Was she serious? She still thought I might hurt her? Fuck, I hadn’t done enough to reassure her after all. Maybe I needed to change tonight’s plan around and give her the power again. She seemed to like having it last night.

“Are you joking?” I asked because that’s what a non-involved, concerned person would do. “You think this guy is going to kill you?”

She blew out a breath. “No. I mean, I hope not.” She dropped her head into her hands. “Fuck, I’m making this sound so much worse than it is.” She lifted back up and looked at me imploringly, and I decided I would give her anything she asked for at that moment. My help. My undying loyalty. The password to my investment account and all the money inside it.

“If I thought I was truly in danger, I would have gone to the cops,” she said. “This guy has just been messing with me a little, in a mostly harmless way, and I’d like to get back at him.”

I continued to play the role of a concerned bystander. “I don’t know. This seems like something the authorities should handle.”

She shook her head. “No. I want to do this my way. Will you help me or not?” She placed her hand over mine, my right one, I noted, and squeezed again. “I totally understand if you’re too freaked out, though.”

Ow, ow, ow.

I kept my face stoic as I answered her. “I’ll help. But please go to the police if things escalate or you feel unsafe.”

She grinned up at me, squeezed once more, even harder this time, clearly watching me for any sign of pain, and then let go. “I will. Thank you.”

She seemed almost disappointed that I didn’t flinch as I nodded and turned back to my laptop. Did she want it to be me?

Did she think I’d make it so easy for her?

I made a show of pulling up my social media profile on a browser and locked it to the left side of my screen. Next, I opened a coding program, locked it to the right, copied and pasted my user name into a line of code, and hit enter. Numbers and letters started flying over the right side of the screen while the program got to work.

It looked impressive as hell, like something out of a spy movie, but in reality, it did fuck-all. I wasn’t really going to sit there and track myself down, nor had I replaced my fall guy with someone closer. If Aly was serious about looking for payback, that might mean breaking into someone’s house, and I would never send her to a stranger's address if that were the case.

I’d have to find some way to run down the clock, tell her that her hacker was very good – I mean, he was, not to blow my skirt up or anything – and he’d done too much work covering his tracks for me to find him without risking getting caught and hacked myself.

“That’s it?” Aly asked. “You just put it in there, and the program does it all for you?”

“I wish it were that easy, but no,” I said. “This is just to figure out what IP address he used to create his account.”

From there, I went into detail about how much work it would realistically take to track someone down. Her face fell as I talked. Good. Hopefully, she was second-guessing her harebrained idea.

“So you’re not going to have an answer for me by the time I have to leave,” she checked her watch, “in twenty minutes?”

“Nope. Sorry,” I said. “What’s it like being a trauma nurse?” I tacked on. Because I couldn’t help myself. This was the first time I’d spoken to Aly, and despite how often I watched her, I was still ravenous for information. There was only so much knowledge you could gain through a camera. I had memorized her expressions and learned how to read her moods, but I didn’t know what made her tick, didn’t know how she truly felt about all the things I’d seen her go through.

“Oh,” she said, looking slightly taken aback by the sudden topic shift. “It’s…I don’t exactly know how to describe it. Good isn’t the right word. Rewarding might be better.”

I glanced down at her lips, unable to help myself. Less than a day ago, they had parted around my cock. Less than a day ago, I had come inside that sweet mouth.

I jerked my gaze up and refocused on her words before I did something stupid.

“It’s incredibly challenging at times,” she said. “The lows are really low, but the highs are equally high. Nothing compares to the thrill of saving someone’s life.”

I nodded. “I bet. What made you want to get into it?”

She met my eyes before shifting to watch the letters flashing over my screen. “My mom, but I don’t want to talk about it. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said. Shit, I’d touched a nerve. I needed to get us back on safer ground. “More coffee?” She drank at least a pot a night, and her cup looked like it needed to be topped off.

She held it out to me. “Yes, please.”

I went to the kitchen and poured us more. Aly was typing on her phone when I turned back around, and I watched as she hit a final button and then looked toward my phone, which sat next to my laptop, as if waiting for something. Did she just text me? The masked me?

If so, she would get a vague, slightly teasing response in three, two, one…

Her phone chimed, and she looked disappointed for half a second until she read the text and grinned, shaking her head like she was amused and didn’t want to be. I knew the expression well. She’d worn it almost constantly last night.

She fired off another text as I returned to the living room with our cups, grinning even wider when the next reply came through.

The auto-response program I’d loaded onto my burner was pretty sophisticated. It could carry on an entire smartass/flirtatious conversation with her in my absence, though I hoped she didn’t keep this up for long. The program was good, but it wasn’t perfect, and she looked like she had finally stopped suspecting me. Josh me. After all, I couldn’t be her masked admirer if he was texting her back, could I?

“Thank you,” she said, setting her phone down to take her coffee. She looked more relaxed than a moment ago, like her back was no longer up now that she didn’t suspect me.

Mwah ha ha ha ha.

My evil plan was working. Step one: get Aly to drop her guard. Step two: fuck her on this couch.

Oh, wait, no. I’d skipped a few steps somewhere.

But, god, the temptation was strong. Relaxed Aly was almost as hot as feisty Aly, and I had to stop myself from staring at her instead of pretending I was watching my fake hacking program work its magic.

Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to suffer such compunction, and I could feel her gaze like a physical touch as she watched me watch the screen. I’d been worried earlier that my need for her might be tied to our shared kink, and without a mask between us, the excitement would dull. I should have known better. I wanted her just as much now as last night, and from the way she stared at me so intently, I was beginning to think it went both ways.

Keep it up, baby, I thought, and see if I don’t out myself right now just so I can give into this driving need to yank your scrub pants down and –

“What’s it like being a computer programmer?” she asked.

I cleared my throat and shifted my hips, trying to ease my erection sideways so it wasn’t digging straight into my fly. Was she making small talk, or did she really want to know?

I took a sip of coffee and sat back, risking a glance at her. She looked genuinely interested.

“It’s a little like how you described nursing. Challenging but rewarding, if in different ways.”

“What made you want to get into it?”

I reluctantly pulled my gaze from her – I’d been staring at her mouth again and almost missed the question. The second it registered, my stomach plummeted. I was already playing enough games with her, and I didn’t want to start piling lies on top of them, so I settled for a half-truth instead.

“My dad wasn’t a good man. He tried to find us when Mom and I left him. Learning how to hide us from him online was the reason I first started coding.”