“Can you honestly tell me you weren’t going to investigate the accident in the lab?”
“I don’t like to ask for help.” She didn’t like to feel small. She’d felt it much of her life, had learned exactly how fragile it all was at a young age. She’d also learned that the minute she asked for help was the minute everyone around her started thinking she needed it all the time.
“I can understand that. I need you to understand that despite my earlier impression, I don’t tend to underestimate people. I don’t judge a book by its cover, though the cover might be awfully pretty.”
He’d obviously decided to go the charming route. It wouldn’t work on her. “Sure. The first thing anyone notices about me is that I’m pretty.”
“Well, if I’d noticed the cane first, I wouldn’t have made an ass of myself,” he pointed out. “So you need to understand that you probably manipulate a lot of men with those eyes of yours, but it won’t work on me.”
Outrage sparked through her and then she caught a ghost of a smile on his lips and realized the jerk was fucking with her.
No one fucked with her. Not like teasing. No one in her world treated her with anything but the utmost respect. Except Madison. God. Was that why she wanted to investigate? Because Madison had at least respected her enough to play rough. Madison was the kind of woman who would have ignored her utterly if she hadn’t felt threatened.
This man already zeroed in on a weakness Noelle herself hadn’t realized she had.
“I’ll remember that.” She wasn’t going to give in to the need to spar with him.
The grin disappeared. “I know you’re independent and that’s important to you, but someone absolutely is spying on you through your computer. I found some sophisticated software that was uploaded five days ago. What else happened that day?”
A chill crept across her skin. “Madison died. All right. I can make connections when they’re that obvious. So I’m supposed to tell my coworkers we’re high school sweethearts who reconnected and now we’re together again?”
“How close are you to your coworkers? Have you talked a lot about your past?”
She could lie and tell him this plan of his would never work. She should have told him she already had a boyfriend, but she’d lost that chance. And yet she found herself leveling with him. “I’ve got a couple of people I have lunch with at work. Sometimes we go to happy hour. I’ve spoken very little about my past. I find coming from a small town puts me in a box with a lot of people in my industry. I talk about my time in Austin. I talk about the awards I’ve won and the papers I’ve written.”
“So they don’t know much about your life,” Hutch mused. “I promise I can handle this. I can handle your friends and make them believe I’ve cared about you for a long time. I can make them comfortable, and I’ll make you comfortable, too. I’m sorry we started off the way we did.”
Something about the words put her on guard. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”
Hutch shrugged. “And I’m not looking for a relationship either, so we’re good.”
“But you’re flirting with me. I don’t like it.” It threw her off. No one in her life flirted with her. She got asked out from time to time, but the men who asked her always seemed serious. Hutch was different.
“It’s a part of who I am,” Hutch conceded. “I’ll try to not do it outside of our cover. I’m sorry. I think flirting is a coping mechanism. I spent a lot of years surviving by making people like me. I did some time in foster care and on the streets as a teen. I’m only telling you because you should get to know me. I’m not trying to get sympathy.”
“Yes, you are.”
The slight grin was back on his face. “Is it working?”
“Is it true?”
The smile faded again. “Oh, yes. I don’t lie about my childhood. My scars are all on the inside, but they’re there, and they affect every part of me. I’ll lay it on the line. I’m a man who’s been in therapy for a decade. I go almost every Thursday. My therapist is on vacation right now, but I have an appointment next week. Unless it’s dangerous for me to leave you, I’ll make that appointment.”
“You don’t have to justify your therapy. It’s good and healthy, and I’m happy it works for you. I’ve done some myself. After the car accident. I still struggle to drive. Anyway, your healthy attitude toward therapy is okay with me.” More than okay. He’d been vulnerable in the last couple of minutes, and she had a hard time shutting him out. They would be working together for a little while. “Do you want to start over? Like pretend the whole morning didn’t happen?”
He stood, his eyes warm as he held out a hand. “I’m Hutch. It’s nice to meet you, Noelle.”
She took his hand, and she could have sworn she felt freaking sparks. Warm and true. He enveloped her hand and she had to remember to breathe. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
“Hey, MaeBe says yes. She can take us. I call shotgun.” Kyle was smiling and looking way less broody than he had before. And younger.
She felt younger standing there looking at Hutch like he was the lead singer in a boy band. She forced herself to take her hand back. “We should go then. I’m late.”
She would focus on work and not the man waiting for her at the end of the day.
He wouldn’t be there for long. That was the truth she had to remember.
Chapter Three
Twenty minutes later she made her way to the parking garage, Hutch at her side. She’d noticed he’d matched her stride, which was much slower and shorter than his. It was only polite, she supposed, but there was something nice about it. Often she felt like she was holding people up, but Hutch seemed perfectly comfortable with the slower pace.
“Do you know what Madison was working on? And I’d love to see any kind of reports on the accident in her lab.”
While they’d waited for MaeBe and Kyle to text them that they were ready to go, they’d talked about the case. He’d gone over how a hacker could get into her system, patiently explaining the methods and answering her every question.
He’d also offered her candy. He had a surprising amount of candy on his desk.
“She was working on something top secret. I think it’s some kind of biochemical experiment,” she replied as they stopped on the ground floor of the garage. “She had every technician who worked with her under some hard-core NDAs.”
Everyone signed a nondisclosure agreement when they started work at Genedyne, but Madison had her own to cover her specific lab.
“So you work on whatever you want to?” Hutch had a bag in his hand. Apparently he kept a spare set of clothes and a toiletry bag at the office in case he got stuck working late.
“Consider Genedyne as something of a think tank combined with a university, but making money like a corporation.” It could be hard to describe the way these new firms worked. “They’re all about the patents they potentially get coming out of this.”
“So you do the work and the company gets the patent, and the patent is what makes money. Doesn’t seem fair to me, though I know it’s how the system works.”