“I know. But if you decide you want to do this with us, take things further, he’s going to have to be able to trust you without question before he fully lets go.”
She slipped her arms around Ren’s waist and pressed the top of her head to his chest. “Until then, you’ll take good care of him?”
He kissed the top of her head. “In all ways. That’s what I do. That’s what he’s done for me.”
She looked up at him, the words telling her everything. “You love him.”
A statement, not a question.
Ren smiled, resigned. “Impossible not to.”
The words should’ve worried her. She was potentially entering into a tryst with two men who were in love. The risk of her getting hurt was high. But it was also a comfort knowing that these guys were so deeply bonded. It didn’t leave any gray area. She knew where she stood. She didn’t have to fall into her old trap of pinning false hope on relationships. In the end, it would be those two. Not her and Ren. If she was going to do this, she needed to be okay with that. Accept the ending before the start.
“I better get back to work. I’ve still got a hacker to catch.”
Ren rubbed her arms. “Tell me you enjoyed this and want to do it again. Preferably soon. Preferably with me.”
She smiled. “Is that a command or a request?”
He tilted his head, mischief in his gaze. “A desperate plea?”
“Who am I to deny a desperate plea?”
His grin went wide and he kissed her again. “Back to work, Benning. I’ve got meetings this afternoon. But we’ll talk soon.”
EIGHTEEN
When Cora got back to her office, she collapsed into her chair, trying to regain the focus that Ren and Hayes had blown to bits. How was she supposed to work while her body was still humming in the afterglow and her brain was short-circuiting? What was she supposed to be doing again? Oh, right. Find a hacker. Yes. That was it. She rolled her shoulders and woke her screen. Back to work.
It took her a few more minutes to cool down fully and get back into the mind-set of the hunt. But the amount of work in front of her helped her not overanalyze what had just happened with the guys. That was a problem for future Cora to pick apart. This was what present Cora needed to be focused on.
She scanned the screen. All the profiles that were accessed by the perp were there on her list. She tapped a few keys and then leaned over to snag pages from the printer. She’d compiled a separate document to see who had history with whom, who had chatted, and who had privately played. It had taken all week to gather everything. She’d pretty much holed herself up in the office and hadn’t interacted with anyone during work hours. She worked best when she put blinders on and shut everything out except the mission. But even before the detour to Ren’s office, the information was getting tangled up in her head, too many scattered pieces.
She set her chin in her hand and let her attention run over the documents, wishing it was like a movie and all these lines and connections would just appear in front of her in midair and make some kind of sense. But all she could see was lists and more lists and spreadsheets.
“Ugh. Enough staring.” She once had a professor tell her that when numbers don’t make sense, draw a picture. He’d meant charts, but she had a better idea for this. She grabbed her laptop from her bag and opened up a free-form text editor that let her draw concept maps. She needed to see these connections as more than just names on a page. She laid out her papers and started typing in the names, putting little ovals around the submissives, squares around the doms, and color-coding for gender. Then once she had everyone in there, she started to draw the lines between the people. A single line if they’d chatted in the last six months, a double line if they’d played, a squiggly line if they were exclusively paired.
She got lost in the project and regained her hyperfocus. Lines started to fill the page, ovals joining others, connections becoming more obvious. And the more she added, the more a pattern started to emerge. A very obvious one.
She frowned, checked her work. At the center of the tangled web of lines and shapes were three names, three dominants. And one was very, very familiar. A pit settled in her stomach. Well, shit.
—
Hayes leaned back in his office chair and massaged his temples. He’d finished most of what he’d planned to do this afternoon, but his head was starting to throb. Probably because all the blood in his brain had been rerouted to his dick for an hour after he’d left Ren’s office. Sharing a bed with Ren this week had been earth-shifting enough, but seeing him with Cora today had poked the old Hayes with a cattle prod, making him want to fight to the surface. It’d taken everything he had to turn Cora down when she’d asked him to join in. But the risk was too high. Despite what he’d witnessed this afternoon, Cora was still a stranger to him.
A sexy, smart, drive-him-to-distraction stranger.
“Knock, knock.”
The sound startled him and he lowered his hand from his eyes, his gaze shifting to the doorway. Cora was leaning in with a tentative smile. She’d put her hair in two braids and had thrown on a gray army-style jacket over her blue Smurfs T-shirt. It shouldn’t have been alluring in any way, but he couldn’t help the way his baser side perked up at the sight of her. He’d like to undo those braids. Or maybe have Ren hold them while he guided her mouth onto Hayes’s cock.
He groaned inwardly. She’s coming here about work. Put the dirty thoughts away. He needed to show her that what had happened didn’t change how he’d treat her at work. “Hey.”
“Am I interrupting?”
He sat forward in his seat, the chair squeaking under his weight. “I could use the interruption. What’s up?”
She stepped inside, a notepad and file folder clutched to her chest, and a hesitant look on her face. “Okay, so I’m not going to lie. This feels a little awkward.”