Ready by Lucy Monroe Page A

muscles in the process.
    Writing for such long stretches left her muscles cramped and her mind wasted, but they were worth it when she had so much to show for her time at the keyboard.
    Straightening, she found herself looking into Joshua’s eyes. They burned through her with such intense focus her mouth went dry.
    He stood right outside of the camera’s range, his dark hair damp, wearing a fresh t-shirt and smelling soap-clean like he’d just stepped out of the shower.
    She opened her mouth to speak, but he jerked his head toward the speaker with the minicam and she turned it into a yawn instead.
    It wasn’t hard. Her writing jag had exhausted her.
    She grabbed her word processor and barely suppressed the urge to thumb her nose at the camera. She had no idea how many pages she’d written, but the file she’d saved was sixty kilobytes in size. On a Dana, that was a lot of pages.
    She allowed herself a triumphant grin at the room in general and walked out of the line of vision of the minicam.
    “You ready for that break now?” he asked.
    She yawned for real this time. “Yes. I could eat something, too.”
    “You left your lunch sitting on the table.”
    “Lunch?”
    “I made you a sandwich. Nothing big. I told you about it. You said, all right , but kept typing.”
    She felt heat steal up her neck. “I get like that sometimes. You can talk to me and I’ll respond, but I don’t remember the conversation at all. Jake gets no end of amusement out of it.”
    Joshua’s smile could only be classified as pure, one-hundred-percent sex appeal, and it did bad things to her heart rate.
    “I’ve got a snack made for you if you want it.”
    She headed toward the kitchen. “You don’t have to tell me twice. I’m starved.”
    She noticed her computer chair was empty when she passed it. “I heard the door shut.”
    His expression turned wry. “The last time was about the fifth time it opened and closed today. Nitro’s been and gone. I went running and came back and Hotwire left a second ago.”
    “No wonder you look like you just took a shower.”
    “I went running five hours ago.”
    She grimaced. “Oh…”
    He chuckled. “We had a meeting and then I worked out on the floor of your bedroom while you were writing.”
    “I could use a workout. My muscles ache from sitting in one position for so long.” She stopped beside the table and did some side stretches.
    Joshua watched her with distracting interest and she bumped the table sliding into her chair.
    She took a long drink of the juice he’d poured her and then a bite of her sandwich. It was Heavenly, and she didn’t talk again until she’d eaten most of it.
    “I take it you got a lot done on your book?”
    “Yep.”
    “Hotwire installed an invisible firewall on your system that should trap anyone trying to get in and give us a lead to their computer.”
    “Nemesis didn’t leave a trail when he deleted my file.”
    “No. He did a better sweep job than a soldier in the field during war games.”
    “That makes sense. When I used my firewall software to try to trace his e-mails, I came up with nothing.”
    Joshua spun a chair around and straddled it, his arms over the back. He liked watching Lise eat. She was dainty, even if she wouldn’t appreciate him saying so.
    “Hotwire got a little further with the e-mails, but he’s still working on it.”
    “So, am I supposed to use my computer now?”
    “It’s up to you. Stick with the Dana if that makes you feel better, but download to the computer every night so he doesn’t track the fact we’re on to him. Just keep a current backup of your file.”
    “I always do.”
    “Good.”
    “Thanks for working on that.”
    “Thank Hotwire. He did it. Computers are not my specialty.”
    “What is your specialty?”
    “Tactics and warfare.”
    She didn’t flinch as he’d expected, but watched him with eyes he swore saw into his soul. “You said you’d done a lot of things you wouldn’t want put in your