Rest & Trust by Susan Fanetti Page A

three of the newest major gaming consoles, and above it was a huge, framed, custom-printed poster of what had to be her main toon in the MMORPG that he also played. Her character was She’rah, a well-geared troll hunter.
     
    He had a similar poster in his home office. He played an undead priest named Benediction.
     
    Scanning the room again, he found her computer, and was disappointed to see that it was a decent unit, but not for gaming.
     
    “What are you looking for?” she asked, and Sherlock realized that he’d been standing there, taking everything in. Research was what he did. He took information in and processed and synthesized it. There was a lot in this apartment to process. A lot about Sadie to get to know.
     
    “I know you don’t game on that.” He nodded toward the unit on her desk.
     
    She walked to it and sat down. “No. I game on the box by the window back there.” Nodding toward the back wall and the living area, she struck keys on the desk unit. “Hold on. I was supposed to log back in ten minutes ago. I need to let them know I’ll be offline for a while longer.”
     
    As Sherlock turned to see what she gamed on, he asked. “What do you do?”
     
    “Tech support.”
     
    He stopped and swiveled back to her. “What kind?”
     
    She answered while she typed. “Level 2 stuff. Pretty much anything that can be handled remotely…hold on.” A flurry of keystrokes. “Gimme five minutes, okay?”
     
    “Sure,” he said, and turned back to look for her gaming unit. On a window seat, he found a huge, top-of-the-line gaming laptop. He personally wouldn’t game on a laptop, there wasn’t enough flexibility, but if he were going to, it would be on that one right there.
     
    Shit, had he found a chick who actually liked the things he liked? And might actually understand the things he did?
     
    With the singular exception of Bart, who was as good a hacker as he was (they each had their strengths), his brothers all seemed to think that what they did was mostly magic and voodoo. He’d long ago stopped trying to explain how he got the information or where the limitations were, because their eyes would just glaze over. They were alternately shocked at the things he could find out and impatient when he told them he couldn’t simply strike a couple of keys and give them every piece of data in the known world. Hacking took time. It took design. It took creativity and patience.
     
    And women? Forget about it. He’d never in his life met a woman who didn’t think his interests were silly and immature. Which was why he mainly kept them to himself.
     
    Until, maybe, now. Of course, Sadie was young. Too young, probably, which didn’t do much to erase the taint of immaturity. But he didn’t give a shit.
     
    He crossed the room and stood behind her. When he laid his hands over her shoulders, she paused, her fingers resting on the keyboard, and sighed deeply. Then she got back to typing.
     
    Without really meaning to pry, with just his constant need to pay attention and take in information, he glanced at her screen. She was in a chat. The avatars for all the participants were characters from the old television show Firefly . And they were chatting in character. Sadie was Kaylee, and, in character, she was telling them that she needed the afternoon off.
     
    Charmed, he laughed, and she looked over her shoulder. “Shoo!”
     
    “Sorry.” He backed off and wandered around her apartment. Damn, it really was clean. The whole place gleamed, and it even smelled of some kind of cleaner. Lavender, he thought. He only knew that because Taryn had once had massive lavender bushes in her front yard. They drew bees like crazy, and last summer, Chelsea had been stung while he was there. Taryn had had to rush her to the ER, where they’d discovered that she was dangerously allergic to bee stings.
     
    He really didn’t want to be thinking about Taryn and her kids right now.
     
    “Okay. That’s