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 to know, 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 under the influence of superglue. ‘Do I have to eat the fast food?’ she said.
‘It’s tastier than it looks.’
‘Only if you have the palate of a two-year-old.’
He smiled at that and some of the tension between them dissipated. ‘It’s my show, Ruby,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Wait!’ she said hastily. ‘You don’t want to talk about it first? Run me through what it is we’ll be doing?’
‘I’ll talk you through it as we’re doing it,’ he offered calmly.
Ruby opened her mouth to protest, took one look at him, and shut it again without saying a word.
They walked from her apartment to the nearest train station. Just another young couple getting from one place to the next, foreigners but not strangers to Hong Kong or the mass transit railway service it provided.
Comfortable, as they found two free seats and Damon slung his backpack between his feet and laced her hand in his and smiled, before turning to look out of the train window into subway darkness, his thoughts his own.
‘I should have bought a book,’ she said lightly, and he fished his phone out of his pack and handed it to her.
‘Take your pick.’ And she took it because she was curious and scrolled though his offerings.
‘No romance,’ she said after a time and handed the phone back to him and earned herself a very level gaze. ‘You said you’d explain what we were doing along the way. Why are we going to Kowloon?’
‘To find an internet access point. One that tracks back to a public place.’
‘Like a fast-food outlet?’
‘Often they have internet access. Not that it’ll do us any good. Too much surveillance. Not enough privacy.’
‘So why are we doing the fast food thing at all?’
‘I just like their coffee.’
He was deliberately messing with her head and from the glint in his eye he knew it.
‘Once we get to Kowloon, we’re looking for a combination of things within a short distance of each other,’ he said quietly. ‘A luxury hotel. A less than savoury hotel. And caffeine.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then we go to work.’
He found what he was looking for within five minutes of exiting the train station. Coffee stop at the fast-food place first, while Damon fiddled with his phone and largely ignored her. Normal behaviour for this part of the world, Ruby noted. Around here, mobile phones and miniature computers ruled supreme.
‘All set?’ he said, in less time than it took her to take two cautious sips of her surprisingly decent coffee. ‘Bring it with you,’ he said of her coffee. ‘We’re going to need a room.’
Not a room at the five-star hotel, however. No, Damon escorted her to a high rise nearby that boasted a bar on the ground floor, a hotel on the next, and several different categories of businesses after that, a brothel being one of them, given the nature of the girls lounging idly in the bar.
‘One room, one night, a window facing the street, no company, no room service and no questions,’ murmured Damon and handed a wad of Hong Kong dollars to the bruiser manning the reception desk.
‘You got it,’ said the bruiser and gave Damon a hotel swipe card and nodded towards the stairs.
‘And another innkeepers’ law bites the dust,’ she murmured as they started up the stairs. Damon glanced at her, his gaze faintly mocking.
‘Time to put the lawyer away, Ruby.’
‘You don’t say,’ she countered grimly and stepped over a pile of what looked like discarded clothing on the stairs. ‘Please tell me we’re not staying here the night.’
‘We’re not staying here the night.’
Good news, because room 203 was charmless, airless and decidedly unclean. Ruby stood in the centre of the room sipping her suddenly mighty fine coffee and watched as Damon slung his backpack off his shoulder and withdrew a small laptop from within it. He set it on the bedside table beside the window and set its innards whirring.
‘Pull up a chair,’ he said, but Ruby didn’t feel like sitting.
‘Mind if I pace instead?’
‘No pacing allowed,’ he said. ‘Sit.’
So she pulled up a chair and sat and stared at the computer screen,
