“Any progress on tracking down our killer?” he asked, following her into the bright white kitchen with a six-burner gas range.

“Not really, but I set up a web crawler to search websites for a few specific lines of code he used when he hacked my system. I’m not familiar with them so…”

“How long before you get results?”

She picked up her hoodie off the back of a kitchen stool and shrugged into the soft-looking cotton before grabbing a glass out of the cabinet. The tattoo on the inside of one wrist was a small intricately worked snake. “Difficult to say. I have sparkling water if you want?”

“Sounds good.” Whatever took longer to prepare. “Why is it difficult to say?”

She made a bottle of fizzy water and poured him a glass. Put it on the counter rather than risk making contact with him. He didn’t know how he knew that except when he went to catch her gaze, she avoided it. He made her nervous but he didn’t think it was because she was physically scared of him. It was something else.

Attraction? Or guilt?

He could work with attraction. And he would uncover whatever it was she was hiding. In the meantime, he was happy to keep pumping her for information pertinent to the investigation.

“The sheer volume of websites and pages means it could take hours or days or even weeks to crawl over all the data. On top of that, the code might be something generic that I’m simply not familiar with and yield hundreds if not thousands of hits. In which case I will either sift through the results or ditch the search or refine it.”

“Sounds complicated.” He took a drink.

She clasped her hands together. “Not really.”

“To me it is.”

“What you do is complicated. I simply review computer code and assess threats.”

He stepped closer. “Don’t put yourself down. You search the internet for things that hackers are trying to hide. What you do is important and I think you know it.” He reached out and gently freed a strand of her hair that had escaped her ponytail and been trapped in the neck of her hoodie.

He saw the way her eyes dilated when she looked at him. He was pretty sure it was attraction reflected in her dark irises, but he also saw the wariness. He wanted Scotty’s killer to pay. He wanted all the retribution he was legally allowed to inflict and maybe a little extra to go with it. To get that he needed to sneak under this woman’s guard.

He took another drink of water. Stepped back. “Where are the cameras?”

She blinked in surprise. Good. He wanted her a little off balance. He needed her to trust him first and foremost, and he had the suspicion that if he made a move now, she’d never let him through the doorway again.