#keyconnections

“Soren, just because no one else has physically touched the cameras, doesn’t mean that they can’t just hack the cameras.”

She was back around, hands flying across her keyboard before she could get anxious over how he would take that news. She was already in the midst of pulling up the information on each camera stream access when she heard the sound of something breaking.

Temen’s following gasp but lack of reprimand confirmed that it was probably Soren who had caused the ruckus, as Raina couldn’t imagine Temen letting anyone else get away with it.

Raina felt more than saw Soren come up behind her, her back heating with his proximity. His shadow fell over her shoulder, and she fought down a shiver when he gripped the back of her chair and his knuckles brushed her back.

“Rain, I need you to explain exactly what you mean by that.“

She hadn’t been so close to a man since her brief stint in the dating scene during her undergraduate studies, and she rationalized that was why her entire body suddenly felt like her skin was far too tight.

‘Oh I need you far, far, away from me,’ she thought to herself as she turned her nervous energy into her job.

“What I mean,” she started quickly,” is that if you wanted a truly isolated camera system you should have gone a little more old school and kept it to physical tapes. Downside to that would be the endless reels you’d need to keep confidential, but then,” she said, beginning to punctuate each word with a quick snip and enlargement of specific text-

“-you wouldn’t have this problem.”

Before them were a series of IP addresses that Raina had surmised did not match anyone currently allowed access to the feeds.

She had thought jumping ahead of the curve and showing him the problem would get him out of her space faster, but instead he leaned far enough in that she could feel his hard stomach against the back of her head. Suddenly he was close enough that she could smell him: clean, woodsy, and something that was utterly Soren.

The unexpected familiarity of it broke something in her, the crack beneath her rib cage as sharp as any bone. This was why she hadn’t wanted to come back. At sixteen she had been afraid she couldn’t live without him. Now she was twenty six, and once again she wanted nothing more than to turn into his arms and bury herself in him.

Worse, he wasn’t even in his furry form.

“You wanna translate for me?”

She could practically feel the bass in his voice, the rough under current of his near constant growl rolling through her and making her nipples peak against her will.

There was one haunting second where he leaned in impossibly closer, the heat between them suddenly stifling, everyone else forgotten to her human senses except for the shifter caging her in. She felt trapped in way she couldn’t decide if she loved her hated.

When she saw him brace a hand beside her keyboard, she fought not to think about how the too sharp tips of his claws would feel against her skin.

She was a scant second away from embarrassing herself in front of her entire team when she managed to find the will to bring her chair back in a hard spin, jumping up and knocking him off her.

He was, of course, staring at her with a shit eating grin. Those bright blue eyes of his were shining with the same heat currently burning through her body, so she opened her mouth and killed it as brutally as she killed.

“Translation? Those are all the times someone has accessed your security feeds without your permission.”

The smirk finally fell off his face, but it didn’t make her feel better.

“Who?” he questioned.

Raina eyed him for a second, trying to decide the best way to approach the situation.

“Right now I just know that the feeds were accessed, the who will take more time,” she told him truthfully. She had automatically ran the addresses as soon as they were tagged as unknown, but they had all been fake.

Evidently having finally decided it was safe to join the conversation, Temen said asked “How much time?”

Raina understood the severity of the situation given the fact that the creeps they were looking for where in the people snatching industry. It was a time sensitive situation, and as Raina ran through the possibilities in her mind, the options were not looking pretty.

She could do it for sure, though requesting the necessary access to certain databases would take time. That was what she couldn’t accurately gauge, as her first instinct was to bypass those databases to get to what she wanted. One route was right, and one was illegal.

She knew the right thing to do, though.

Her mouth had barely opened to tell them it would take 5-7 business days to get the proper clearences before Soren was once again demanding her attention. He was in her space in seconds, large body moving with grace.

“You can do it now cant you?”

From inches away, he looked down on her, gaze sure.

So she sidestepped towards her team lead like a coward and shook her head.

“No, I can’t-“

“Can’t or won’t?” he pressed, moving forward.

She threw up her hands in defeat, as if that would stop him.

“Soren its not legal for me to-“