“Comfort is not my first concern. Your friend and I should not be alone together.” Laila met his gaze straight on, as if she refused to be cowed by him. Or maybe she’d already seen it all in her short life and had nothing left to fear.
“He would never touch you without your consent,” Zy assured.
“So you say. But perhaps you are right.” She frowned with confusion. “Madison came by. It is clear she would allow him into her bed. It is equally clear that he has not partaken.”
“Because Trees isn’t looking for an easy lay. He may be big, but he’s not a bully. Or a rapist.”
“It is my experience that all men eventually reach the limits of their restraint. He will come to the end of his.”
Zy shook his head. “No. It’s his job and his duty to take care of you. He won’t shirk that, especially to touch you against your will.”
“I know you genuinely believe that.”
And her sad smile said she wasn’t convinced.
Suddenly, she glanced above his shoulder.
Zy turned to find Trees standing in the hall. “Be right there.”
“You okay, Laila?”
His buddy’s usually gruff voice caressed the woman’s name with reverence. Yeah, Trees had it bad.
“I am well. Do what you must.” Almost reluctantly, she tucked away the switchblade. “I will resume my prayers.”
Then she turned and glided to her knees, seeming to tune them both out.
Zy grabbed the laptop and headed toward Trees, not missing the longing in his eyes. It sucked that the first time he’d ever seen Trees truly interested in a woman, she seemingly had zero interest in him—or any man. Zy needed to wrap up his search for the mole quickly so Laila could return to her sister…and leave Trees’s place. If not, his buddy’s heart would be toast.
“Did she say anything?” he whispered as they headed back to the kitchen.
“Nothing you probably haven’t heard. Madison came by?”
He nodded. “To return my house key. She kept up the place while I was gone.”
She hadn’t done that purely out of the goodness of her heart. “Think she’s falling for you?”
“Nah. She’s looking for something.”
“Love?”
“I thought so for a while. But it’s more. She’s not happy—with her job, her family, her friends, her hookups. She’s searching for something, and I don’t think she knows what yet. It’s another reason I won’t sleep with her.” Trees sat at the kitchen table. “She’s expecting that someone new in her life will solve her problems, but until she figures herself out, nothing and no one will put a dent in her dissatisfaction.”
Leave it to Trees to boil a situation down to a few concise sentences. Granted, Zy only knew Madison from one sweaty night nearly a year ago, but now that he heard his buddy’s opinion, it jibed with what he’d observed. “Yep.”
“You ready to do this?”
Can I gouge my eyes out with an ice pick instead? It sounds like more fun. “As I’ll ever be.”
“I got the data sets ready. We need to account for all the breaches in EM Security’s information, times where the enemy seemed to know shit when they shouldn’t have, and see if we can trace it back to any communication from Tessa, see who it was going to, and how she might have passed the information.”
Zy figured they’d be doing something like that. “So what am I looking for?”
“Anything. Emails, website hits, log-ins to online locations that seem fishy. If I have to drill down to the keystroke level, I will. But let’s see what we can establish without that since months of that info would take more than five hours to comb through.”
“Sure.”
“You take January through March. She was on maternity leave most of that time, so the majority of the emails and communications you’ll be sifting through will belong to Aspen.”
“Oh, god help us all. I’d forgotten about her.”
“I’d like to…” Trees grumbled. “I’ll take April through August and see what kind of patterns emerge. Oh, and be sure to look at any cookies, plug-ins, or other programs she might have downloaded. I compiled a list of EM-approved software.” He set the paper on the table between them. “Anything else is something she would have downloaded without telling the bosses and worth looking at. If you have questions about whatever you find, holler. I’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks.” But Zy wasn’t grateful at all. He didn’t want Tessa to be guilty. He wanted this to be a big misunderstanding that would just go away.
“You’re welcome.”
Then they both dived in. Zy wasn’t terrible with tech, but he wasn’t anywhere near Trees’s caliber. Still, he made his way through the first-quarter emails from the previous year associated with her profile pretty quickly. As Trees said, most of them were Aspen’s since she’d used Tessa’s computer during that timeframe. She had been into some unusual shit, too. Soap carving, competitive cat costuming, and another pastime Zy had never heard of.