Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)
She could see him in her mind’s eye, hunched over a keyboard in the dark. Total concentration. Ruthless determination.
“I wuh-was a hacker,” he clarified.
“Until when, a few hours ago?”
Sean shrugged. One corner of his mouth curved up into the closest thing to a pleasant expression she’d ever seen on his face. He looked almost human.
She turned her eyes to the papers he’d brought again, but her concentration wasn’t all it should be. His voice was wrong. He sounded nervous, but he didn’t look nervous. He looked … well, she wasn’t going to think about how he looked. Not nervous, anyway.
“Why do you sound so worried when you’re not?”
The line between Sean’s eyebrows deepened into a crevasse. “I sss—” He stopped, closed his eyes, and sighed. “I have p-p-problems t-talking.”
“No, you don’t,” she said automatically.
Sean didn’t open his eyes. “I have problems t-talking to ssssome p-p-people,” he clarified.
He stuttered. That was what he’d tried to say.
Sean stuttered, but only in front of some people. “Including me?” she asked, knowing even as she said it this was a worthless question, a filler while her brain took a few more precious seconds to decide what to think about what he’d just told her.
Because she’d heard him talk to quite a few people. A dozen or more. And she’d never heard him stutter before.
When he nodded, the furrow between his eyebrows was so deep it looked painful.
“I’m sssorry,” he said. “I sh-should have t-told you.”
She wanted to ask him why. Why didn’t you? Why do I make you stutter? Or Why didn’t you just say so to begin with and save me all the wondering? It wasn’t as if she would have cared.
Stutter away! she might have said. Just fucking talk to me.
But then he opened his eyes, and everything about him was wary, his shoulders tense and his jaw tight and storms flashing in his blue irises.
He didn’t like this. He didn’t like being here, he didn’t like talking to her, and he especially didn’t like talking to her about having trouble talking to her.
“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure what else to say. She looked down at her lap, wanting to offer him something, some acknowledgment of how flattered she was to finally hear his voice directed at her. “Thanks for doing it now,” she said. “It’s, uh. It’s nice. Talking to you, I mean.”
Sean’s face went blank, and he looked out the window. Apparently, he didn’t return the sentiment.
She went back to reading the report, sipping her coffee and wondering wha
t kind of dork thanked somebody for talking to her.
He’d gathered a lot of information in a few days. A rundown of all the rumors about Judah, how long they’d been around, what the sources were. A list of people who seemed to hate him, and some speculation as to why.
Turning the page to a new section, she sucked in a quick breath. “Hoo! How many laws did you break to get your hands on this stuff?”
“Some t-terms of use. G-guidelines. No laws.”
“You’re not counting the Ten Commandments?”
Sean made a derisive noise. “No.”
“Don’t even try to tell me this is a moral gray area,” she said, delighted. Some of what he’d given her to read was public information, but a lot of it must have come from closed archives and personal accounts. Personal accounts he’d hacked.
“Charcoal, maybe,” Sean replied, and he sounded so different, she glanced away from the report. What she saw shocked the hell out of her.
He was smiling. Sitting on her couch, looking relaxed and mighty fine in an unbuttoned blue oxford shirt worn loose over a gray T-shirt and jeans, Sean Owens was smiling at her, and he stole her reason for a remarkably large handful of seconds.