Flirting With Intent by Kelly Hunter Page A

deal with the fallout. They won’t harm you, they’ll recruit you. Like it or not, you won’t have a choice. That’s the value they place on the work I do for them, Ruby. The cost of maintaining my cover. And the reason I never wanted you to know any of this in the first place.’
    ‘I knew you were trouble,’ she said again. ‘I knew.’
    Again, Damon said nothing. It wasn’t as if she were telling him anything new.
    ‘How would you do it?’ she said after a time. ‘My father could be anywhere. How would you set about finding him? Where would you even start?’
    ‘I’d access files various authorities have on him and get you to read them. See if what they have to say fits with what you remember. See if it throws up any ideas. And then we’ll continue from there.’
    ‘Couldn’t you just … send me a report?’
    ‘Sorry, Ruby. You don’t get to stay clean while I get dirty for you. I want you with me.’
    ‘And equally culpable.’ Damon shrugged. The short answer being yes.
    She looked ready to weep but she tilted her chin and squared her shoulders. ‘When do you need my answer on this?’
    ‘Now.’
    ‘And when would we do it?’
    He gentled his tone and hoped for her sake she could handle this. ‘Just as soon as we get you back to your apartment and get into different clothes.’
    ‘What kind of clothes?’ Ruby was willing to be distracted by the little things. It was a start.
    ‘The kind that don’t stand out.’

CHAPTER SEVEN
    I F R UBY could press a rewind button she would.
    This day would disappear for starters.
    Russell’s society luncheon would go.
    She wouldn’t go so far as to wipe Damon from memory completely but there were definitely things she would have done differently when it came to dealing with him.
    Such as not push him for personal information he so clearly hadn’t wanted to give.
    And not allow herself to become so enamoured of the physical side of their relationship that she lost all sense of self-preservation.
    Fooling around with Damon in his bedroom, with a party in full swing not six yards away. What kind of idiot behaviour was that?
    She’d thought she could play with Damon without consequence. Use him, as it were.
    She really had thought she could be intimate with him and come away unscathed. Wrong.
    ‘First a father who may or may not be guilty of the biggest heist in banking history, and now a computer hacker for a lover,’ she murmured, and a small cat peeked out from beneath her bed and regarded her solemnly. ‘I’m really not having a good run. And what the hell kind of clothes does a person wear when committing a hacking offence?’
    Damon had clothes in his backpack, or so he said. He’d retired to Ruby’s bathroom to get changed.
    Ruby tossed her jacket on the bed and began to rifle through her wardrobe. Jeans, they’d do. A black T-shirt she usually wore when cleaning things. Flat shoes … apart from the ones she wore around the apartment, and they were little more than slippers, flat shoes really weren’t in her vocabulary. Almost-flat shoes, by way of a pair of black patent leather pumps with black and white spotted bows across the front of them, would have to do.
    She put her hair up in a ponytail, left it ornament-free and returned to the lounge room in search of Damon, the man with the vagabond lifestyle, the secrets she didn’t want toknow, and a moral fluidity she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Don’t judge.
    Why did she always have to judge?
    Damon had his Christmas jeans on and a grey T-shirt and the battered black backpack slung across his shoulder now looked half-empty. She’d never seen him looking quite so downmarket before. Or so dangerous.
    ‘Where are we going?’ she asked tentatively.
    ‘Out for some fast food.’ He looked her over, frowned when he got to her shoes. ‘Lose the shoes, Ruby. Or at least lose the bows.’
    Fortunately for him, the bows came off without a great deal of persuasion and would go on again