Everyone laughed, including Pike, whose chuckle sounded so rusty Connor was surprised his vocal cords could support the sound.
“You mean there’s actually a girl out there who can resist your charms?” Hudson teased, smiling at Rylan.
He heaved an exaggerated sigh. “It’s true. Reese will get naked with everyone but li’l ol’ me.”
“What’d you do to her?”
Rylan gave a mock gasp of pain as he touched his heart. “Wow. It really hurts that you think I did something to deserve such appalling treatment, Blondie.”
“Uh-huh. Because you’re pure as the driven snow, right?”
“Damn right.”
“Bullshit,” Xander said. “You’re a cocky bastard, that’s what you are. Serves you right that Reese is immune to you.”
“She’s not immune.” Rylan wiggled his eyebrows. “She’s just overwhelmed by my potent masculinity. A few more visits to Foxworth and I’ll win her over.”
Hudson turned to Connor again. “Can we go there sometime?” She immediately answered her own question. “No. That’s probably not a good idea.”
“No shit, little girl,” Pike muttered. “You can’t go gallivanting around the colony when an Enforcer lieutenant is after your ass.”
A wave of tension washed over the table. Hudson bit her lip and fell silent, her gaze dropping to her plate. Pike kept eating as if he hadn’t even spoken.
A sigh lodged in Connor’s chest. Leave it to Pike to ruin a perfectly nice dinner.
12
Hudson had done all she could with the tablets. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t access the program she was looking for.
She was officially admitting defeat.
“Xander?” she called from across the lodge.
“Yeah, doll?”
The nickname made her smile. All the men had taken to calling her something cute, but there was nothing sexual about it when it came from Xan or Kade. With Rylan… well, Rylan was Rylan. He was forever flirting with her, though she noticed he never made any advances toward her unless Connor was there. And when Pike addressed her as “little girl,” it was neither cute nor sexual, because his tone rippled with disdain when he said it.
And Connor… every word he said was pure sex. It was impossible to even think his name without getting turned on, but maybe that was because the man was inside her more often than not. A week had passed since that first time in the lodge. Since then, he’d come to her cabin almost every night, rocked her world, and left her limp and sated.
It bothered her that he never spent the whole night with her. That he kept so much of himself hidden from her. He showed her only the parts he wanted to show – lust, dominance, and the occasional flash of humor. The rest was a frustrating puzzle she couldn’t solve.
“What do you need?” Xander appeared next to her chair.
“Oh.” She blinked, trying to clear her head. “I needed your help with this.” She booted up one of the tablets. “I’m having trouble accessing something. See this icon?”
She tapped the screen, and Xander leaned in to take a closer look. “Yeah. I’ve seen it before, but I think it’s an old program that the city yanked from its mainframes. Never takes you further than the home page.”
Hudson shook her head. “It’s not an old program. They still use it now.”
He eyed her skeptically. “All right. I’ll bite. What’s it for?”
“Communication. The Enforcers use it to send secure messages when they’re out in the field, or to set up meetings, make schedule changes, that sort of thing.” She hesitated, wondering how much more to reveal. “Dominik also posts the sweep schedule on there, and the weekly assignments for the men. How many in a unit, the weapons they’ll need, where they’re heading —”
Xander interrupted with a hiss. “How do you know all that?”
She bit the inside of her cheek. “I told you, I worked in medical, patching up Enforcers. The unit leader always had a tablet on him, and the men had smaller portable versions. They didn’t hide what they were doing from me or cover their screens so I couldn’t take a peek.” She shrugged awkwardly. “I took a lot of peeks.”
Xander studied her face before shifting to the tablet. “Tell me how it works.”
“Well, when they launched the program, a box popped up asking for their log-in information. Once they entered it, they’d be redirected to other pages.” She paused. “Do you think you could play around with it and see if you can get in?”
“Jesus. Of course.”
She wrinkled her forehead at his very swift, very enthusiastic answer. “Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
He stared at her. “Do you really not see how important this is? How valuable this information could be? We’ll be able to stay one step ahead of the Enforcers. We’ll know which areas they’re sweeping, how many of them to expect… Christ, this is a potential gold mine…” He was still mumbling to himself as he snatched the tablet and stumbled back to his workstation.