to translate into good sex. Second, we are likely to be working long hours on this case, particularly as we get closer to election day. That’s going to cut into your free time for hitting the clubs for someone new to hook up with. If we have a standing arrangement, you don’t have to start from scratch each time. Third, we’re both likely to suffer the same frustration over the case when leads don’t pan out. We could use each other as an effective outlet to blow off a little steam and come back to work the next day with a clear head.” Quinn stopped and took another deep breath, sounding as if he’d just run around the block rather than listing out a solid argument for sex. “What do you think?”
It took everything Shane had not to laugh, but it certainly wasn’t at Quinn. The guy had put a lot of thought into his speech when all he really needed to say was that he wanted to fuck Shane. He thought he’d made that perfectly clear the night before, and Quinn needing a little space wasn’t going to suddenly change his mind about that.
Pushing to his feet, Shane walked around his desk, pausing at the closed door to his office to turn the lock before continuing on to stand in front of Quinn. He leaned down and gripped the armrests on either side of Quinn.
“I prefer my sex without an outline, but yeah, that sounds great to me.”