Page 38 of Fighting With Light

“So I need to make myself look….ugly?” She shrugs and tips her head back exposing her neck.

“Should be easier than it sounds,” she sighs. I splash her with water. “Hey!”

“You can’t makethislook ugly, princess, it’s just not possible.” She kicks water at me this time and crosses her arms.

“Try me, Tarzan. I don’t have prosthetics, but I can certainly give you a black eye and a suit that’s two sizes too big, and maybe even shave your head. That should bring you down a notch.”

“Eh, I don’t think so, I think that would just make me lookmoreattractive.”

She huffs, gets to her feet, and sets a hand on her hip. “Does that plan work for you and your gigantic head?” she asks.

I push myself off the edge of the pool and kick my feet. “I guess it could, but it would mean we have to do some recon on how they let people in. For all we know, they won’t let people without credentials past the gate which means we will have to go with the ninja option.”

“Can’t you just hack their security or something and see how it works?” Aelia asks, waving her hand. I push myself to stand in the pool and look up at her small figure and golden skin.

“Oh…yeah, I could.”

She gestures towards the doors.

“Well then, by all means.”

“So demanding,” I grumble and walk up the steps.

She tosses me a towel and I wipe myself down before going into the house. The chef isn’t coming in today so we’re on our own, but I’m wondering if Aelia would let me take her out on a date tonight. I have to be up early tomorrow and it feels like it’s the perfect time for us. There’s a foreign desire building in me that nearly demands I give her whatever she wants and I don’t know why. She makes me want to take care of her, protect her, even though I’m sure she couldput a bullet in my head without looking, but the want, theneedis still there, and I find myself wanting to see just how much I can let her hurt me.

“After this, do you want to go out to dinner with me?”

She gasps, clasps her hands together, and kicks one of her feet to the side. “A real date, Tarzan?” she says with a hint of sarcasm.

“If you’ll have me,” I say walking into the office.

She hums like she’s thinking about it. Then she slaps my butt, surprising me, and drops into the chair in front of the desk.

“It’s a date, and it better be someplacefancy.”

“You don’t want to go to a food truck?” I ask her, not that I was intending to do that, anyway.

“You know what, yeah, that would be fine, but I’ll be severely overdressed.”

I chuckle and pull my computer up, typing in my thirteen letter and number password. “I guess it will be a surprise, but wear something pretty.”

“I think I can manage that,” she says, gripping her bottom lip with her teeth. I stare at her mouth and shake my head, refocusing on the task at hand. The woman is damn distracting in any situation, so maybe her plan will work.

I pull up the shipping yard for the clothing company and hack into the camera that sits at the front gate. It’s quiet, there’s a guy half asleep sitting in his station and stacks on stacks of containers are out in the shipping yard. My concern is the potential for the container to be stacked on the others. There’s no way we’re going to get someone to bring it down for us without valid reason, which makes me think my ninja idea was a better choice because I can climb them.

“What do you see?” Aelia asks, rising from her chair and walking around the desk. She leans over to look at the screen and her warm skin presses against mine. I take a deep breath and keep watching the video feed.

She stood there for a solid ten minutes until I grabbed a chair for her and we sat there together.

I have the video up on one screen while I work on the code I wrote earlier while we were in Bali to see if it found anything. My expectation was that it would find too much to sift through in a timely manner no matter how manysifting codes I write. But my worst fear happened instead. I didn’t find anything helpful.

This is not good, and it means that we really are going to have to acquire all of our information physically. It’s not something I can pull from a computer, and it’s not like the dark web is exactly admissible in court.Dammit.

“Why are you all huffy over there?” she asks, staring at the screen and tossing a nut into her mouth. Her legs drape over the side of the chair and she’s barely left her seat except for a snack or to pee.

“The code I wrote in Bali didn’t do what I had hoped it would.”

“So?”