Free Once Upon a Matchmaker by Marie Ferrarella Page A

just give me the highlights and you can fill in between the lines tomorrow, how’s that?”
    “Sounds like a reasonable compromise,” he answered. And, if he was being honest, he did feel rather tired himself. Or maybe drained was a better word for it. God knew he certainly felt drained. Worrying about his sick son had worn Micah out clear down to the bone.
    Between that and agonizing about what would happen to the boys if he was found guilty of selling secrets to a foreign power, Micah felt as if he’d been turned inside out, and then used to mop up all the floors at John Wayne Airport.
    “Because of the nature of the work—” He paused for a moment, then interjected, “and you know I can’t tell you what that is.”
    “I don’t need to know specifics for this,” she told him complacently. “Go on,” she urged.
    It was all such a jumble—and it had been ever since he’d been placed on restricted duty—that he wasn’t all that sure just exactly where to begin. So he started with his daily routine—beginning with the end of it.
    “Every night,” he told her, “I need to take out my hard drive and have it locked up in the department’s vault.”
    She stopped him. “Do you know the combination to the vault?”
    “No.” They’d asked him if he wanted to be part of a select few who had access to the ever changing combination and he’d turned them down. That responsibility was above his pay grade. “Only Justin Reed does at the moment—and they make a point of having him change it at the beginning of each month.” His eyes narrowed. She had taken out a pen and was jotting things down on the napkin he’d given her. “Are you taking notes on a napkin?” he asked.
    “It was handy,” Tracy answered.
    “I’ll get you some paper,” he offered. Turning his stool away from her, Micah was about to get up.
    “No need,” she told him. When he turned back to look at her, he saw that she’d opened up the napkin to show him how much writing space she actually had. “Go on.”
    Whatever works, he thought, shrugging. “Anyway, I pick up my hard drive every morning and put it back into the computer. The software and everything I work on is completely encrypted. As is the information on my laptop,” he added.
    She raised her eyes to his. “Your laptop?”
    He nodded. “They issued me one so that I can work from home if I have to. For when Greg gets sick,” he explained.
    Professionally, she was far more interested in the fact that his company had issued him a laptop than why they’d issued it to him. But personally, she found the thought of his caring so much about his younger son endearing.
    “Obviously you can’t take the same precautions with your laptop, since if it’s locked up at Donovan’s, you defeat the initial reason for having the laptop in the first place,” she reasoned. “Which computer is the reason for this investigation?”
    He liked the way she shifted the blame onto the inanimate object and steered it away from him. But the laptop was his, had been his for the past eighteen months. As far as he knew, no one so much as touched the computer in all that time.
    “The laptop,” he told her.
    She asked him the first thing that occurred to her. “Any chance that one of your boys—”
    He cut her off before she could finish her question. “No. I treat it as if it were a firearm.” Then he explained what he meant by that. “I lock it up when I come home unless I’m using it. And even then, when I’m finished I put it under lock and key in the back of my closet. Neither of the boys can reach it,” he assured her.
    Little boys could be very resourceful, but for now, she let what he believed to be true stand. “All right, go on.”
    “The company does random surprise tests on computers. They send in their man—nobody ever knows when they’ll happen or who they’ll target—and when he asks to see either your desktop computer or your laptop, you’ve got to immediately stand